Linking to Business Results: The Holy Grail?
We’re receiving many more requests from clients who are interested in linking aspects of their customer experience research to their business results. Some of these requests are defensive: the marketing research group is trying to justify the customer experience research expenditure by showing how it drives results. Or, management has tied a rather hefty bonus or incentive program to customer results and wants to know how much to put in the pool.Some of these requests are a bit more strategic, along the lines of what aspects of the customer experience needs to be managed closely so that the company can achieve greater results? OK, none of our clients have asked this last question quite this way, but I wish they would.
Despite the repeated death knells for voice of the customer research, there is still no better way to assess your performance BEFORE the customer has taken those next behavioral steps, i.e., the decision to stay or go, to buy again or not.
But so many companies do this type of work for partly the right reasons and often mostly the wrong reasons, and forget that measurement is measurement. Action and change drive improvements.
Companies can’t be blamed for not taking action on their voice of the customer research. Often the research is a stand-alone program, often managed by Sales, Operations or even HR, feeding an employee incentive program, and not tied to any other critical business processes. Or, this program is conducted and reported to the organization without the benefit of planning how the results will be used, who owns the various issues surfaced and what goals need to be set as a result.
One way to overcome some of these problems is to take a hard look at customer experience research programs and ask the following questions:
How will we tie these measures to relevant business results? That is, how will we know what is important to improve in order to improve our bottom line?
Who owns this study, and who should own it? Are the people who have the responsibility for making improvements to what’s being measured heavily involved in the process all the way through?
Is the study method still appropriate for the job? What kind of burden are we placing on our customers to address these issues?
Do we know which processes, procedures or programs are “upstream” from the customer attitudes being measured?
These questions are a mix of internal and externally focused thoughts. The internal establishes the company’s ability to understand and use customer information to improve the business. The external focuses on how we capture that information and what information is captured.
It’s no longer a pipe dream to tie the voice of the customer to business results. New analytical approaches, improved computing power, more robust data capture systems and better thinking regarding linkage all make this task not only more attractive and attainable, but more imperative for companies that want to stay even or ahead of their competition.
What are your thoughts on linkage?
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One Response to “Linking to Business Results: The Holy Grail?”
February 5th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
This is right on. Providers focus blindly on Quality of Service (as measured within the data center) and forget all about Quality of Experience (QoE). While you need both, QoE is the single most important aspect to the user experience — and service provider profitability.
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