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You Can't Buy CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is not a software, technology, or suite of products. CRM is the processes and tools you use to implement your customer relationship strategy. Your CSRs are the drivers of these processes and users of these tools and your customers should be the engineers that help you design all of the elements into an actionable plan. The voice of your customer is the most critical element in your process design and software and hardware purchase decisions.
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Document Transcript:
You Can't Buy CRM
By Dr. Jodie Monger - President, Customer Relationship Metrics
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is not a software, technology, or suite of products.
CRM is the processes and tools you use to implement your customer relationship strategy.
Your CSRs are the drivers of these processes and users of these tools and your customers
should be the engineers that help you design all of the elements into an actionable plan. The
voice of your customer is the most critical element in your process design and software and
hardware purchase decisions.
The voice of the customer is conspicuously missing from most discussions of CRM.
Unfortunately, the talk is most often about the technology; we talk even more of integration of
that technology; we talk of ways to get people within the organization to use the technology; we
talk of ways that we believe CRM will benefit our customers; yet we seldom listen to the voice
of the customers themselves.
CRM without the voice of the customer is like a car with no brakes. It will be able to move but
if you need to maneuver it will be difficult, dangerous, and will cost you a lot of money
(customers) when you crash.
By listening to the voice of your customer, you let the customer engineer the experience. You
won't have to take the risk of driving without brakes. This article will show you how. It will
illustrate how you can gather and measure the voice of your customers in ways that are timely,
meaningful, statistically sound, affordable, and actionable. With the insight gained from
listening to the voice of your customers, you can design your CRM process and choose the right
technology based on what your customers tell you is important to them.
Where is the best place to listen to the voice of the customer? It's through your call centers. In
many organizations today, 90% or more of all customer interactions occur electronically–most
of those by telephone.
If the voice of your customers is missing from your current CRM initiatives, understand that it
is a costly omission… one that can cause you to be among the many who have experienced
CRM failure rates reported to be as high as 75%. You can remedy the situation if you take the
right steps. If you are currently in the planning stages for a CRM initiative, this is the perfect
opportunity to integrate the voice of the customer into your management metrics and
improvement processes. If you have any or all of your CRM initiative in place without
representing the customer, add it immediately.
If your call centers operate like most, you already have an extensive–and costly–method of
call quality monitoring in place. A sampling of calls are evaluated and scored, those scores are
rolled up into composite reports, which are bundled with ACD statistics, and these are then
presented to you for your regular review. The reports you see reveal average caller satisfaction
Page 1
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
scores of 95% and higher. By all indications you're doing well.
But stop and ask yourself, "Who says so?" On whose criteria are those high percentile scores
based? Herein lies the weakness of most quality programs. Many call quality monitoring
programs attempt to rate aspects of the call that have little correlation with caller satisfaction.
They are based on someone's presumptions about what customers are supposed to think is
important.
The criteria covered by your evaluations have then been tweaked over time. They have grown
in both length and complexity. They have evolved within a mental construct which assumes that
if only your agents will follow all of the criteria set forth in the monitoring form, then you're
doing right by your customers. Beware: there's a link missing from this chain of logic.
Put it to the test, and your current method of monitoring call quality may leave you scratching
your head in disbelief, revealing a gap between the internal quality scores and your customers'
experience of the quality of service they received. If this happens, you're not alone.
Ways to Listen to the Voice of The Customer
Companies that actively listen to the voice of their customers continue to refine their methods
for doing it. It's been a rapid evolution. By learning from others' experiences as described
below, you can leapfrog over older methodologies to embrace today's best practices.
Historically, companies that have sought to overcome the myopia that stems from sole reliance
on internally-generated evaluations of customer satisfaction have turned to mail or phone
surveys to augment their understanding of the customers' perception of the service delivery.
Mail and phone surveys are useful to some extent. The problem is: they are costly; they are
slow; and response rates to both have declined precipitously in recent years. The biggest
limitation is that responses from mail and phone surveys are inherently biased.
Biased survey results are very dangerous–very, very dangerous–because you are making
operational and personnel decisions with flawed information. Here are some of the pitfalls of
relying on mail or phone surveys that you must watch for.
· The bias of self-selection. Respondents to mail or phone surveys tend to be those
customers who are either truly delighted or very displeased. Relying only on responses
from customers at either end of the satisfaction spectrum gives you a distorted view of
what actions you should take. You can become lulled into taking no action. Or
conversely, you can be falsely convinced to take expensive actions to fix a problem that
is, in fact, a rather isolated incident.
· The questions you ask. Home-grown surveys are often obscurely worded, contain
Page 2
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
multiple concepts, or ask leading questions. If your survey design is poor, you are better
off not to measure the voice of the customer at all.
· Delay. Mail surveys, in particular, have a long built-in delay. Customers are unlikely to
remember the details of a three-or-four-minute phone call several days or several weeks
after it occurs. CSRs, too, will discount the feedback as being non-specific and
unreliable; therefore, they are not open-minded to receiving it. The longer the gap
between your customers' experience and their evaluation of it, the lower will be the
confidence level of the feedback gathered. In fact, beyond 24 to 48 hours, error rates in
recall can be as high as 60%.
· High cost. Declining response rates to mail surveys and increased postage rates are
driving the cost per response ever higher. With the technology existing in most call
centers today, there is no reason to use mail surveys to measure customer satisfaction.
As a consequence, phone surveys have come to be used more and more. Today,
however, customers' increased resistance to receiving telemarketing calls has now
spilled over into resistance to receiving calls for follow-up surveys. So the cost per
response of phone surveys has also spiraled upwards. The high cost per response for
both mail and phone surveys often entice managers to take shortcuts, which could tip
you into the next pitfall.
· Small sample size. Your sample size must be large enough that you can generalize it to
the entire call population. Don't cut corners here. If you cannot afford to undertake a
statistically valid sample, don't try.
· Incorrect statistical analysis or analysis based only of numerical scores. Survey results–
even from validly worded surveys–cannot be analyzed in isolation. In order to manage
the flood of information that can be obtained from customer surveys, you need to know
what key factors drive caller satisfaction, you need to segment perceptions of service by
types of customers, and you must correlate customer evaluations with operational
metrics.
To remedy the pitfalls described above, some organizations have recently adopted IVR-based
surveys. IVR surveys eliminate the problems of delay and the bias of self-selection. They also
overcome the high costs associated with declining response rates to mail and phone surveys.
They are a definite improvement over old ways of soliciting customer feedback. However,
depending on your technology, your scripting and branching options may be inflexible; you
may struggle for internal resources to manage an on-going program; you will likely be unable to
capture qualitative responses; and you will not be able to drill down your analysis of customer
responses to the level of each agent. Most glaringly, if you rely on a plain IVR-based tool, it
means that you are still missing the actual voice of the customer.
Page 3
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
Maximizing CRM your Initiatives
Fortunately, you can maximize your CRM initiatives like other companies and utilize a more
comprehensive, multi-viewed approach to eliciting the voice of the customer through advanced
applications of IVR.
Advanced IVR is often referred to as "CATs" which stands for Completely Automated
Telephone survey. It is a complete process for gathering, analyzing, and providing results so
you can ACT upon the voice of your customer and use it in more effectively as part of your
CRM strategy. This advanced process utilizes IVR-type technology coupled with sound survey
design, extraordinary flexibility in script branching, and the ability to capture the actual
recorded voice of your customer. By adopting advanced IVR technology as part of a complete
process or a similar methodology, you will be integrating best practices in customer relationship
management into your CRM implementation.
What Best Practice Methods Will Do for You
Feedback from an advanced IVR program is less expensive per response than either mail or
phone surveys.
The advanced IVR program largely eliminates the bias that stems from self-selection. Whereas
response rates to mail surveys typically run as low as 2%, response rates in an advanced IVR
program average as high as 25%.
Here's how an advanced IVR program can work. Callers are greeted at the front of the call with
a request to provide feedback at the end of the call on their satisfaction with the interaction.
This is done without the agent knowing of the impending evaluation. When they are done
speaking with an agent, they are connected to the external advanced IVR survey. Because the
request for feedback is immediate and non-intrusive; response rates are very high, and
confidence levels of 95+% are easily achievable.
You capture qualitative feedback in the customer's own words, too. In addition to being asked
to respond to various questions on a numeric scale, respondents are invited to say–in their own
words–whatever they would like to say about the experience. The advanced IVR technology
captures customers' actual words and the transcription complements and elaborates on the
scores. The comments are reported in aggregate as well as attributed to specific calls and
specific CSRs.
Advanced IVR also allows you to set up an alert process at whatever threshold you feel is
warranted. For instance, on a scale of 1 to 9, if a customer were to rate the overall experience at
a 3 or below, the advanced IVR technology is programmed to immediately trigger an e-mail
Page 4
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
alert containing the customer information and audio file of the comment to your team to launch
a service recovery plan right away, thus avoiding any negative word-of-mouth.
The advanced IVR program also is more robust than a standalone IVR system. With it, you get
graphical feedback in the form of an impact and performance chart based on your call center's
key drivers of customer satisfaction.
Feedback That Motivates
Advanced IVR even becomes a motivational tool for your call center managers to use. This is
because the advanced IVR program facilitates the gathering of customer comments.
Can you remember the pride you saw on your young child's face when you tacked her spelling
test–the one with the big "A"–to the refrigerator door for everyone to see? Your CSRs share
a similar sense of pride in their work and they beam when their successes are highlighted.
Unfortunately, customers who take time to write letters of praise are few and far between. They
won't write, but many customers will take the time–immediately upon completion of the
call–to speak a few words of praise. The advanced IVR system records those spoken
comments; these are transcribed, and each agent receives a scorecard detailing the scores and
Page 5
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
comments of his or her contacts.
Correctly integrating the voice of your customer into your CRM initiative by using an advanced
IVR program process will result in a host of process improvements that may include any or all
of the following:
· You will be able to provide performance feedback to CSRs in a way motivates rather
than de-motivates.
· You will have clear direction that allows you to focus improvement initiatives in the
right areas–those areas that your customers say are important to them.
· You will avoid frittering away time, money, and energy into misguided change
initiatives.
· You will be able to calibrate the voice of the customer with operational measurements,
resulting in a truly balanced scorecard.
· You will gain the insight needed to determine the best ways to stratify your service for
different types of customers based on their value or their potential value to your
organization.
· You will gain increased customer share (and be able to prove it), leading to a higher
ROI for your CRM initiative.
· You will have in place the statistically valid data collection tools that you need to pursue
Six Sigma quality in your service delivery processes.
Summary
The voice of the customer provides a solid foundation on which to build your CRM initiative.
Best practice companies listen to the voice of their customers and let their customers engineer
the CRM experience. If that voice has been missing from your current CRM implementation,
now is the time to put it in. If you are just now planning your implementation, by using the
ideas summarized in this article you are well poised to integrate the voice of the customer from
the outset.
Page 6
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.Author
Jodie Monger, PhD is the President of Customer Relationship
Metrics, LC (Metrics). Prior to joining Metrics, Dr. Jodie was the
founding Associate Director of Purdue University's Center for
Customer-Driven Quality. Dr. Jodie's expertise is working with
Fortune 1000 companies to help them quantify the Voice of their
Customer.
**For reprint information or to schedule an interview with Dr.
Jodie please contact Jim Rembach at 336-288-8226 or
Jim.Rembach@Metrics.net
Page 7
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.
By Dr. Jodie Monger - President, Customer Relationship Metrics
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is not a software, technology, or suite of products.
CRM is the processes and tools you use to implement your customer relationship strategy.
Your CSRs are the drivers of these processes and users of these tools and your customers
should be the engineers that help you design all of the elements into an actionable plan. The
voice of your customer is the most critical element in your process design and software and
hardware purchase decisions.
The voice of the customer is conspicuously missing from most discussions of CRM.
Unfortunately, the talk is most often about the technology; we talk even more of integration of
that technology; we talk of ways to get people within the organization to use the technology; we
talk of ways that we believe CRM will benefit our customers; yet we seldom listen to the voice
of the customers themselves.
CRM without the voice of the customer is like a car with no brakes. It will be able to move but
if you need to maneuver it will be difficult, dangerous, and will cost you a lot of money
(customers) when you crash.
By listening to the voice of your customer, you let the customer engineer the experience. You
won't have to take the risk of driving without brakes. This article will show you how. It will
illustrate how you can gather and measure the voice of your customers in ways that are timely,
meaningful, statistically sound, affordable, and actionable. With the insight gained from
listening to the voice of your customers, you can design your CRM process and choose the right
technology based on what your customers tell you is important to them.
Where is the best place to listen to the voice of the customer? It's through your call centers. In
many organizations today, 90% or more of all customer interactions occur electronically–most
of those by telephone.
If the voice of your customers is missing from your current CRM initiatives, understand that it
is a costly omission… one that can cause you to be among the many who have experienced
CRM failure rates reported to be as high as 75%. You can remedy the situation if you take the
right steps. If you are currently in the planning stages for a CRM initiative, this is the perfect
opportunity to integrate the voice of the customer into your management metrics and
improvement processes. If you have any or all of your CRM initiative in place without
representing the customer, add it immediately.
If your call centers operate like most, you already have an extensive–and costly–method of
call quality monitoring in place. A sampling of calls are evaluated and scored, those scores are
rolled up into composite reports, which are bundled with ACD statistics, and these are then
presented to you for your regular review. The reports you see reveal average caller satisfaction
Page 1
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
scores of 95% and higher. By all indications you're doing well.
But stop and ask yourself, "Who says so?" On whose criteria are those high percentile scores
based? Herein lies the weakness of most quality programs. Many call quality monitoring
programs attempt to rate aspects of the call that have little correlation with caller satisfaction.
They are based on someone's presumptions about what customers are supposed to think is
important.
The criteria covered by your evaluations have then been tweaked over time. They have grown
in both length and complexity. They have evolved within a mental construct which assumes that
if only your agents will follow all of the criteria set forth in the monitoring form, then you're
doing right by your customers. Beware: there's a link missing from this chain of logic.
Put it to the test, and your current method of monitoring call quality may leave you scratching
your head in disbelief, revealing a gap between the internal quality scores and your customers'
experience of the quality of service they received. If this happens, you're not alone.
Ways to Listen to the Voice of The Customer
Companies that actively listen to the voice of their customers continue to refine their methods
for doing it. It's been a rapid evolution. By learning from others' experiences as described
below, you can leapfrog over older methodologies to embrace today's best practices.
Historically, companies that have sought to overcome the myopia that stems from sole reliance
on internally-generated evaluations of customer satisfaction have turned to mail or phone
surveys to augment their understanding of the customers' perception of the service delivery.
Mail and phone surveys are useful to some extent. The problem is: they are costly; they are
slow; and response rates to both have declined precipitously in recent years. The biggest
limitation is that responses from mail and phone surveys are inherently biased.
Biased survey results are very dangerous–very, very dangerous–because you are making
operational and personnel decisions with flawed information. Here are some of the pitfalls of
relying on mail or phone surveys that you must watch for.
· The bias of self-selection. Respondents to mail or phone surveys tend to be those
customers who are either truly delighted or very displeased. Relying only on responses
from customers at either end of the satisfaction spectrum gives you a distorted view of
what actions you should take. You can become lulled into taking no action. Or
conversely, you can be falsely convinced to take expensive actions to fix a problem that
is, in fact, a rather isolated incident.
· The questions you ask. Home-grown surveys are often obscurely worded, contain
Page 2
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
multiple concepts, or ask leading questions. If your survey design is poor, you are better
off not to measure the voice of the customer at all.
· Delay. Mail surveys, in particular, have a long built-in delay. Customers are unlikely to
remember the details of a three-or-four-minute phone call several days or several weeks
after it occurs. CSRs, too, will discount the feedback as being non-specific and
unreliable; therefore, they are not open-minded to receiving it. The longer the gap
between your customers' experience and their evaluation of it, the lower will be the
confidence level of the feedback gathered. In fact, beyond 24 to 48 hours, error rates in
recall can be as high as 60%.
· High cost. Declining response rates to mail surveys and increased postage rates are
driving the cost per response ever higher. With the technology existing in most call
centers today, there is no reason to use mail surveys to measure customer satisfaction.
As a consequence, phone surveys have come to be used more and more. Today,
however, customers' increased resistance to receiving telemarketing calls has now
spilled over into resistance to receiving calls for follow-up surveys. So the cost per
response of phone surveys has also spiraled upwards. The high cost per response for
both mail and phone surveys often entice managers to take shortcuts, which could tip
you into the next pitfall.
· Small sample size. Your sample size must be large enough that you can generalize it to
the entire call population. Don't cut corners here. If you cannot afford to undertake a
statistically valid sample, don't try.
· Incorrect statistical analysis or analysis based only of numerical scores. Survey results–
even from validly worded surveys–cannot be analyzed in isolation. In order to manage
the flood of information that can be obtained from customer surveys, you need to know
what key factors drive caller satisfaction, you need to segment perceptions of service by
types of customers, and you must correlate customer evaluations with operational
metrics.
To remedy the pitfalls described above, some organizations have recently adopted IVR-based
surveys. IVR surveys eliminate the problems of delay and the bias of self-selection. They also
overcome the high costs associated with declining response rates to mail and phone surveys.
They are a definite improvement over old ways of soliciting customer feedback. However,
depending on your technology, your scripting and branching options may be inflexible; you
may struggle for internal resources to manage an on-going program; you will likely be unable to
capture qualitative responses; and you will not be able to drill down your analysis of customer
responses to the level of each agent. Most glaringly, if you rely on a plain IVR-based tool, it
means that you are still missing the actual voice of the customer.
Page 3
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
Maximizing CRM your Initiatives
Fortunately, you can maximize your CRM initiatives like other companies and utilize a more
comprehensive, multi-viewed approach to eliciting the voice of the customer through advanced
applications of IVR.
Advanced IVR is often referred to as "CATs" which stands for Completely Automated
Telephone survey. It is a complete process for gathering, analyzing, and providing results so
you can ACT upon the voice of your customer and use it in more effectively as part of your
CRM strategy. This advanced process utilizes IVR-type technology coupled with sound survey
design, extraordinary flexibility in script branching, and the ability to capture the actual
recorded voice of your customer. By adopting advanced IVR technology as part of a complete
process or a similar methodology, you will be integrating best practices in customer relationship
management into your CRM implementation.
What Best Practice Methods Will Do for You
Feedback from an advanced IVR program is less expensive per response than either mail or
phone surveys.
The advanced IVR program largely eliminates the bias that stems from self-selection. Whereas
response rates to mail surveys typically run as low as 2%, response rates in an advanced IVR
program average as high as 25%.
Here's how an advanced IVR program can work. Callers are greeted at the front of the call with
a request to provide feedback at the end of the call on their satisfaction with the interaction.
This is done without the agent knowing of the impending evaluation. When they are done
speaking with an agent, they are connected to the external advanced IVR survey. Because the
request for feedback is immediate and non-intrusive; response rates are very high, and
confidence levels of 95+% are easily achievable.
You capture qualitative feedback in the customer's own words, too. In addition to being asked
to respond to various questions on a numeric scale, respondents are invited to say–in their own
words–whatever they would like to say about the experience. The advanced IVR technology
captures customers' actual words and the transcription complements and elaborates on the
scores. The comments are reported in aggregate as well as attributed to specific calls and
specific CSRs.
Advanced IVR also allows you to set up an alert process at whatever threshold you feel is
warranted. For instance, on a scale of 1 to 9, if a customer were to rate the overall experience at
a 3 or below, the advanced IVR technology is programmed to immediately trigger an e-mail
Page 4
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
alert containing the customer information and audio file of the comment to your team to launch
a service recovery plan right away, thus avoiding any negative word-of-mouth.
The advanced IVR program also is more robust than a standalone IVR system. With it, you get
graphical feedback in the form of an impact and performance chart based on your call center's
key drivers of customer satisfaction.
Feedback That Motivates
Advanced IVR even becomes a motivational tool for your call center managers to use. This is
because the advanced IVR program facilitates the gathering of customer comments.
Can you remember the pride you saw on your young child's face when you tacked her spelling
test–the one with the big "A"–to the refrigerator door for everyone to see? Your CSRs share
a similar sense of pride in their work and they beam when their successes are highlighted.
Unfortunately, customers who take time to write letters of praise are few and far between. They
won't write, but many customers will take the time–immediately upon completion of the
call–to speak a few words of praise. The advanced IVR system records those spoken
comments; these are transcribed, and each agent receives a scorecard detailing the scores and
Page 5
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.You Can't Buy CRM
comments of his or her contacts.
Correctly integrating the voice of your customer into your CRM initiative by using an advanced
IVR program process will result in a host of process improvements that may include any or all
of the following:
· You will be able to provide performance feedback to CSRs in a way motivates rather
than de-motivates.
· You will have clear direction that allows you to focus improvement initiatives in the
right areas–those areas that your customers say are important to them.
· You will avoid frittering away time, money, and energy into misguided change
initiatives.
· You will be able to calibrate the voice of the customer with operational measurements,
resulting in a truly balanced scorecard.
· You will gain the insight needed to determine the best ways to stratify your service for
different types of customers based on their value or their potential value to your
organization.
· You will gain increased customer share (and be able to prove it), leading to a higher
ROI for your CRM initiative.
· You will have in place the statistically valid data collection tools that you need to pursue
Six Sigma quality in your service delivery processes.
Summary
The voice of the customer provides a solid foundation on which to build your CRM initiative.
Best practice companies listen to the voice of their customers and let their customers engineer
the CRM experience. If that voice has been missing from your current CRM implementation,
now is the time to put it in. If you are just now planning your implementation, by using the
ideas summarized in this article you are well poised to integrate the voice of the customer from
the outset.
Page 6
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.Author
Jodie Monger, PhD is the President of Customer Relationship
Metrics, LC (Metrics). Prior to joining Metrics, Dr. Jodie was the
founding Associate Director of Purdue University's Center for
Customer-Driven Quality. Dr. Jodie's expertise is working with
Fortune 1000 companies to help them quantify the Voice of their
Customer.
**For reprint information or to schedule an interview with Dr.
Jodie please contact Jim Rembach at 336-288-8226 or
Jim.Rembach@Metrics.net
Page 7
Copyright © 2003 Customer Relationship Metrics, L.C.
