Found In Translation: Net Promoter Customer Comments Automatically Translated

To have another language is to possess a second soul
- Charlemagne

For some fun last week in CustomerGauge HQ, we counted up the number of languages that we can speak. The result: 13. Maybe more – I think I forgot to count Norwegian. That certainly helps us roll-out complex multi-language solutions for our clients.

And from this week,  we can now assist our clients with a low-cost, instantaneous translation system for Voice-of-the-Customer comments from Net Promoter® Score survey.

Our new CustomerGauge Automatic Translation System uses the Google Translate™ Translation Service API to translate over 60 languages. Translated comments are stored in CustomerGauge, and can be searched and reported on. No need for cut-and-paste, no buttons to press. If you have used Google Translate before, you’ll be familiar with the idea.

Technically it’s a “Gisting” service – you can get the “gist” of a comment – but it’s not a perfect translation. We always recommend that comments be routed to local language speakers to deal with; however, the service has already proved useful for client needs. Some interesting points have already be “found in translation”.

The cost of this service is EUR 0.10 per translated comment. (equiv: US $0.13, A$ 0.13, GBP 0.09). It is available from 2 December 2011 on CustomerGauge b2c sites.

Our Client Operations team are ready to set up translations on CustomerGauge sites now. Or if you are considering a Net Promoter project, let us advise you on acquiring the gift of translation for your Net Promoter project.

Download the presentation here.

Epiphany: Seeing Customers as a Resource

It was a classic lightbulb moment: “So our customers can actually be a resource to us?”

I was recently in a meeting with a new client talking about how to best use customer feedback from their just-launched Net Promoter® initiative. We were looking at real comments coming in real time through their CustomerGauge systems. And that’s when one of members of the customer service group exclaimed that he just realised “after looking at all of these comments in depth, I now see how we could use these customers as unpaid business consultants!”. It was as if the scales had lifted from his eyes.

I thought about this for a minute and realized that he had discovered by himself the change management shift from the norm.

If we ask most customer service employees of companies what they think of their customers, the expletives will soon start to fly and the summary is sometimes “customers are pains in the XXX!”.  Contrary to the website banners and company mission statement praising the company’s attention to customer service most companies still think of customers as “problems to deal with”.

If we think about customers as resources first, then we can start to think of how we can best “use” our customers to help us.  This simple shift in mind-set can make huge changes in the way we deal and think about our customers.  Following the Golden rule of Net Promoter® score, “treat your customers as you would like to be treated” coupled with the idea that customers are resources we expect the following type of information to come from our customers for free!

• Identifying process improvements: who better to identify issues with current business practices than the recipients? Customers will let you know when your systems, processes and people are not working as advertised.
• Providing testimonials: there are ones that have fantastic experiences and are willing to tell you if you ask. Using these testimonials on your website and marketing materials is a great way to promote the firm without saying anything.
• Suggest improvements: companies are amazed when they start to ask their customers what they think what information they get back. Many times customers will give insightful ideas for product improvements that can be passed directly to R&D.
• Ideas is for product extensions: just like improvements customers will suggest new products with similar attributes that can be passed to product marketing to design new SKUs
• Extending your marketing reach: with social media platforms today like twitter and Facebook advocates for your products have simple ways to tell thousands of people in seconds about their experience.

In case this is not something you are working on, CustomerGauge allows companies to quickly and continuously survey all of their customers asking the standard Net Promoter Score question and allowing for comments/self-select issues. Using the system’s features companies can route different type responses to the correct departments for immediate action.

A word to the wise: When you start to use customer feedback in this way, have the courtesy to let you customers know, and thank them! That’s when you can really start to build customer loyalty. So harvest your customers, don’t ignore them!

Automatic Root Cause Analysis for Net Promoter with a Waterfall chart

Reading customer comments is a serious business. Ultimately, it has to be the best way of understanding what your customers think about your organisation – and it is essential that comments get to the right people – the ones that can actually change or improve customer experience.

However, there are some drawbacks to manually classifying the comments:

• It’s not scalable: Some of our clients have hundreds of customer comments a day. It takes only seconds to read and classify each one, but it still takes resources
• Interpretation varies by person: People classify comments in different ways. And what may be urgent to one person is mundane to another.
• Customer comments are variable: It can take some head-scratching to understand what customers are referring to. We regularly see  multiple issues in a single comment. Sometimes positive and negative sentiments are expressed together. Or positive comment, “zero” Net Promoter score.

This unpredictability means that it’s almost impossible with the technology of today to do pattern recognition, and automate the task (although we are working on this in CustomerGauge Labs).

So we have a better method, recently productised in CustomerGauge. We call it by various names: “Customer Self Select” or “Automatic Root Cause Analysis” but like all good solutions it’s simple and customer focused. The trick is to make the survey smarter. We ask the customer to highlight the issues that bother them (or delight them) the most. With a few simple clicks, the customer chooses the issues you should prioritise. We then direct the results into a series of “buckets” containing issues relating to Logistics, Product, Service etc. We call these “Level 1″ as they are the high level matters to focus on.

Below each Level 1 issue are more detailed reasons that provide more detail. For example, Delivery issues might be related to lateness, damaged goods or returns – and it’s important to separate out what drives the customer score. These are the Level 2 issues. Customer comments provide context and detail.

Depending on the initial customer rating the reasons can change, and are easily edited in the CustomerGauge administration tools.

The real magic comes in reporting. We now have a quantitative number of issues, selected by customers themselves. We then organise into Level 1 and Level 2 reports, and add Net Promoter Scores together with other customer data – for example order value or segment information.

We build up the data and allocate to individuals, so the Logistics manager automatically receives a report on issues relating to his/her department. These can later be assigned to projects (more in a later post).

The newest report is our Waterfall Analysis. This shows a bridge between Promoters and Detractors to break down the Net Promoter Score by Level 1 issues. It works by aggregating Net Promoter Scores in each issue, and weighting them on by the number of issues selected. It’s a simple way of visualising the impact of key elements in your business on your Net Promoter Score.

In the presentation we explain how this is all put together. Download it in a PDF here (WaterfallReportJan2011CustomerGaugeRootCause.pdf. 3.2Mb)

And then try the survey to see how our Self Select system works.

We are happy to explain how it is all put together, and demonstrate how our clients are already making great progress with this tool. Revolution is a strong word, but we see this making significant improvements in some sites due to its simplicity of implementation and interpretation. Contact us to arrange a webex and see more.

Real Time Customer Feedback Done Right

Net Promoter Score, Verbatim Comments on a Digital Sign.

Inspired by the “crawler” (or news ticker) on SkyNews and CNN, or maybe by the “Calls Holding” message boards in call centres, we proudly present the new CustomerGauge Real Time Feedback Screen. It’s designed as a digital sign (a new buzz word that as far as we can tell means “giant plasma display” and a spare PC running Firefox or Safari). Ideal for placing in your marketing department, lobby, canteen or even boardroom.

We pack a lot of information on this screen. As a CustomerGauge client, you can survey your customers continually. As comments and scores come in they are displayed in the upper part, on a sliding carousel of the most recent comments. All the relevant transaction information is shown next to the comment.

In the “lower third” we show the Net Promoter Score® for the current week, past week, month and year to date, plus sending stats and other useful information.

It is the latest iteration of our display board, and is designed to:

• understand the “zeitgeist” by reading customer voice in real-time
• help react immediately to customer comments
• motivate staff

For CustomerGauge b2c clients, it’s a simple low cost add-on. Let us know if we can show you more.

NB: Can’t see the Flash image above? View it on YouTube.

Make Customer Feedback One of Your 5-A-Day

Every e-commerce professional tracks traffic and counts orders once a day, but rarely (if ever) checks customer feedback daily, weekly, or even monthly. Let’s look at some reasons for this, and why regular customer feedback will benefit your business.

Reasons we have heard for not taking regular customer feedback included: “not standard business practice”, “it’s extra workload”, “how will it benefit?” and “just too difficult”.

Here is what every e-commerce manager needs to know about daily feedback:

1. It’s becoming the norm. World-class companies DO survey EVERY transaction for customer feedback. To mention a few: Sony, Philips, Canon, Avis, Hertz, eBay and many more. Feedback is an essential part of their daily business routine with comments distributed around the organisation. Also there IS an Industry Standard Methodology for measuring loyalty: the Net Promoter Score® - a simple, one-number approach, as understandable as page-views or profit.
   
2. It’s not extra workload. If a customer complains in a survey, you would likely have to deal with that customer issue anyway (so it’s not additional workload, just time-shifted forward). More usually an unhappy customer will silently defect and never return. Unless you ask customers, you may never know how much business you are losing.
3. It’s free consulting. Customer suggestions can help shape your business. We have seen examples where customer feedback helped merchandising give instant additional sales, and comments on manuals and packaging delivered cost-savings. In addition, positive comments can be used as testimonials on your site, which  helps reassure future customers.
4. It’s simple to implement. You can start a feedback project with a simple online survey tool and do it manually (actually, we started that way by doing monthly reports), but due to time lag we highly recommend that you automate it. Products like CustomerGauge have plug-ins for major e-commerce systems that automatically survey customers.

If you are still hesitant, here are some other points to consider:

Responding fast is impressive: When was the last time you had a response to a comment you made? You can transform customer experiences by responding quickly to feedback. Some large companies we deal with read and react to customer comments within 24 hours. That can turn the most hardened complainer into a delighted evangelist for a business.

Customer Focus: As a result of measuring, these same companies have become more customer oriented. Staff are bonused on Net Promoter Score, and welcome the feedback that customers give in order to improve service.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Feedback

Our customer feedback solution is CustomerGauge: a simple plug-in to your e-commerce site, paid monthly on subscription. All the hard work of integration and setting it up is handled by us. We arrange the emails, surveys (in different languages), automatic sending and reporting in real time. We deliver daily and weekly feedback to your staff by email. You can use positive comments and publish them on site as testimonials, which increase conversions significantly. CustomerGauge also helps keep your promises to customers: track open and closed customer issues with built-in workflow. And identify your most valuable returning customers with our real-time reporting.

In summary, Customer Feedback can become one of your essential Daily Metrics, tracked like your other Key Performance Indicators. You can receive it on a daily basis in your mailbox, and use metrics to check improvement. It is the business transformation you are looking for this year.

Join us today on our Campaign for Daily Customer Feedback and benefit from a January 2010 CustomerGauge offer: Free 30-day trial on your e-commerce website*

*Sign up by 31 Jan 2010. Terms and conditions apply, ask for details.

Real-Time Customer Comments via Twitter

With Google Real-Time Search launching today, we thought it appropriate to show off the CustomerGauge Real-Time Customer Comment Feed, which works via Twitter. Ideal for customer-focused companies that like to rapidly react to feedback and issues.

It started when a client asked: “Could we put a desktop widget on the bosses desk, so that every time a new comment comes in it pops up?”. Actually we’d been thinking about this for a while, trying to find the right component.

Now we have a solution that’s super easy and flexible: we integrated CustomerGauge with Twitter. As soon as a customer makes a comment, an API connection to Twitter is made and a “Tweet” sent – and you get a real-time feed on your favourite device (PC, mobile phone etc). It is customisable, so you can filter on comments – examples: “Score 9 + 10 comments for call center staff” or “Detractors commenting in Manchester with ‘reception’ keyword”. The feed can be public (if you are proud of what your customers are saying) or private so it’s secure for selected subscribers. A link takes you to the full comment and customer details.

We would be happy to give you more details, by tweet (@adamdorrell) or old-fashioned phoning. Contact us for details.

Demonstrators get Cool interface to view a wall of Images

New feature on our field marketing measurement solution DemonstratorGauge: A wall of photos to allow browsing, searching and downloading. It uses an excellent plug-in from Cool-Iris which looks rather like the fancy photo-manipulation you see Tom Cruise doing in the movie Minority Report.

After logging in, you have a super-easy way of looking through the photos collected by field agents. We have it set up to show the last 30 days of photos, which currently displays around 2000 images. No extra software is needed, but the small download from Cool-Iris gives a slightly better user experience.

If you wish to collect images from marketing activities from thousands of agents in multi-country locations, DemonstratorGauge is the natural choice. Enjoy this 90-second demo here (and for iphone users it’s also on YouTube).

Loyalty Spectrum Analyzer: A New Visualisation for b2b Surveys with Net Promoter Score

So what did Newton know about loyalty? 340 years ago Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated that white light was made up of a rainbow of colours by using a prism. What’s more, he astounded onlookers by showed the spectrum could be recombined back in to white light again, via a second prism. It was no mere party trick – it was the start of our modern understanding of light.

Refracting customer loyalty.

The December 2009 Business-Business (b2b) release of CustomerGauge takes the principle of Newton’s prism to split customer loyalty scores (based on Net Promoter Score®) into their component parts. We call this our Loyalty Spectrum Analyzer.

Using these new reports, it is possible to analyse the scores of each segment, and see the comments and results by each individual customer. Hovering over the image shows the customer comment, and a click allows you to drill down into details. Downloads are provided for each segement (or the entire dataset).

You can also analyse the Net Promoter Score of customer companies in the data with the Organisation report. The score of each company is shown, and again, a mouse-hover over the image shows comments and number of responses. A click shows organisation details and full downloads are provided.

Why is this useful? You can pinpoint problem areas at a glance – for example see the companies that need “rescuing”, or immediately see the reasons behind a low score for customers in “purchasing” roles.

It’s easier to see how it works in this short video (2’30). Also on YouTube for iPhone users

• Filter by “flight” (a batch of surveys)
• Reporting on Net Promoter Score by Organisation and Individuals
• Response percentage reporting by individuals and companies
• Tools to boost response and combat email filters: reminders, multi-point survey sending, survey link for completion by IM or telephone
• Email management: pre-email checks, and unsubscribe
• Root-cause analysis reports

Next steps

Never Was So Much Decided For So Many By So Few

“By cutting prices, you are upsetting our customers,” I was told when I presented the sales results of the company’s direct sales division to the UK sales director, “and they are threatening to not buy from us“. I probably should have been more polite, but instead I pointed out that he surely was confusing his retail partners (to him, customers) and end consumers (who buy from retailers). It didn’t help our relationship – let’s face it, nobody likes a smart-ass.

Consumer Electronics companies have for years dealt with the Power Retailer Oligopoly – a few powerful chains controlling 60 – 80% of the market. Over the years, this has evolved into  cozy manufacturer-purchaser relationships (especially in Europe) based around golf, annual dealer trips to sunny locations and other “boys club” activities. Despite investigations from the UK’s Competition Commission in the ’90s which eventually led to the prohibition of Recommended Retail Pricing, strong linkages between retailers and major brands still exist.

An article about the success of the iPhone reminded me of how destructive this relationship can be. In “Apple Proves… It pays to be late And ignore the mobile networks“  Andrew Orlowski explains how Apple managed to beat large companies full of clever people who devoted years of planning and expenditure to make a mark in the smart phone market. Ironically, Apple, by coming late to the market could buld a product that consumers wanted, not network executives.

He writes that in the mobile phone business “the customer isn’t you or me, or the billion and a half other phone users in the world. Phone manufacturers have only 800 customers, of which only around 200 really matter: these are the gentlemen from the networks. And one of these stroppy customers can demand changes that cost the manufacturer millions, or cause the cancellation of product lines in which tens of millions have been invested.” According to Orlowski, the network executives decided the “butterfly” design Nokia introduced with the 6800 was too complicated, and that disabling Wi-Fi and charging high prices for data was good for all of us.

Apple, with their close customer relationships (half of their business is direct via internet or own shops) understood that they could offer features consumers wanted, not the telcos.

But with Consumer Electronic companies still mostly dragging their feet on embracing a channel model that includes direct-to-consumer sales, I fear that the best product innovations are still hidden from us.  I wonder how many times  a Retail Purchasing Executive decided to  kill an interesting CE product because of his or her prejudices, or because their business model did not allow for such a price point?

The moral is that CE companies may be iPhoned out of business by not listening to the voice of the customer.

There are solutions to breaking the Power Retailer addiction: You can upset Retail Buyers. Get some help from the Manufacturers D2C Direct to Consumer Support Group. And CustomerGauge will help you measure and understand customer sentiment, and create innovative products.

Pic and Quote: The Few

Breaking the Fourth Wall in Business – a simple script in three acts

“How can I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?”

In the 1986 minor-classic film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off“, Matthew Broderick occasionally stops and speaks to the camera to explain to the audience his character’s techniques and thoughts. This device, occasionally used in film or TV is known as “Breaking the Fourth Wall“. You can see it in other films, often comedies, when the director wants to shake up the narrative and bring the audience in to the action. The characters become aware of the audience, sitting beyond the imaginary “fourth wall” of the set. We are invited to become part of the theatre. It’s not new – the Greeks used it as a standard part of their comedies; Shakespeare used it extensively (all those asides to the audience).Favourites like Alfie and Up Pompeii! spring to mind.

Breaking the fourth wall is easy an technique for major businesses to exploit. And it is something that also helps them successful stand out. What do I mean? Simple: Start communicating directly with customers!

Very few of the major corporations that I work with actually bother to reply directly to customers when they take the time to complain, praise, or make suggestions. In marketing and sales (the departments one would most expect to respond to customers) a customer comment is greeted with panic, or otherwise ignored – almost as if the company wants to act out its own little drama without an audience – and that is not going to win any critics awards.

At best, a comment is directed to the “customer service department” or someone else to deal with. A few years ago I  worked with a huge well known company, where customers (and real fans of the brand) would often make suggestions for better packaging, changes to the manual, software improvements and so on. These were routinely directed to the Product Managers, who did precisely nothing with the information. “Too busy on real marketing”, they said. Ironically, the Product Designers back at headquarters often asked for customer feedback, and got little of value.

And when was the last time you got a personal reply from a  large company? It almost never happens, to the point of making it hardly seem worthwhile writing a letter, let alone an email.

But things can be different. For example Sony Style Online make a point of answering every single customer comment, and they send the learnings to other parts of the company to action. Philips Online Store actively encourage customers to comment after each transaction. This feedback helps design new products. Small companies often are excellent at directly answering customers.

So let’s make a dramatic change today, and have small revolution for big businesses. Here are three simple ideas to help break the fourth wall:

1. “Talk to your Audience” – Set expectations with your staff – tell them you expect them to pick up the phone, write some emails, pen some letters to real customers and thank them for their input. Invest in a tool like CustomerGauge that can help harvest feedback in a systematic way.
2. “Script your Ad-libs” -  Empower your people to talk to end users. Come up with some templates they can use to answer issues quickly – often a stock “thank you” with some personalisation will go a long way. Or write a small telephone script that takes the fear out of calling – you can run some simple role-plays to make the practiced seem spontaneous.
3. “The World is your Stage” – Demand your executives, managers and other non-front line workers spend some time (an hour or so) actually interacting with customers. Get them to sit in the call-centre and take calls, serve on the shop-floor, send some “thank you” letters.

Three simple ideas that can change your business today. You will delight customers, make your staff understand customers more, and with luck you can get really break through the fourth wall and engage your clientele.

Next week in pop-culture v business: TomTom – jumped the shark?

Oooooh missus!

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