Net Promoter News: You Can Be Sure of Shell Customer Service, Android NPS blues but iOS in pink, Transactional Net Promoter Score is “Need To Know Buzzword”

Shell puts customer service in the fast lane

Shell in the Netherlands has launched an intriguing campaign to find out what its customers think about its service via dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android.

As spotted by CustomerGauge staffer Chris, the pilot campaign runs across 14 stations, and the app allows customers let Shell know what they like about the Shell filling stations and what could be improved.

In addition, the stations have a device at the entrance where customers can select an appropriately happy, sad, or indifferent face depending on their experience.

It’s a simple initiative, and if we have one small suggestion it may be to include a mechanism to give feedback in-store as well as online. Shell Netherlands (in Dutch)

 

Android wallows in NPS purgatory, but will Apple continue to dominate?

Like a televised cage fight, consumers are watching battles by Android v iOS,  Microsoft v anyone, Samsung against Apple,  Nokia and Blackberry begging to be let back in. As smartphones march toward ubiquity, predicting where each of the major players will be in a year’s time is complicated by the fact that it is not just handset against handset, but also operating system against operating system, and even carrier against carrier.

New research in the US has found that:

• iOS is the most preferred operating system among IT professionals, with a Net Promoter Score of 69, well ahead of Android at  27.
• AT&T and Verizon are equally preferred carriers among IT professionals, with Sprint a distant third.

The low score for Android may be surprising for some, but it does seem to have some correlation with an earlier prediction that we reported on by analyst Ben Bajarin, who believes that partly based on Windows’ high NPS, iOS and potentially Windows will be the longer term operating system winners.

However, this is complicated by a number of factors, including Samsung’s momentum. Predicting the state of the mobile market in the medium term is best left to those more knowledgeable, but we are watching this space with interest. Red Orbit

Transactional Net Promoter Score dubbed “need to know buzzword”

MarketingWeek UK has named Transactional Net Promoter Score to its list of “need to know buzzwords in 2012.”

While we’re bemused with the idea of Transactional Net Promoter Scores being thought of as just another buzzword, the article makes some good points on the strengths of the metric and how it differs from regular Net Promoter surveys.

One of the more important considerations is that transactional surveys can potentially provide a much bigger data set than conventional surveys, as they ask for a response at the moment of contact, rather than once every quarter or other predefined period. For businesses that don’t often see customers face to face, such as insurance, Transactional Net Promoter Scores can also offer an opportunity to resolve a customer’s problem immediately.

Please check out this link if you’re interested in reading more about transactional surveys and how they have helped CustomerGauge clients, including insurance business nib, branded manufacturer Melitta, and more. Marketing Week

In brief

• Wonga, the financial services business that announced an NPS of +73 in May, this week announced it has trebled its earnings, with income rising 225%. The Guardian
• Recent research in the UK has revealed that “only 14% of service organisations have a system in place that accurately and automatically scores employees on performance in customer service.” For more insights into the state of customer service (or lack thereof) in UK businesses, see HR Magazine.

Net Promoter Vacancies

User Experience Manager – North America: LEGO, Hartford CT, US

Net Promoter Systems Analyst: Aerotek - Parsippany, New Jersey

Webinar Wednesday: Relationship Surveys vs. Transactional Surveys, in 17 minutes

16.00 UK / 17.00 CET
Wednesday 11 January 2012 (ARCHIVED)

What works best for Net Promoter® Score: Relationship Surveys or Transactional Surveys?

UPDATE: 11 January 2012. Sadly both Rob and Adam forgot to record the webinar, which was a shame as all agreed it was the best “Webinar Wednesday” ever. However, you can see the slides on this link.

Find out how in just 17 minutes in this interactive session, the next in our Net Promoter Best Practice Series.

Led by Robert Kerner and Adam Dorrell, this short webinar will cover the differences between a relationship survey and a transactional survey and give some interesting examples of where/when to use each of them. Once you understand the differences, we will discuss the pros and cons of each and whether a “hybrid” model might be a good fit for your organisation.

Topic: Best Practice Series: Relationship vs. Transactional surveys
Date: Wednesday January 11th, 2012
Time: 16:00 UK, 17:00 CET
Price: Free, to registered subscribers

Agenda:

• Survey overview and why we recommend Net Promoter
• Definitions and examples of relationship and transactional surveys
• Uses in each type in B2B, B2C and B2E (Employee) surveys
• Hybrid models
• Pros and cons of each type of survey
• Key takeaways

This is a fast run through as an overview of the issues, plus a short Q&A session at the end. It should be useful for those considering the design and implementation of a Net Promoter program, or anyone in a customer facing or research role in your organization.

Net Promoter: Is there a “Dutch Effect”?

Thoughts on how cultural differences impact Net Promoter® Score

Yesterday we had three webchat enquiries within an hour from different countries relating to exactly the same topic. This one is typical: “I’m searching for information if there are cultural effects that impacts the NPS. I’m specially interested in if Dutch customers are “harder” to receive a high NPS score from then the rest of Europe”. It’s not normal to hear such a specific pattern of questioning like this, and at first we thought it might be some kind of sophisticated botnet attack attacking customer loyalty firms. But when we spoke to one of the questioner it was clear it was genuine, apparently triggered by one of the company’s Big Client survey results just coming back. And you guessed it, a low score from the Low Countries.

I was asked, in a conspiratorial way “Is there something like a “Dutch Effect” on scores?”

Read more

Net Promoter News: Marketers, Metro Bank ‘get it’ but Barclays don’t, plus Smartphones, Ireland and Clockwork Home

In what is a kind of Net Promoter ‘Love-fest’, the UK’s Marketing Week devotes many column inches in their latest issue to NPS.  In “How to get more from your score” they explain how “adding extra layers to the Net Promoter score technique of assessing levels of customer satisfaction is enabling marketers to take their insight into the boardroom.” They add “…there is no doubt NPS has proved useful for marketers.  Mark Blayney Stuart, head of research at the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), believes the use of NPS continues to increase because the system is so straightforward and easy to use.” Article name checks companies: Hays Recruitment, Standard Life, Aviva, Carole Nash and Philips.

And continuing in the same issue Mark Ritson writes “Why I would recommend NPS to my friends” with some well thought out reasons and solid metrics: “Lego revealed that it was aiming for 5 million club members by 2015 and a net promoter score (NPS) of 75%…. the head of Citigroup’s consumer banking division had some good news for his team. After two years of crisis and more than £20bn in losses, the bank’s NPS had risen to 54%. That was 9% higher than a year earlier, and the first time the bank had risen above the 50th percentile since the data was first collected.” He also adds “Against the recommendations of professors and jealous research agencies (that despair of any metric simple enough for clients to use without their assistance) thousands of marketers have become advocates of NPS.”

iPhone tops NPS poll, no one surprised.

Zokem, an Espoo, Finland-based marketing company used standardized net promoter score (NPS) survey to analyze user loyalty of over 6,000 U.S. consumers in 2010 and found that the iPhone scored a 73 percent rating, while Android handsets took second-place with a 40 percent score. Research in Motion’s BlackBerry line earned 30 percent, Nokia’s Symbian was 24 percent, while Palm and older Windows Mobile phones pulled just 10 percent each. Interestingly, Zokem said Android users were actually the most likely to buy an Android phone again, at 89 percent, while iPhone owners get another iPhone 85 percent of the time. To explain how the statistics relate to the large gap in scores they point out Android powers a number of models and carriers, and consumers have more opportunity to choose and jump from one Android handset to another.

BlackBerry users stick with the platform 61 percent of the time, but only 28 percent of Palm owners and 8 percent of Symbian users plan to stay the course. Full source here.

When Irish “1″s are smiling…

Dublin based metricists W5 recently freely published useful Net Promoter benchmarks in Ireland. High street and grocery stores achieved the best scores, with health insurance and broadband providers achieving the worst. Download as a PDF here.

Company News

Metro Bank: Committed to NPS. Now this is newsworthy – a bank focused on customers using NPS. Anthony Thomson, co-founder and chairman of Metro Bank — first new high street bank to be opened in the UK for 150 years -  talks about being a retailer not a bank, nixing staff sales commission and using Net Promoter as a business metric. “None of our customer facing staff have sales targets or sales bonuses — their rewards and bonuses are based purely on their customer satisfaction scores. We use Net Promoter and currently we have a Net Promoter score of 87% which I believe is among the highest anywhere in the UK — and eight out of 10 of our new customers come as recommendations from existing customers — 97% of our customers rate our service as being exceptional.” Read more…

According to self-puffer, NES Rentals Holdings, Inc. has set a “new Net Promoter Score record for the aerial equipment rental industry” with a 2010 annual score of 80.1. The lifting company achieved consistently high quarterly scores in the NPS process throughout 2010, including a quarterly high of 82.6 in the fourth quarter, derived from  results of thousands of customer interviews and ratings throughout 2010. The company implemented the NPS program in 2007 and has received growing Net Promoter Scores each year since.  “Achieving high customer loyalty scores in the midst of tremendous economic pressure in our industry is a testament to our team and their dedication to our customers,” stated Andrew P. Studdert, NES Rentals chairman and chief executive officer.  “By making the customer experience our priority, it has led to a natural emphasis on customer safety and service, an emphasis that sets us apart from our competition and gives us the highest customer loyalty scores in our industry.” Source.

Sage keep “A deep customer focus” according to an opinion article covering their annual analyst event. Unusually for Sage, who have given NPS scores out before, it seems there was some reticence to give details. Could be that some rather sharp comments on the blog might be a more accurate representation of current customer sentiment. Judge for yourself on ZDNet.

Clockwork Home Services, a home repair conglom from Sarasota (owned by Toronto-based Direct Energy, the North American subsidiary of publicly traded Centrica) talk about Net Promoter in the Gulf Coast Business Review. Company head Scott Boose has implementedNet Promoter for all three service brands after learning the NPS ropes at British Gas. “A key component to the success was to be absolute on one rule from the first day: Well-dressed, polished and professional technicians were the only employees allowed to arrive at a customer’s home.” Key takeaway for Scott: Educating customers couldn’t be an afterthought in the home services sector. “If all we had done was fix the customer’s appliance,” says Boose, “but we hadn’t fixed the customer, then we’d be back.” Source.

The boss of Clayton Homes of Abilene, Texas describes the important the customer treatment to the company. Clayton Homes keeps track of each office’s Net Promoter Score, and earlier this month the Abilene office stood at 86 percent. To Buddy Parish they represent people customers can contact for testimonials about Clayton Homes. Those who answer with a 9 or 10 are promoters who will keep buying or referring friends. Nice homespun small-co reference: Source.

PPC-tweaker Covario held their annual INFLECTIONPoint Conference in downtown San Diego, CA last week, basing the conference theme on the movie Top Gun (Hey Covario, the 80′s called and want their uniforms back!). Oh and they announced that their Net Promoter Score, had shown an increase of 20 points. From where, to where, we sadly are not told.

TD Ameritrade announce jump in NPS. At an event so star studded that when Tony Blair had to cry-off (citing some minor middle east peace issue), Colin Powell stepped in at the last minute (what do the finance sector have on these people?), and it was announced that the company’s net promoter scores had ‘zoomed’ from 49 to 75. The jumps apparently  reflect the fact that the company has ironed out technology glitches that cropped up when Ameritrade and TD Waterhouse worked to integrate systems and service after their merger in 2006. More conference details here.

Dell’s 66 second NPS soundbite: Adam Brown, Director of Social Media at Dell, explains why Net Promoter Score (NPS) matters so much to the computer-maker. Relevant snippet:  At Dell, the NPS score is shown top right hand side of intranet screen, right under stock tracker. (Surely only a cynic would say that’s Dell’s relative positioning of NPS vs stock price?) YouTube.

Vodafone’s Turkish Delight: Vodafone Turkey on Thursday said its service incomes in Q3 in 2010 went up 31.7 percent over the same period a year earlier, becoming the fastest growing operator within Vodafone Europe, also adding that its net promoter score was 18 higher than that of its closest competitor. Source TurkishPress

Back-officers Blue Frog Solutions self-puffed about record high client loyalty and satisfaction levels “as ranked through a national scoring system”. “Blue Frog surveys its distributor and carrier clients semi-annually using Net-Promoter Score (NPS)… ” said SVP Joe Breakey, “Survey results … help assess the performance of our employees.” (translation: we bonus our staff on NPS). BlueFrog claim  industry leading survey 72% response rate and say Net Promoter Score climbed to an all time high in December and “scored higher than nationally well known organizations such as EBay, Costco, State Farm, Geico, and Cigna.” Source.

Amcor, Australian based ore-botherers talk about NPS and the amalgamation of Alcan. “All the while the discipline of the so-called “Amcor way” will be drummed in – the key elements are safety, customer focus, talent, capital discipline and low costs, each with its own key performance indicators, programs and deliverable targets.”  Customer focus, by way of example, is delivered by making clients happy through innovation and profitable sales growth, which comes from a range of programs including environmental action, and is measured by Net Promoter Score, among other tests. Australian.

BallenIsles birdies NPS, crowned Country Club Facility of the Year. Interesting to see that Net Promoter has been adopted by the golf set. Troon Golf, the world’s largest golf management company, with operations at properties located in 30 states and 23 countries honored BallenIsles Country Club, as it nearly tripled its NPS ranking, used to evaluate loyalty and the Club’s relationships scores. Source.

Bloomingdales hire for NPS: Spotted in the SitVac ads, retailer Bloomingdales specify Net Promoter Score Experience in job ads: “…analyze our performance in the Net Promoter Score (NPS) customer engagement survey” Manager, Customer Service and  “Achieve store Net Promoter Score goal.” Distribution/Logistics Manager

And the NPS Razzie goes to… Barclays.

As a bookend to the Metro Bank story, read another Mark Ritson piece in MarketingWeek, about how tone deaf Barclays manage to be.  “After more than 90 minutes of bonus-based questioning, committee member George Mudie MP changed tack and [...] then referred to Barclays’ all-important net promoter score, widely acknowledged as a key metric of banking performance, which currently sits at the astonishingly low -35. Mudie asked whether Barclays’ ability to generate huge profits while treating its customers so badly provided clear evidence of a lack of competition in the British banking sector. He looked across at [Bob] Diamond and waited for a response. But Diamond, sensing that this was a question about customers, took a long drink from his cup of water and handed the floor over to Anthony Jenkins, his head of retail banking.” (This also tallied with surveys completed by Millward Brown and Geronimo that both rated Barclays as the worst performing bank in their respective net promoter research studies). Ritson closes with “perhaps no-one at Barclays actually cares about what their customers really think. In the weeks ahead the furore around £1m bonuses during Britain’s worst period of austerity in living memory might encourage the leadership team at Barclays to take a more customer-centric view. MW.

Worms turn election strategy, also business?

In a few hours, the United Kingdom will vote in the most closely fought election in years. The most memorable moments have been due to the introduction of the TV debates, and the now famous “worms” that accompanied the first one. Pundits delighted in showing how the audience reacted to favourably to Nick Clegg. After the debate, it became clear that the two main parties adapted their communication strategies based on the wavering red, blue and yellow lines on the screen.

In fact this continuous audience monitoring is not new.  Back in 1946, TIME magazine reported that the Gallup Handheld Hopkins Televoting device was wowing movie moguls in Hollywood (we wrote about it here). A handheld device allowed cinema-goers at preview screening to dial “like very much” or “very dull”, which drew a red line on a chart as a staffer noted key scenes in the movie. Most films were not significantly altered but the reaction made a difference to the way they were marketed  (sounds like the politicians have been doing the same).

Dial M for Measurement

Customer feedback has also been used in business for years. Waiters have always asked diners what they thought of service. Unfortunately, “And how was the meal, sir?” is  just not a very scientific way of collecting feedback. Firstly, waiters can be quite intimidating, and secondly, you have a unreliable way of getting feedback to the proprietor. Like a turkey voting for Christmas, the server is hardly likely to admit “Customer says service was awful…”.

To make feedback more scientific, companies have invested in consumer research – but it’s expensive and can take time to process. Lack of common standards mean that one company’s results are hard to compare to another. And small sample sizes (like in the TV Worm example) can result in error. Finally, customer feedback can end up in the “Market Research ghetto” – giving useful strategic information, but rarely used to solve operational customer issues.

Last weeks Economist magazine had an article on firms focusing on customers: “...shareholder value should give way to ‘customer-driven capitalism’ in which firms ‘should instead aim to maximise customer satisfaction’. [...] Paul Polman [boss of Unilever] said ‘I do not work for the shareholder, to be honest I work for the consumer, the customer’…“. It is clearly becoming a boardroom priority – so how can business better tune into customer needs?

Many companies, including Philips, Vodafone, Canon and Electrolux have found the most effective method is real-time customer feedback through direct sales. Using a tool from CustomerGauge, these companies invite their online store to answer a one-page survey after each transaction, which asks for  feedback and a 0 – 10 recommendation rating. They have standardised on the Net Promoter (R) methodology, which is simple to communicate to front-line staff, and allows benchmarking against other companies. Between 10% and 30% of all customers respond, many with comments that are used to shape the business.

In doing so, they are getting real-time feedback with a numeric score they can systematically graph and track (like the worm) and written customer feedback they can match to that customers history. Recently, one of these companies responded to customer comments by changing packaging on products and printing manuals in larger type which had a positive effect on their Net Promoter Score. Another succesfully re-launched an almost forgotten product that was highly rated by customers, who were acting as evangelists and introducing friends. A recent CustomerGauge innovation is digital signage to show comments coming into the business as they happen.

These companies have already found best practices which include

• responding to customer feedback within 24 hours (even the most unhappy clients respond positively to this)
• routing comments to department managers (and more junior staff members who are empowered to solve problems)
• and weekly review meetings where projects are reviewed a prioritised on the basis of customer sentiment.

The good news for customers is that real-time sampling of transactions like this is becoming more widespread, and businesses are waking up to its potential. Executives know customers can “sack” them and defect to the competition immediately. That is unlike the winning party on Thursday, which might be able to last around four years before being subjected again to the worm of customer opinion.

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.

Silent Running: Automatically looking after your best e-commerce customers

There is a moving final scene in the 1971 film Silent Running. Bruce Dern sets his robot adrift in a spacecraft to tend the last remaining plant specimens from Earth. Although it’s 40 years old, this image of a machine trusted to look after living organisms inspired recent films like WALL*E, and was perhaps a foretaste of our current age with machines looking after our health, even agricultural robots starting to grow our food.

Not so much of a stretch then to imagine a system that could look after your customers?

It’s a theme we have been developing – we recently wrote about a Simple Customer Rescue and Reward Plan and followed it with a webinar “The Loyalty Robot”: Learn how to increase customer loyalty and grow online sales automatically.

We wanted to share our current thinking on how you can build “robotic” systems to enhance the e-commerce customer experience. The key elements:

• • automated customer surveys to understand voice-of-customer and Net Promoter® Score in real-time
  • automated customer segmentation by lifetime value
  • automated customer segmentation by loyalty (using Net Promoter Score)
  • process to help customers needing immediate response
  • clustering customer issues together for longer-term strategic fix
  • close-loop monitoring of results (Net Promoter Score and other metrics)
  • Responding to customers with updates on your actions

You could roll-your-own solution, but we believe CustomerGauge has all the parts you need to start this now – and we have proof points from our major e-commerce clients including Canon, Philips and Vodafone.

It’s all in a presentation you can download here: Building your own e-commerce Loyalty Robot (PDF, 8Mb) – or you can watch/listen to the archived webinar here.

When you are ready to add some “Silent Running” on your e-commerce site, we would be delighted to help you.

A Simple Customer Rescue and Reward Plan

We’d like to share a short 6-step plan for customer retention, based on some years working in e-commerce. We’re going to find some key customers that you can rescue, and others that you can reward. Then help you reach them and increase sales.

Step 1. Segment your customer base. Rank your customers by amount of spend, then make the cut at a suitable point – somewhere like 10 – 20% of your total customers.  You’ll probably be aware of the 80-20 rule (sometimes named the Pareto rule) which helps explain how a small number of customers are responsible for much of the sales (20% customers drive 80% sales). In the case of e-commerce, it’s often more extreme. We found on some sites that around 10% of the customer base brought in 50% of the revenue (and even more profit if you take into account acquisition costs). When you do the analysis, you may find it’s just a few hundred customers who make a sizable contribution.

Step 2. Identify your loyal customers. Survey your customers using the Net Promoter® Score question. You can find out how to do it in our 2-minute guide to the Net Promoter Score.   Ask “Would you recommend us to a friend of colleague?”, with a 0 – 10 scale. Use the results to understand who in your customer base are “promoters” or “detractors”. You may get up to 30% of your customers responding, so this is a very good way of dividing up the base. Don’t forget to ask for customer comments.

Step 3.  Draw up the matrix. See the chart above. On one axis, plot customer spend (or value). On the other, loyalty. In the top boxes you should have a manageable number of customers who represent a sizable portion of business, divided into those who would recommend you (promoters) and those who would not recommend you (detractors).

Step 4. “Customer Rescue”: Find the customers who are most at risk from defecting: High value customers that scored low ratings. If you do nothing, you risk losing repeat sales, or lose them to a competitor. At worst, they may warn their friends from buying from you. By reading their comments you can understand what the issues are. Don’t waste time – divide up the numbers and get your team on the phone to them within 24 hours of harvesting their comments. Failing that, personal emails will do. Acknowledge any problems, apologise if needed, and ask what it will take to put it right. Often, customers will make allowances for errors – and if you can surprise them by over-delivering on a fix, you may even turn them into evangelists.

Step 5. “Customer Reward”: Identify the high spenders who rate you highly. These are customers who are likely to make a repeat purchase, and with luck, bring you new customers. So give them the tools to do so. In the excellent book  Creating Customer Evangelists (Huba/McConnell) you can get some good ideas on how to turn customers into referral machines – offer new product information, ask for product feedback, give small gifts. Surprisingly, there are more effective actions than  financial incentives.

Step 6. Automate and track the progress. This retention model is not a one-off task – the successful companies bake these process steps into their sales DNA, and monitor which actions are most successful, while reducing the number of detractors. Keeping a customer is far cheaper than finding a new one.

Do the hard work, easily

Yes, you can do all the above steps using manual analysis. You can do it for next to nothing with low cost survey tools, if you have spreadsheet skills and plenty of time.

However, there is an easier way: CustomerGauge automates all the steps for you: segmenting, surveying, reporting, closing the loop. By integrating with e-commerce systems, CustomerGauge can survey every transaction with the Net Promoter Score question, and can often reach 30% response. Thanks to special reporting, the system automatically ranks customers (and repeat orders) by value, showing results in real-time, and providing call- and email-lists for actions. CustomerGauge even tracks open customer issues with internal workflow, and reports on returning customers.

Now all you have to do is come up with some creative ways of keeping your best customers recommending you to others!

Learn for free

Our upcoming webinar  “Learn how to increase customer loyalty and grow online sales automatically” on 10 Feb 2010 has additional resources on how to keep customers. Details/sign-up here.

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Co Jest Grane? Net Promoter Score Comic, in Polish

 

 

 

We were delighted to be contacted by Marcin Malinowski, a Poland-based Certified Net Promoter® Associate from Philips, who asked if we minded a translation of our famous cartoon guide to the Net Promoter Score®.

He also is happy to share his work here, so we would like to present to the Net Promoter community his Polish translation of our comic.

 

Download it here:  PDF (14Mb). Please enjoy!

Marcin, Dziękuję!

PS If you would like to translate into other languages please let us know.

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.

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