Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty for the Global Enterprise

By Monica David
Vice President, Professional Services
CustomerSat, Inc.

Satisfying — better yet, delighting— customers is a fundamental goal of every business. But what is customer satisfaction? What benefits does it deliver? How do you quantify and measure it? What are the best ways to improve it?

To know what your customers think, you must ask them. Surveys of customer satisfaction come in two basic flavors. A Transaction Survey collects feedback from customers to discover how satisfied they were with a particular transaction (e.g., purchase, installation, training or support). Relationship Surveys, which are conducted less frequently, ask customers their attitudes, feelings and perceptions about their business relationship with you. Well-designed surveys can also uncover issues or annoyances unknown to you, that are quietly festering, out of sight. Surveys also measure how customer satisfaction varies by product, region, and customer segment. Typically the relationship surveys cover all touchpoints over a specified period of time, such as the past six or 12 months.

After the feedback is collected, reports are compiled and delivered, often in graphic formats like trend lines, positioning charts or key satisfaction driver charts. Low scores trigger action alerts, which are sent to appropriate personnel for immediate follow-up.

Once you hear the Voice of your Customer, you can make informed decisions that drive changes and improvements in processes, people, deliverables, documentation — everything that surrounds the customer experience.

Today, with greater customer choice and declining loyalty, creating deep and trusted customer relationships is more essential — and more elusive — than ever. Strong relationships, especially with your most strategic accounts, translate into repurchases, renewals, marquee references and positive word-of-mouth.

Increasing competition is forcing all businesses, but especially global enterprises, to pay far more attention to how well they are satisfying their customers. Customer feedback can help identify at-risk customers, employees and partners before they are lost. This can increase customer retention, loyalty, revenue, and profits. They can also provide valuable insights into new products or services your customers want, putting you ahead of the competition. Equally important, customer feedback indicates what is most important to customers, so that the enterprise can focus on meeting customers’ needs in those areas.

Customer satisfaction surveys, like those designed and deployed by CustomerSat, are one of the primary tools for hearing the voices of your customers. They let you view your corporate performance through the eyes of the customer. You quickly discover what's important to them — and what's not — so you can concentrate on the actions that will pay the highest dividends. Listening to your customers’ voices ensures that your internal process improvements focus on what the customer actually values, rather than what your people think they want. Customer feedback also builds on Six Sigma and other quality initiatives.

Think Globally, Act Locally

In the 1990s, corporations focused on improving quality to compete effectively in a fast-changing world. By 2000, the spotlight had shifted to globalization as a means of wringing higher margins from sales. Now, in the 21st century, customer satisfaction has taken center stage, as companies consolidate and concentrate on increasing market share. Listening to and acting on the Voice of your Customer has become an imperative to thrive and even to survive.

The most forward looking companies consider the global requirements of their global enterprise when designing their customer feedback system. They acknowledge that surveys across the world are better received and, therefore, have higher response rates if the surveys are in the local language and deployed in as many as eight or ten languages. They also use online surveys, which allow for tailoring the questionnaire to the geographic differences in terms of products offered, services delivered, or even where training takes place. For example, the questionnaire of one of our clients, Ventana, has a question about training; U.S. respondents see it described as Tucson-based training and Europeans see it described as Strasbourg-based training.

CustomerSat clients AMD, Ariba, Business Objects, Canon, Salesforce.com, Sodexho, Thermo Electron, WebEx Communications and Wind River are all prominent global players operating in fast-moving markets. Each has discovered the importance of addressing customer satisfaction locally. CustomerSat helps these global enterprises capture survey feedback from key stakeholders at every key touchpoint, whether it’s electronic interactions at Web self-service and e-commerce sites or in-person service calls, for product installation, maintenance or training.

But that’s only the beginning. Interactive, real-time analytics, metrics, and verbatim customer comments are continuously delivered back to the enterprise through secure portals, interactive dashboards, push reporting, email alerts and other means. These alerts align and empower your organization to drive responsive actions in real time.

Wind River, for example, is a $266 million global leader in device software optimization. Industry leaders like Apple, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Motorola use Wind River software in more than 300 million devices.

Before partnering with CustomerSat in mid-2005, customer feedback was simply not a part of Wind River’s corporate DNA. “Employees cared deeply, but lacked the means to receive feedback and act on it,” said Barry Mainz, Vice President of Worldwide Customer Operations.

Wind River faced a host of unanswered questions surrounding customer satisfaction. “We wanted to know how our customers felt about our support engineers,” Mainz said. “Did our processes meet their expectations? How happy were they with our technologies, our products? How loyal were they?”

CustomerSat’s baseline survey of existing customers discovered how Wind River was perceived by current customers, where they could improve, and established benchmarks for measuring future improvements. Loyalty questions probed how likely customers were to continue using Wind River products and services, make additional purchases, renew their contract and recommend Wind River to others.

Ongoing surveys measure their customers’ satisfaction with the two types of support Wind River provide:

• Online Support, where customers search Wind River’s online Knowledge Base for answers to their questions, and
• Technical Support Requests , where Wind River engineers provide “live” support by phone, email and online chat.

Within hours of any support interaction, Wind River customers are invited to answer questions and offer comments about the experience and their satisfaction. Surveys are currently deployed in thirty-two countries, in English and Japanese.

Customer feedback data are ported into dashboards, which display in-depth numeric information in an easy-to-read graphical form. Any score falling below a certain threshold automatically triggers a real-time action alert, which is sent to the appropriate Wind River manager so their reps can respond quickly. “The customers realize that we really are reading their responses and taking immediate action,” said Carl Orsi, Manager of Wind River’s Office of Customer Advocacy. “A quick follow-up call from a manager goes a long way toward increasing customer loyalty and good will.”

Ariba: Adopting a Global Perspective

While Wind River surveys focus on a single customer touchpoint — technical support — other CustomerSat clients measure customer satisfaction on a broader, more global perspective.

Ariba, for example, is a fast-growing global enterprise that is morphing from a narrowly focused e-procurement vendor into a comprehensive On Demand solutions provider. After five mergers in three years, the company’s CEO and Management Committee upgraded its Customer Advocacy program, to better hear and respond to the voices of its customers.

When the program was launched in 3Q 2005, Ariba “didn’t know what it didn’t know,” admitted Roger Blumberg, Ariba’s Senior Director of Customer Advocacy. Not every department even surveyed its customers, nor were all customer touchpoints surveyed. Management did not enjoy a 360-degree view of their customers.

Ariba’s Customer Advocacy office was charged with creating:

1. A closed-loop feedback process with which customer satisfaction is regularly measured, action is taken and management is provided with accurate and timely reporting
2. A forum where customers could provide Ariba senior management with regular constructive feedback
3. A corporate culture where all employees focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

After an extensive RFP, Ariba replaced nine different survey vendors with CustomerSat. We were asked to provide accurate and consistent customer intelligence for all departments, in all regions, at all customer touchpoints.

Ariba Relationship Surveys are conducted twice a year, while ongoing Transaction Surveys measure customer satisfaction at every major touchpoint, e.g., the end of a consulting engagement or training session. All surveys use a common sampling method so customers with multiple interactions are not over-surveyed. Questions, scale and style are standardized so data can be compared and results easily consolidated into reports, which are distributed across the company using a common dashboard and dissemination system. All 1500 employees are briefed in quarterly departmental road shows.

Ariba’s Management Committee handles follow-up actions, actively engaging all dissatisfied customers to determine root causes and corrective actions. In addition, Quarterly Management Reviews and Customer Advisory Councils close the loop with Ariba customers, informing them of corrective actions and fueling their level of engagement.

After barely a year, results are impressive. Ariba has seen significant improvements in Overall Satisfaction in all departments and regions. 10% of their customers reported a 2 point (out of 10) improvement in Overall Satisfaction. The Achievement in Customer Excellence (ACE) Certification committee rated Ariba’s program a best practices exemplar of information dissemination, action on customer feedback, communication to actual and potential respondents, and management and employee involvement.

Customer satisfaction scores now drive Ariba’s employee compensation (MBOs) and investment decisions, too.

Will Customer Feedback Help You?

If you want to hear the voices of your customers, and see your organization through their eyes, a customer feedback program will help you do it. A good program will uncover what your customers value — and are willing to pay for.

Customer satisfaction is the key if your organization wants to thrive. It offers direct links to higher revenues and higher profitability. But remember, customer feedback by itself is useless. True enterprise feedback is actionable. It must have the ability to drive process improvements within your company, which will lead to customer retention, renewals and referrals. Importantly, actions can be tailored to the unique requirements of customers in each major region of the world, as well as down to the level of sub-regions such as Benelux or Australia/New Zealand, as long as there is an adequate number of responses from each.

As Wind River’s Barry Mainz puts it, “Surveys make things very black and white. They remove the emotion, guesswork and hunches. Instead, you have solid data to analyze. That's the first thing you need to make changes and improve.”

Customer satisfaction can be simple or extensive as you make it. The key is to get started.

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About the author of this article:

CustomerSat VP of Professional Services Monica David has three decades of experience in management, marketing, and Market Research. Founded in 1997, CustomerSat is the leader in real-time customer feedback solutions for building customer satisfaction, loyalty and profitability. CustomerSat solutions turn key customer, partner, employee and supplier insights into targeted actions.