Customer Panels Can Help Increase Value, Extend Brand Loyalty

Customer panels can truly enhance value and extend brand loyalty, according to Brian Koma, VP & CX Practice Leader, Verint Systems; and Sean Mahoney, CCXP, Director, Solutions Consulting, Verint Systems.

Loyalty360 hosted a webinar on Thursday titled, “How Effectively Are You Delivering Value to Your Customers?” which was presented by Verint.

Koma and Mahoney discussed the powerful impact that a customer panel, if leveraged correctly, can have on brand loyalty.
 
What is a customer panel?
 
You invite customers to provide ongoing feedback as part of a panel
Customers opt-in to the panel and agree to be surveyed periodically
Customers provide you with detailed profile information to help you focus your surveys
You survey them only about things that are relevant to their interests – and not too often
 
“By using a customer panel, it helps brands understand at a deep level how their customers are feeling,” Koma explained. “It’s a pretty powerful means to delve into more detail. Panel surveys can help you get to a level of engagement that is very difficult to reach otherwise. It opens up a whole world of possibilities. These individuals will provide you with detailed profile information about themselves.”
 
Armed with that profile information, Koma said brands can survey those individuals about things only relevant to their interests. In general, Koma said customer panels receive a third higher participation rate than random email surveys. Panel-based surveys receive almost 13 percent participation rates, but Koma has seen some customer panels generate as much as a 50 percent participation rate.
 
Mahoney added that leveraging customer panels are “one of the best things you can do to increase value. They send the message that we want to understand from your perspective about what’s important, what’s working, and what’s not working. It’s just so impactful.”
 
Koma and Mahoney listed the five elements that must be present for any CX program to be successful: Vision, Governance, Culture, Processes, and Technology.
 
Of these five, Vision and Culture are truly foundational. Without a clearly articulated vision, beginning from the top and inclusive of the front-line staff, any other effort will be wasted. And where the vision needs to be advocated by the executive team, culture begins and ends with the daily activities and behaviors of every staff member, and especially those in customer-facing and supporting roles. If vision and culture are out of alignment, no amount of governance, process management, or technology will matter or have the desired impact.
 
Vision
Define the strategy and vision for engaging with customers
Align with the corporate strategy and overarching customer experience goals
 
Governance
Establish a cross-functional Center of Excellence or Governance model
Provide strategic guidance and help manage priorities, communication and funding
 
Culture
Build the case for a customer-centric culture
Capture feedback from employees and engage them in designing solutions
 
Processes
Design customer-facing processes
Create closed-loop processes with customers and employees
 
Technology
Implement the correct technology solutions for customer feedback and engagement to meet your goals (becomes the enabler)
 
Verint’s answer to addressing these challenges is Customer Engagement Optimization, which goes beyond just measuring customer experience:
 
It is the ability to collect huge amounts of structured and unstructured data from customer interactions across channels – be it voice-based data, web-based data, text-based data from email, chat and social interactions, customer demographic data, or workforce data.
 
It’s the ability to aggregate that data, to be able to analyze it and to glean valuable insights about customers and their journeys, expectations, sentiment, and experiences.
 
The ability to operationalize these insights and to be able to equip every interaction channel in the enterprise with the right knowledge, process, context, and next best action to deliver the right outcome for the customer and for the business.
 
For the consumer, it means you can meet expectations for fast, easy, consistent, contextual, and personalized engagements. For the business, it means enriched customer interactions, improved enterprise processes, and a highly productive workforce who are more effective and efficient at delivering customer service.
 
Some common CX Challenges include:
 
What are the factors that drive loyalty with my customers?
How do I get my organization to understand and embrace these drivers?
How do I effect change and then measure that change?
How can I determine if I am interacting with customers in an effective manner?
 
To counter these challenges, Koma and Mahoney listed the following key drivers of CX quality:
 
Effectiveness of the interaction with customers (Can they get the job done?)
Ease of the interaction (Did you make it easy for me to do that or hard?)
Emotion generated by the interaction (Customers rarely remember what you did, but they do remember how you made them feel)
 
Mahoney said that transactional surveys can be “incredibly valuable” as long as they’re conducted in a timely fashion (within 48 hours). Transactional surveys provide important data, but they are by no means comprehensive.
 
“Keep it tight and narrowly focused,” Mahoney said of transactional surveys. “They are really a critical point of experience feedback.”
 
Koma added that once brands gather transactional survey data, something must be done with it.
 
“What are you going to do with it?” he said. “Not only who’s using the information, but what decisions are being made with it? Also, determine if are there are closed-loop processes being driven by transactional information. Understand the impact of the processes on the customers.”
 
Customer journey mapping can measure ease of doing business by:
 
Mapping the customer journey to understand where issues exist
Using transaction data, CRM data, and customer interviews to build a visual representation of how customers interact with you
Using journey maps to understand the friction points in the journey that cause customers to do more work than they anticipate
Making process changes and then measuring the effect on ease of doing business
 
In conclusion, Koma and Mahoney offered the following keys related to measurement to understand how effectively a brand delivers value:
 
Effectiveness of the interaction with customers
Ease of the interaction
Emotion generated by the interaction (typified by unstructured interactions)
Measure Effectiveness using transactional and relationship surveys
Understand Ease of Doing Business with journey mapping
Measure Emotion with Speech & Text Analytics

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