Posts Tagged ‘benefits’

Blog #8: Best Practices for a Perception Improvement Program

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

What are the key elements in a successful perception improvement program?

A regular (i.e., annual) survey is the most efficient vehicle for measuring and improving perception. Nearly all surveying performed today, however, fails to achieve the stated objectives; and most surveys are not repeated in their most-current form. Critical points in the process include:

  • Defining the survey objectives should be done before the questionnaires are designed. Which services will be evaluated? Which comparison groups will provide the most meaningful insight into reasons behind dissatisfaction? What is the time line? How much improvement is desired?
  • Choosing the appropriate stakeholder population is important for maximizing the response rates and the relevance of the collected data.
  • Preparing and motivating the respondents boosts their buy-in and their faith in the results, which is essential for improving perception in subsequent years.
  • Managing the process requires setting and communicating expectations, providing timely feedback on the results and delivering on promises made.

The perception improvement program should be part of an integrated continuous improvement process with a strategic plan. The emphasis should be on cost-avoidance, efficient resource management and a lowest-risk strategy. The plan should be compatible with enterprise culture. Survey feedback needs to be far-reaching and candid. It should not come as a surprise that all key stakeholders need to be informed of the results. Critical to the success of this step is communication at the local level, with regional and business management addressing the key issues and their applicability — and contribution — to the overall satisfaction level.

Promoting the Program

In selling the benefits of an improvement program to the stakeholders, management needs to emphasize operational improvements (e.g., reducing frustration and delays). Business-unit management needs to be assured of the contribution to their political and performance goals. Do not discount the impact of business-unit power loss. The “losers” will often be the most needed advocates.

Conclusion

Do not rush the process — collaborate with all key stakeholders before rolling out any major changes. Once the changes are in place, schedule a follow-up meeting to build on the benefits and solicit support for beginning the survey cycle again.

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Survey Tip #6: Why Measure Both Satisfaction and Importance?

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Effectiveness measurement needs to evolve beyond technical and objective metrics to the measurement of perception. Why? Businesses can boast superior efficiency, meet stated service-level agreement (SLA) objectives and exceed all product functional requirements yet still suffer from the customers perceptions of a lack of alignment and noneffectiveness. It is not enough to solicit the list of issues, demographics and customers satisfaction ratings. To really be effective a business needs to know how the customer’s needs are prioritized and this can only be done through measuring importance. Just remember:

  • If it’s NOT important to your customer’s, should you focus on it?
  • If it IS important to your customers, shouldn’t it also be a key priority to you?

Is the redundancy in questioning really worth the effort?

By asking both satisfaction and importance, the ultimate outcome is an ordering of the customer’s needs and issues affecting their perception along the axes of satisfaction and importance (see the following figure).

satisfactionmatrix

Source: AlliedInput

Figure. Importance + Satisfaction = Impact

Where satisfaction is low, businesses should focus resources on areas indicated as high importance. However, businesses are cautioned that company priorities are seldom specific business or customer priorities. At the risk of banality, AlliedInput emphasizes that the two groups speak very different languages. Areas of low importance should not be ignored, because their relative importance can increase next year as high-priority areas are remedied and business needs change.

Where satisfaction is high, businesses should keep resources employed. Failure to do so will quickly result in a drop in the lower right corner of the quadrant and potentially an increase in costs. In areas of lower importance, businesses should seek sources of redeployment in opportunities through retraining, retooling or retirement.

In some situations, the solution is not a reactive fix, but an interactive response. Changing the expectations of the customer and key stakeholders can result in an improvement in satisfaction where changing the services and/or products delivered is determined to be too costly or impossible.

In some cases, a problem may be of secondary importance and, thus, not qualify for expanded resource expenditure or accelerated scheduling. Budgetary constraints, political or technical risk, lack of a clear-cut or available solution, or a negative impact on an ongoing program or project make it more prudent to change the expectations of the stakeholder rather than to go on a quest that could do more harm than good.

Fatal Flaw - Failure to Ask for Importance Weighting: Result — No Prioritization

Another common error of a satisfaction survey is not including respondent importance weightings. Many organizations apply importance weighting to respondent data after the fact, but this will result in missing the opportunity to focus action plans and IT efforts on the criteria that will have the greatest impact on respondents’ satisfaction.

Conclusion

Ultimately, effective methods of measuring customer perceptions and managing their expectations include various forms of marketing to the customer population, training and refocusing customer facing employees, streamlining services and product offerings, implementing customer requested updates and clearly establishing the role of customer relationship managers.

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Best Practice-Integrating Customer Measurements into Business Processes

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Key Issue: How can a business be more effective?

Several recent surveys have highlighted two strong predictors of a business’ effectiveness. The first is having a continuous, interactive planning process between key business customers, business stakeholders and the business community. One of the most effective ways of doing this is through data and surveys.

Most measurement initiatives are either done as a single event or as an ongoing monitor of a single business process (e.g., a transaction-based survey or an annual employee satisfaction survey) and they are not incorporated into an enterprise wide, bottom-line impact quality program. Also, most initiatives are implemented once a problem has occurred (e.g., a decrease in customer retention rates) and not as an ongoing quality program to improve customer satisfaction, increase retention and bottom-line profits. The fatal flaws of these types of programs are that they are one-offs, only focused on a specific process and the feedback is never sent back to the respondents. In the long term, these initiatives will ultimately cause an increase in dissatisfaction, which is counterproductive to the organization.

The second predictor of a business’ effectiveness is for the key stakeholders and the business to make extensive use of external resources (e.g., best practice groups, consultants, research and benchmarking organizations) at all levels of business process maturity, including requirements, design and implementation phases. At each step in the sequence, the appropriate external resources should be leveraged to improve the effectiveness of the process and organization.

The high correlation found between the use of external resources and effectiveness is a function of several factors, including:

  • External resources enable the enterprise to learn more quickly and leverage the experience of others, reducing the number of potential mistakes.
  • The use of outside references and materials encourages the enterprise to break stagnant or harmful patterns of behavior and “think outside the box.”
  • External sources “triangulate” decision making between organizational structures, allowing leadership to consider the problem collaboratively with its constituents, rather than adopting antagonistic positions that reflect entrenched organizational biases.

Conclusion

Effectiveness measurement efforts need to evolve beyond metrics and demographics to the evaluation of perception. Why? Businesses can boast superior efficiency, meet posted service-level agreement (SLA) objectives and exceed all advertised functional requirements yet still suffer from the customer and stakeholder perceptions of missed alignment and lack of effectiveness. It is not enough to solicit the list of issues. You need the ultimate outcome to include an ordering of customer perceptions so you can successfully improve their experience and perception of your business.

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Survey Tip #5: Membership Surveys - How Satisfaction Impacts Membership

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Statistics have show that it’s five times cheaper on average to keep an existing client and/or member, versus finding and getting a new one. This is especially true in today’s market where it takes more than 25 touches before someone will commit to buy, as opposed to five years ago when it took just five touches.

We’ve been working with a number of association groups to help them understand and retain members. Through our work we’ve discovered a very interesting relationship between satisfaction scores and loyalty or renewing. The basic thought was if you’re not overly happy or satisfied, you probably won’t renew. We’ve found this to be true in some cases. In addition, there are a number of natural reasons that will cause people to not renew (move, job change, personal factors) and their satisfaction could be very high.

A real interesting piece of data we found is that satisfaction can be very low and it doesn’t impact a person’s renewing their membership within a group. People will still renew even if they’re not happy, as long as one thing is not negatively impacting them.

We discovered there’s a linchpin in each group, which is the key reason why people won’t renew and it’s different for each group.

What Are Some Linchpins?

COST

One of the first is cost. This was a bit of a surprise, since cost is also the most common off-the-cuff answer for why someone doesn’t renew or buy something. However, it’s also one of the linchpins for renewing.

If this is your group’s linchpin, some things to think about are:

  • Can you offer alternative pricing without compromising the benefits of the group?
  • Can you clarify what goes into the pricing, so people understand the value of the cost?
  • Have you clearly defined and highlighted the benefits of membership for each person?

When it comes to something like cost, knowing what goes into the pricing helps people understand the reason for the price. Don’t be afraid to talk about it. It makes things easier in the long run.

VALUE PROPOSITION

When you have a specific benefit (training, business growth, peer interaction, etc.) for being a member and your patrons don’t realize this benefit, they will leave. If your group is clearly defined with a specific purpose, you need to ensure that it’s tracking that purpose. Some examples are:

  • If it’s referrals and/or business, you need to make sure everyone has the tools and ability to get recommendations.
  • If you’re a politically inspired group, you need to ensure that all your members have the information they need to impact politics.
  • If you’re a group designed to support disadvantaged people, make sure you have a specific focus on who, why and what.

All groups have a purpose. Make certain your group is meeting its goals and be very clear with the membership.

Conclusion

Know what your members are expecting from their membership. What is important to them? What is your group’s value proposition? What are you communicating? For example:

  1. Building strong relationships with other members
  2. Peer-interaction
  3. Events
  4. Building their businesses

If these are part of your group’s mission and they’re important to your membership, in priority order, you need to focus on helping your members get from point 1 to 4. If you’re focusing on things that are NOT important to your members, you need to reevaluate either your mission and/or your purpose because this will not retain members.

Upcoming topics:

Survey goals - What are you doing with your results, if anything?

Question formats
- What are you after with your question?
- The confusion of a combo question.
- What do you mean by that?

Question wording - the good, the bad and the really ugly

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