2013 ForeSee Summit Highlights: Part 3

Posted on May 23, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

When I last left you, we were getting ready for the ForeSee Homecoming Dinner at the Jack Roth Stadium Club.

It’s not too often that you have a chance to rub elbows with tone of the greatest and most revered coaches in college football.  Dinner attendees had just that opportunity when Lloyd Carr – the third most winning coach for the University of Michigan, and the last one to win a National Championship – talked about his coaching days and most importantly leadership.

What a great way to start a great night. But that wasn’t enough…there was more. A lot more.

 

2013 ForeSee SUmmitMaybe it’s because I’m a University of Michigan alumnus, but setting foot on the legendary football field and taking in the grandness that is the Michigan Football Stadium never gets old. But I’m not so sure it’s about me anymore; it’s about watching the wide-eyed wonderment of our clients as they walk through the tunnel and onto the field for the first time (or second time, or even third…), looking up at the mammoth stadium lights. It’s pretty cool. More pictures should be available soon.

In some ways it’s the same look I see in a client’s eye when they finally see the power and understand the value of measuring the customer experience with predictive analytics for the first time.

To echo that sentiment, Stephanie Bottner, Pear Tree Greetings, opened the final day of the 7th Annual ForeSee Summit with an eye-opening case study on How the Customer Experience Can Drive Strategic, Operational & Tactical Success.  Her presentation was the perfect example of why we host the Summit – so companies can show their peers the importance of evolving within the field of customer experience analytics. She talked about how her company went from using one simple word-of-mouth survey question (NPS) to embracing a scientific methodology that provides actual and actionable intelligence (ForeSee). This is innovation at its best.

And the business success that Pear Tree has experienced since implementing a scientific measurement is impressive:

  • Sales are up 44%
  • AOV is up 27%
  • Orders are up 13%
  • Repeat purchases are up 18%
  • Traffic is up 65%
  • Call volume is down 30%, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars

The value of a satisfied customer does pay dividends. Stephanie proved the point when she revealed that a one point increase in satisfaction brings in $1 million more in sales annually for her company.

That was the perfect segue  for WoMI: Innovating Analytics, where I talked about how, while the Net Prompter Score (NPS) has served a valuable purpose throughout the past decade, there is a need to evolve the widely-used word-of-mouth measure so it is more accurate and reliable in understanding today’s customers. To fill that need, I introduced ForeSee’s Word of Mouth Index (WoMI) measure, which is a more precise measure that builds on what many companies are already doing with NPS. You can read more about WoMI in a recent post, or download the free white paper.

Oh, and thank you Stephanie – I’ve always wondered what I’d look like with a handlebar mustache (I guess you just had to be there).

In his presentation, The Big Picture: Leveraging the Multi-Channel Customer Experience to Support Your Strategy, Hickory Farms’ Michael Holton shared examples of how his company gained cross-channel insights, identified business opportunities, and shaped action plans all by leveraging voice of customer data; and demonstrated how you can bolster your business strategy by measuring ALL customer touch points. He also talked about how after implementing ForeSee technology, including, SessionReplay, the company could better prioritize investments and allowed them to make better business decisions.

Play to win was the theme for the second half of the final day and we took on the mobile game first.

The rapid increase in mobile adoption has created many challenges for many companies. That’s what made the presentation, Incorporating Mobile Into an Integrated Customer Experience Strategy, from StubHub duo Chris Daniels and Kate McGunigal so intriguing and important. They talked about how the recent explosion in mobile growth has driven change across their entire organization, forcing them to rethink how they leveraged customer satisfaction analytics from mobile to better align their strategy to the company’s overall needs.

Top takeaways from StuHub:

  • Consumers will use their platform of preference, not your platform of preference
  • Think of the customer experience in totality, not as one off surveys
  • Top to bottom alignment leads to better customer experiences

Eric Peterson, the author and Founder and Senior Partner of Web Analytics Demystified, cleverly detailed through 10 tips exactly how his firm’s best clients run their analytics like the ’71 Los Angeles Lakers, the ’98 Chicago Bulls, and the ’12 Miami Heat ran their teams – combining star talent with great leadership and powerful technology to deliver results. One of the main points he made was as a company leader you cannot rely on one resource. If you do, it will eventually lead to failure.

Sticking with the sports theme, our friend Billy Beane, General Manager, Oakland A’s ,shared with us his presentation, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, to close out the Summit’s regular sessions.

Billy Beane, the subject of Moneyball, the New York Times Best Seller and Academy Award Nominee for Best Picture, told the incredible story about he and his executive team developed a predictive methodology for analyzing non-traditional statistics to estimate a player’s ability to generate wins. During his presentation, Billy discussed how these metrics helped the Oakland A’s uncover undervalued assets and compete against baseball’s elite teams–even with one of the lowest payrolls in the game.

What a way to conclude our 7th Annual ForeSee Summit. I hope everyone found it to be as valuable as I did. I want to thank every one of our clients who attended and participated this year and I hope to see you next year. For those who didn’t, or simply couldn’t, make it in 2013, I hope to meet you in 2014.

I also want to thank the ForeSee staff (you know who you are) for working day and night to make this event such a great success and value to our clients. I’d like to end the Summit in the same manner I started it – in the immortal words of Bo Schembechler, it’s all about “The team, the team, the team.” And I can’t thank mine enough – a truly exceptional effort.

Check out my other Summit update posts and continue following our Twitter and Facebook feeds for more updates and upcoming photos and videos highlighting the 2013 ForeSee Summit.

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2013 ForeSee Summit Highlights: Part 2

Posted on May 22, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

There’s no question that we live in a new era ruled by the customer – an era that is multi-channel and multi-device, requiring multiple measures in order to get a better understanding of customer experience. And there’s nothing we can really do but embrace it.

After refueling at lunch it was back to business at the 7th Annual ForeSee Summit where we tackled the challenges of living in today’s multi-channel world by Connecting the Dots: Combining Multiple Measures to Complete the Customer Picture in a panel discussion led by ForeSee’s  Eric Feinberg, senior director mobile, media, and entertainment.

During the session, Howard Blumenthal, Advanced Auto Parts; Laurie Kuhn, Samsung Electronics America; and Lisa Morely, ExxonMobil Fuels and Lubricants, chatted about how their organizations use customer satisfaction to define the lines that connect  the multiple customer touch points, which in turn, helps them to break down organizational silos, drive strategy, and create a complete picture of the customer.

2013 ForeSee SummitAttendees then had the opportunity to choose one of four Best Practice sessions: Customer Service and Contact Center; Web Measurement; Store Measurement; and Mobile Measurement. Since I was unable to be in all four places at the same time, I’ve enlisted ForeSee leaders to follow up with blog post throughout the next couple of weeks to highlight these sessions and case studies in greater detail.

At last year’s Summit, Joyce Hrinya, A&R Strategy Partners, took part in a roundtable discussion on how to increase the level of awareness around customer experience in your organization. That very important discussion spurred her to step on stage this year to present a full session on the topic The CMO Perspective: Understanding the Strategic Power of Data. She left the audience with some key best practices:

  • Demonstrate expertise
  • Exceed expectations
  • Challenge internal status quo
  • Magnify voice of customer
  • Find better and quicker ways to share customer voice
  • Add value
  • Proactively plan improvements

Lea Synefakis-Pica, Prudential, finished out the regular sessions and the first full day of the Summit with Get Their Attention: How to Impact Organizational Change by Effectively Telling the Customer Experience Story. She explained some of the best practices for communicating the customer experience at various levels of the organization to help drive true optimization. Her “three pillars of presentation enlightenment” outlined how you can effectively raise visibility of the customer experience and socialize it across the organization with better presentations and cross-platform storytelling techniques. Basically she showed us how to make our data (and presentations) standout so it moves up in the organization with the end result of making a difference. The three pillars are:

  • Be your audience – step into the shoes of who you are presenting to. Get context.
  • Choose your presentation tool wisely…then use it wisely
  • Maximize absorption of your data (one hint: kill the pie chart)

Tonight we head to the “Big House,” the University of Michigan’s football stadium for dinner and a chance (depending on weather) to set foot on one of the most storied fields in college football.

Check out my 2013 ForeSee Summit highlight posts right here and stay tuned into Twitter (#ForeSee2013) for live updates as the event unfolds.

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2013 ForeSee Summit Highlights: Part 1

Posted on May 22, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

Representatives from  more than 100 of the top companies and organizations worldwide descended upon the University of Michigan yesterday to take part in the 7th Annual ForeSee Summit at the esteemed Stephen M. Ross School of Business on the beautiful and historic Ann Arbor (ForeSee’s hometown) campus.

This is by far one of my favorite times of the year. The Summit offers us at ForeSee and opportunity to celebrate our clients. Why? Because they get it. They really, really get it. They understand that the customer experience is more important right now than ever before and they’re taking the necessary steps to measure and manage it the right way so they can make a difference in their companies and to their customers.

And so the celebration began on Tuesday.

For the early arrivals yesterday, we provided “How To” sessions in the afternoon: Seeing is Believing: SessionReplay in Action; and Advanced Analytics Portal: Customer Intelligence at Your Fingertips, where ForeSee product specialist demonstrated to attendees how to use the technologies to their fullest potential.

We officially kicked off the 2013 ForeSee Summit this morning when I talked about how, as an industry, we need to evolve to a Next Generation of Customer Experience Analytics, what I define as a robust system of integrated metrics to help business leaders better understand the full customer experience not just fragments of it. I will talk in greater detail about this new generation of predictive analytics in a future blog post. So, stay tuned.

2013 ForeSee Summit

Then, our own John Williams, senior vice president of product and delivery, provided a detailed roadmap of where we are at and where we are going as far as product development, including a look at the new Advanced Client Portal, and a demonstration from Alexei White, ForeSee’s director of emerging technologies, of our highly-anticipated and just-released SessionReplay for Mobile offering.

While I had hoped to provide a wake-up call with Next Gen Customer Experience Analytics, the real eye-opener came in the form of two case studies by Cars.com and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan that outlined real-life examples of how customer experience analytics helped define challenges and solve problems.

First up was Josh Chapman from Cars.com, a prospect at last year’s Summit, with his presentation: Driving Success with Audience Segment Strategy. This was a great example of analytic integration, innovation and evolution toward Next Generation Customer Experience Analytics.

He explained how Cars.com creatively pairs audience personas shaped by their Salesforce.com data with ForeSee customer experience analytics to micro-target tactical changes and shape strategic direction. He also shared how this ability to look at audiences with different characteristics and needs helps him communicate value to senior management as well as the company board.

What is one to do when faced with the perfect storm of “consumerization” and industry reform? Faced with that exact situation, Kathryn Levine of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, the biggest health insurance providers in the state, explained in her case study: Meeting Rapidly Changing Consumer Needs how applying voice of customer data influences her organization’s customer strategy, and how SessionReplay is a crucial element in driving urgency for imperative enhancements.

Effective customer experience programs can impact both business strategy and operational execution. But that requires buy-in at many levels, including the C-Level. In Change Management Success: Creating a Customer Experience-Centric Organization, Arezou Zarafshan from Crocs, Inc. shared her experience for nurturing CEO commitment, showing business leaders across an organization the value of customer experience measurement, and guiding teams to adopt customer experience analytics as a discipline in their business.

And that was only the first half of the first day at the 2013 ForeSee Summit. Stay tuned in right here and on Twitter (#ForeSee2013) the next few days to learn how some of our other clients are using ForeSee analytics to navigate the ever-changing customer experience landscape.

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ForeSee Summit Just Around the Corner

Posted on May 15, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

It’s coming up quick, but there’s still time to make plans and join us for the 2013 ForeSee Summit: Next Generation Customer Experience Analytics. We’re reaching a record high in attendance and we don’t want anyone to miss out.

The value of attending the event is incredible – read this guest blog post by Josh Chapman, VP operations at Cars.com for more. And the value we get out of having our clients there is equally as valuable to us.  The Summit is a great opportunity for business leaders to gain valuable customer experience strategies and tactics from their peers and colleagues. Here’s a quick look at some agenda highlights:

  • Customer Experience Insights: Case Study Keynotes

Learn how your peers apply customer experience analytics to move the needle, gain executive buy-in, and foster a customer-centric culture at their organizations.

  • Channel Focus: Best Practice Sessions

Get channel-specific insights for Web, Mobile, Contact Center, and Store. Gain actionable ideas that you can apply when you walk back into the office.

  • Networking: Peer-to-Peer Connection Opportunities

Our Peer-to-Peer Sessions provide an interactive opportunity to discuss trends, challenges, and best practices with peers and Satisfaction Research Analysts.  Attendees can also make connections during the extracurricular activities we have planned such as the Welcome Reception, Campus Tour, and dinner at the “Big House” (The University of Michigan Stadium).

The 2013 ForeSee Summit, May 21-23 in Ann Arbor, Michigan

You can download the agenda here or click here to register.

As a bonus to everyone who attends, we will be given away a special preview of the first four chapters of my new book, Innovating Analytics, coming out through publisher Wiley & Sons this fall.

Hope to see you there!

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When Just Having a Mobile Presence Isn’t Enough

Posted on May 14, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee Blogger Kim Turner

by Kim Turner

We’ve been saying for years now that the mobile age is upon us. And with mobile usage evolving at such a fierce pace – mobile-connected devices set to outnumber people on Earth by the end of 2013 – I’d say there’s no denying it, leaving organizations really no choice but to try and appeal to smartphone and tablet users by offering dedicated mobile sites and apps.

Whether companies are just dipping their big toe into the vast mobile waters or diving in head first, either way it’s a good thing. Because if they aren’t doing it now (even a little bit) they face the risk of falling to the wayside as their competitors (who are delivering mobile experiences) pass them by.

But just having a mobile presence isn’t enough. Company leaders have a responsibility to their customers and prospective customers to ensure their experiences with the company are good ones, and companies themselves will reap the rewards of providing a good customer experience with increased sales, loyalty, and recommendations. This especially true in mobile where expectations are going to be high from the start thanks to mobile leaders such as Amazon and Apple who are setting the bar high.

So, how do you or will you know if you are doing a good job? How do you know if your customers are satisfied with your mobile experience? Better yet, how do you know what improvements to make if they are not? Where are they getting tripped up? What is working and, more importantly, what is not working for them in the mobile experiences you are providing?

There’s no Pause/Stop button to allow you to catch up in the mobile game and there’s no FastForward button to allow you to skip through the hard parts. But there is a Replay option.  To help company leaders answer those burgeoning questions above we released SessionReplay for Mobile today to help company leaders see a quick and accurate picture of how individual consumers engage on their mobile sites and apps. Wait, Rewind that…

Yes, SessionReplay for Mobile is now available. Read the official release here.

As a powerful complement to ForeSee Satisfaction Analytics for Mobile, SessionReplay for Mobile provides real-world video replays to help companies rapidly identify struggles, and expedite and validate improvements.

With this first-of-its-kind technology, business leaders are able to:

  • Relive their mobile visitors’ experiences. Organizations can evolve their mobile strategies – seeing where visitors are struggling based on video replays of real user experiences. SessionReplay for Mobile displays visitors’ touches and taps, pinch and zooming motions, swipes, scrolling and even device orientation.
  • Quickly identify relevant replays. There’s no need to sift through hundreds of replays to identify trends and issues. Using the satisfaction scores, visitor roles and comments already captured by ForeSee, companies can zero in on the specific session they’d like to view. In addition, the page filter functionality makes it easy to find replays that focus on a particular path or page.
  • Analyze touch and scroll patterns. Using heatmaps, organizations can see if individual struggles are representative of broader issues, helping to quickly identify and efficiently resolve roadblocks.
  • Share insight across their organization.  Teams can annotate replays with comments – providing a play-by-play that helps quickly build consensus around improvements. Replay sessions can then be distributed easily and securely as links via email, so stakeholders throughout an organization can see issues and agree on necessary actions. Recipients view the replays as videos within their Web browsers. 

ForeSee SessionReplay for MobileSessionReplay for Mobile, when used in concert with ForeSee Satisfaction Analytics for Mobile, provides an end-to-end solution for quickly and scientifically analyzing customers’ wants, needs, expectations and actual experiences.

So, regardless if you are a mobile veteran or a rookie looking to make a splash, the mobile revolution is here. Are you ready for it?

Read the full release here.

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It’s Good! The Mobile Track at the ForeSee Summit

Posted on May 13, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee Blogger Eric Feinberg

By Eric Feinberg

This is always an exciting time of year. We are again hosting hundreds of our clients in lovely springtime Ann Arbor for the ForeSee Summit. Our clients will take over the best darn college town in the world for a couple days of incredible content and amazing events. Yes, I might even attempt to kick another field goal at The Big House, the University of Michigan football stadium.

Amidst the hullaballoo of the extracurricular activities, we are featuring some incredible mobile content. Since our mobile measurement delivers admirably on all three strategic, operational, and tactical fronts for our clients, we have crafted our sessions to meet those discrete and complete needs:

  • Strategic: I will first talk about macro industry trends including some incredible never-before-seen ForeSee mobile research.
  • Tactical: ForeSee’s Usability Team Lead, Matthew Dull, will deliver a breathtaking screenshot-heavy view of mobile usability best practices.
  • Operational: Our client, Marriott, will then bring it home on our panel delivering the practitioner view of how people in the real world are thinking about and implementing these trends and best practices.

Also on the mobile docket this year in the form of a Client Case Study is

Incorporating Mobile Into an Integrated Customer Experience Strategy

Presented by Chris Daniels and Kate McGunigal, StubHub

From a research perspective, StubHub’s thinking about mobile has evolved significantly – especially as mobile growth has driven changes across the entire organization. Chris and Kate will discuss how their thinking has changed for leveraging Customer Satisfaction Analytics from Mobile to better align their strategy to the company’s needs.  They will also discuss how they’ve applied lessons learned from web measurement experience to improve the mobile experience.

There’s still time to register for the 2013 ForeSee Summit – click here to learn more.

The 2013 ForeSee Summit

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Contact Center: The Last Resort

Posted on May 9, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee Blogger Joel Van Haaften

By Joel Van Haaften

Last week we released our annual ForeSee Contact Center Benchmark where we take an aggregate look at customer satisfaction with our clients’ contact centers. Today, I want to take a singular look at how predictive customer experience analytics can help a company make informative, strategic business decisions regarding their contact center.

A theme that often emerges from our client data is that the contact center is often not the first stop in a customer’s journey to try to accomplish their task – rather, it’s often a last resort.  It is a last chance to solve a problem, a last chance to close the sale, or a last chance to influence a customer’s future loyalty to your company.  Therefore, it is critically important to the long-term value of your customer relationships that contact center is effective at addressing customers’ needs.

contact center customer satisfactionLately we’ve seen our clients increasingly use customer experience analytics to better understand the cross-channel dynamics of the customer experience.  These companies are not viewing the website, contact center, mobile site and store locations as separate touch points to be managed individually.  Instead, they understand that these “separate” channels must all be working to meet customers’ wants and needs in a seamless, coordinated fashion.  A critical tool in making that ideal a reality is to have a consistent way to measure, understand and prioritize improvements to the customer experience across channels.

Here’s one recent example.  While looking into some lower customer satisfaction scores for one client’s contact center measure, we noticed the score being pulled down by a prominent segment of callers who were contacting the center about a specific promotion.  This led to two critical insights:

  • First, a large proportion of customers in this segment did not get their question answered to their satisfaction during their call.  The contact center reps needed to be better equipped with answers to questions about this promotion, so this client immediately set out to address this shortcoming.
  • Second, the majority of these callers had first visited the website, which happened to be the most cost-effective method for the client, before picking up the phone.    Only when their needs were unmet by the website did they make the call to customer service – a much more expensive interaction for the company.  The client put action plans into place to update the website so the promotion information was more prominent and useful for customers.

Improving these customers’ experience meant making changes to both the website and the contact center.  The channels were not viewed separately, but rather as coordinated effort to effectively engage their customers.

This insight and the specific action plans that followed would not have been identified through web site satisfaction data alone (this segment made up only a very small percentage of traffic to this highly trafficked website).  However, by having a satisfaction measurement in place for the contact center, this client not only acquired actionable insights about their contact center operation, but also about some changes needed to their website.

Customers don’t think of your company as a series of channels – they think of it as one company that should seamlessly support their needs.  Is that how you are managing your business?

Read the ForeSee Contact Center Benchmark here.

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WoMI: The Next Generation of NPS

Posted on May 7, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee President & CEO Larry Freed

By Larry Freed

Download the free white paper, Net Promoter Score: The One Number You Need to Evolve

There’s something to be said about the digital world we live in today and how it’s hurling change at us at the velocity of a Justin Verlander fast ball.

Through the last decade we’ve seen incredible advances in technology that has led to the fierce evolution of the consumer and their constantly changing expectations, which has resulted in the need for more and better ways for companies to measure their experiences.

For many organizations the Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been the extent to which they measure customer experience. The problem is, as the world around NPS has changed, NPS remains the same. It is stranded in a land that time has forgotten, outliving its usefulness as a metric.

Don’t get me wrong, NPS has served a valuable purpose through the years. When it first came onto the scene in 2003, it helped to elevate customer satisfaction from being a “nice to have” to a strategic “need to have” requirement during a time when consumers were just gaining unprecedented power when making purchasing decisions.  And it’s easy to implement and understand.

The main fault I have with NPS, however, is that it (on its own) never was and never will be a true measure of the customer experience. It is a measurement of an outcome of experience: word-of-mouth. Today, organizations need more precision than NPS can offer in order to make the most informed decisions.  It is time for NPS to evolve.

How NPS Works

Developed by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company, NPS was designed to be a simple way to categorize customers based on a single question: “On a zero-to-10 scale, how likely is it that you would recommend us (or this product/service/brand) to a friend or colleague?”

Reichheld then categorized respondents based on three classifications: Promoters (people who responded with a nine or 10), Passives (people who responded with a seven or eight), and Detractors (people who responded with a six or below. NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. For example, if 60% of your customers are promoters, 30% are passives and 10% are detractors, your NPS is 50.

Sounds simple enough, right? If only we could stop there.

The Problem with NPS

The first real problem is that NPS takes an 11-point system and turns it into a three-point one. This diminished scale seriously undermines the accuracy and reliability companies need in a measurement.

Furthermore, NPS fails to measure how likely or unlikely someone is to recommend or detract. In a ForeSee survey of more than 20,000 consumers that NPS labeled “detractors,” only 1% said they would be likely to communicate a bad experience – meaning the other 99% were passive detractors (in fact, a large percentage of those turned out not to be detractors at all!). ForeSee’s analysis also found that 60% of those so-called “detractors” were actually loyal customers, indicating they had paid for the company’s service for two years and would continue to do so in the future.

In the real world, detractors do not always detract, and promoters do not always promote. NPS misses this nuance, and ForeSee found that NPS overstates detractors by an average of 260-270%.

Imagine, for a moment, the key performance indicators (KPIs) on your executive dashboard being off by a factor of 270%. And now, imagine the poor decisions you would make based on this faulty information. If you believe 30% of your customer base is made up of active detractors, but really it’s only 10%, then you may very well invest significant money and manpower into trying to “convert” detractors who simply do not exist.

Organizations need and deserve more depth and precision than NPS can provide.

Beyond NPS

To help companies move beyond NPS, ForeSee developed a new word-of-mouth metric: The Word of Mouth IndexSM (WoMISM).

ForeSee tested and refined WoMI over a two-year period with more than 300 companies and through nearly 1.5 million customer surveys. The result is a much deeper and more precise categorization of active promoters and detractors than is possible with NPS, while still preserving NPS-caliber ease-of-use and understanding. WoMI does this by augmenting the NPS “How likely are you to recommend?” approach with a second question: “How likely are you to discourage others from doing business with this company?”  WoMI then subtracts the percentage of 9 and 10 ratings from “likelihood to discourage” from the percentage of 9 and 10 ratings from “likelihood to recommend” to arrive at the balanced and accurate WoMI score.

WoMI - The Word of Mouth Index

Click to Enlarge

WoMI offers more sophisticated analytics to understand what consumers want and where to allocate resources, using a simple, precise metric. Like NPS, it is a single number that is easily shared with business leaders, enabling executives to manage the customer experience across the organization as part of a comprehensive measurement system. And like NPS, organizations need to understand that WoMI is just one metric within the customer satisfaction ecosystem.

Today’s customer experience champions are organizations that use a comprehensive system of metrics measuring the customer experience across all channels (Web, store, contact center, mobile, or social media). This type of system pinpoints the exact elements that most directly impact overall satisfaction, enabling organizations to identify priorities for improvements and optimize their investments in customer experience management.

It’s time for NPS to evolve. It’s time for WoMI.

Download the full and free white paper, Net Promoter Score: The One Number You Need to Evolve.

WoMI The Word of Mouth Index Download the White Paper

ForeSee is not affiliated with Net Promoter or Satmetrix Systems (and/or Fred Reichheld or Bain & Company) or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. Furthermore ForeSee is not associated with, licensed by, endorsed by, or funded by Satmetrix Systems (and/or Fred Reichheld or Bain & Company), and no effort has been made to falsely suggest a connection with any of those entities or the products/services offered by Satmetrix Systems (and/or Fred Reichheld or Bain & Company).

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Making Contact: Contact Centers Customers are Highly Satisfied

Posted on May 2, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee Blogger Eric Head

By Eric Head

While a company’s contact center isn’t typically the first choice for engaging with a company, it still remains an important part in fostering the customer relationship.

Today, ForeSee released its annual Contact Center Benchmark that affords company leaders an opportunity to determine how their centers stack up against industry averages. This year, the average customer satisfaction score for contact centers is 80 on ForeSee’s 100-point scale, ranging from 61 to 94, meaning – in general – contact centers customers are highly satisfied.

ForeSee Contact Center BenchmarkFor benchmark purposes we compared likely future behaviors of highly-satisfied contact center customers (those with satisfaction of 80 or higher) with the future behaviors of less-satisfied contact center customer to illustrate the impact that customer satisfaction with contact center experiences can have on a company’s future success. Based on this comparison, highly-satisfied customers report being:

  • 182% more likely than less-satisfied customers to make contact again, which can mean higher frequency of interaction, improved engagement and increased share of mind and wallet.
  • 149% more likely than less-satisfied customers to purchase next time, which can lead to increased sales.
  • 180% more likely than less-satisfied customers to recommend the company to a friend, family member or colleague, which can translate to more business.

You can read the full benchmark here.

Our researchers dug a little deeper into the data to compare future behavior scores for those customers that completed their task or resolved their problem in one call versus those who needed to make multiple calls. Those customers making just one call report being:

  • 40% more likely than those who made multiple calls to make contact again.
  • 45% more likely than those who made multiple calls to purchase next time.
  • 39% more likely than those who made multiple calls to recommend the company.

We also compared the future behaviors of two other segments of contact center customers: those who thought the length of their call was just right, and those who thought it was too long. Those who thought the call was too long report being:

  • 46% less likely than those who thought the call length was just right to make contact again.
  • 40% less likely than those who thought the call length was just right to purchase next time.
  • 46% less likely than those who thought the call length was just right to recommend the company.

Continuously measuring the customer experience with the contact center is critical to an organization’s success. And doing so with an accurate and reliable system of metrics, business leaders will gain invaluable intelligence that will allow them to identify areas of improvement and make the right choices that will help move the company forward.

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Siteshowing: Defying the Norm…or Defining the New Norm

Posted on April 30, 2013 Leave a comment
ForeSee Blogger Eric Head

By Eric Head

Every once in a while I come a across a situation where I can’t decide if it’s completely brilliant or utterly insane. Such is the case with Bonobos.

With a pure play online clothing retailer such as Bonobos, the retailer runs the risk of having site visitors wishing they could try on the clothes before punching in their credit card number. Unable to do so, they find what they want on the retailer’s site, log off, and head to the closest department store (Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Target, etc.) where they can discover similar styles (by other brands) to what they found online at the site, try them on, and purchase right there at the register.

Siteshowing Bonobos Guide Shop

A Bonobos Guideshop

To address this phenomenon, Bonobos recently opened storefronts, dubbed “Guideshops,” in select cities that, as reported in a recent USA TODAY article, don’t actually sell anything.

The Guideshops are essentially a place for the company to showcase what it offers on their website by providing a place for men to see firsthand, feel, and try on the clothing before they make a purchase – a concept I call “siteshowing,” which is basically showrooming done in the most strategic of ways. And after customers try on clothes in the store, they still need to place their order on the company’s website, which they can either do right from the storefront or from home if they prefer.

While the concept of the Guideshop allows Bonobos to skirt some of the traditional operational costs such as large, on-site inventories and staff, opening the more expensive touch point goes against conventional wisdom without question. But it is done so with the best intentions and their customers’ expectations in mind.

“We founded Bonobos to really create a better shopping experience for men,” says Erin Ersenkal, chief of Bonobos Guideshop operations, in the article.  “Initially, we thought we could do it purely on a website, but we realized from talking with our customers that actually some of them like to try on the clothes.”

So, kudos to company execs for talking with their customers, actually listening to them, and attempting to fulfill their needs and wants – and for making the decision based on more than just a gut feeling.

There are countless ways to “talk” to customers, but the real question is: did they talk to the right customers the right way to get the right input they needed to make the right decision? Only time will tell by way of success or failure in this case.

It helps, too, that the Guideshops offer a very unique experience in and of itself. But will that offset the expense of operating physical stores?

There’s a thin line between brilliant and insane and Bonobos might be straddling it. Whether they are defying the norm or defining the new norm for online clothing pure play retailers is yet to be determined…as are the consequences (if any). This interesting and out-of the-box concept is definitely something the retail industry as a whole (although I can’t imagine Target or Best Buy adopting such a model), brick and mortar retailers, online pure players, and Bonobos itself need to monitor very closely to see on which side of the proverbial line it falls. What do you think? Is Bonobos onto something or off their rocker?

For more on showrooming read my last two posts:

Showrooming: Not as Bad as You Think

Browsing Fees…Really?

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Posted by Eric Head | Tagged , , | Leave a comment