Getting Your Customer Experience Strategy Right

Does your customer experience strategy for selling capital goods address the most significant NPS® components? Pricing? Delivery? Knowledge and professionalism? Or Ease of doing business? Our research now reveals how all these factors come together to create a great, mediocre, or bad experience. By the way, pricing and even delivery are not the things that most impact NPS®.

How Do We Know?
We surveyed 2,400 customers for an equipment OEM with an extensive dealer network in North America.  The equipment is generally complicated and requires significant consultative selling.

The salesperson’s role is critical, as are those supporting the sales process (finance, service, product support, etc.).  We were able to quantify just what does matter in the product delivery process.

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Customer Experience is More than the Score

Our clients often ask about how to most effectively use the outcome score (e.g., NPS®, loyalty index, overall satisfaction, etc.) to improve the customer experience.

Over the years, a number have opted to include an objective for Net Promoter Score® performance, as an example.

The outcome measure becomes a part of the manager’s evaluation and compensation.

Unfortunately, using only the score as an incentive has several unintended consequences: Inevitably, arguments arise over whether to include or exclude individual surveys.

Sometimes, a small number of negative surveys may have a disproportionate impact on the outcome measured.

Unproductive discussions arise about fixing the score rather than fixing the store.

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Update: March 18, 2020

On behalf of The Daniel Group, we hope this note finds you, your families, and your businesses safe and well.

As we enter uncharted territory for the North American and global economies due to the impacts of the novel coronavirus, we are providing the following Business Continuity Update.

The Daniel Group plans to support your critical customer experience feed back programs with no interruptions or changes to the service quality levels you’ve come to expect from us. We are well positioned to operate through this time due to the following key elements:

Web-Based Portal
The technology supporting our core survey system, from importing/uploading your data files, to conducting surveys, to sending alerts and displaying results in our portal are all driven by a system housed in a secure Tier 1 data center in Charlotte, NC, with cloud-based backup and disaster recovery systems.

Virtual Call Center
As many of you know, our team of sixty Research Analysts already work from home using our web-based survey management application and phone system.

So, we have inherent resilience to physical/site shutdowns compared to a traditional call center.

Cloud-Based Office
Over the past several years, we have transitioned our key business processes into the cloud, e.g. Microsoft Office 365 for email and files, a voice-over IP phone and web-based accounting, HR, and screenshare/webcam meetings.

As such, our management team will begin working from home from the close of business today and resume office activities when it makes sense to do so from a health security perspective.

In our experience, during challenging times it’s more important than ever to deliver excellent customer experiences.

We plan to continue to provide you with the feedback you need regarding the experiences your teams deliver for your customers, to help you keep your business healthy and competitive throughout this time and beyond.

Please contact me directly with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Doug Fowler
President & COO
704.816.7703

Update: March 23, 2020

As we affirmed in our Business Continuity Update last week, The Daniel Group remains open to support your critical customer experience feedback programs. With that said, many of you may or already are operating in a very different business environment than even a week ago.

To reflect this new reality, we have a few important points we’d like to share:

1. OBSERVATION: Many Customers Have More Time
Over the past week and into this morning, an increasing number of your customers are on a pause from usual business levels. They now have additional time and inclination to provide feedback. So, this is proving to be a productive time. However, to be sensitive and supportive to those customers who are experiencing any issues or disruption, we suggest adding an optional temporary message,as covered in point #2, below.

2. ACTION: Survey Introduction – Option to Add a Temporary Message
To show support and sensitivity during this time, we can open our calls to your customers with:

• A message on your behalf,with verbiage of your choosing. For example, “[Client] remains open to support you, with full details available and updated on[Website]”, and/or
• A question prior to gathering feedback on the recent transaction, to ask if your customer has any outstanding needs for support or information. We can suggest verbiage, if this is of interest to you.

3. ACTION: TDG Can Do More Than Surveys–Can We Help?
If you need assistance contacting or coordinating with your customers or internal teams for any reason, processing or analyzing data, or any other non-survey related needs at this time, please contact me directly to discuss feasibility and details. We have a virtual team of 60 well-trained analysts who know your business. They are excellent at customer contact by phone or email. We also have a strong data analytics practice. So, we can help with more than surveys.

On behalf of The Daniel Group, we wish you, your families, and businesses a safe and healthy path through the upcoming week and beyond. Please contact me directly with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Doug Fowler
President & COO
704.816.7703