Omega Management Group

Like a pilot needs a checklist and a navigation system, companies need a template to help guide them on their journey to delivering exceptional customer experiences through a Customer Experience Management (CEM) strategy. This is where the CEM concept begins to become embedded in your organization's DNA.

Road Map to CEMDNA

Start your journey by taking a candid, in-depth look at the major areas of your business and begin to find places where improvements are needed. Follow our Road Map:

Review Current Business Performance - This includes all operations that contribute to revenue, costs and profits. Which ones are most directly tied to CEM? Consider such dynamics as growth, retention, win-back and return on investment (ROI).

Review Current CEM Maturity Level - As illustrated in the Four Stages of CEM Maturity, you will determine whether your organization is reactive, tentative, engaged or customer-centric. Knowing your starting point is vital to setting CEM objectives and measuring progress and results.

Management Interviews - Interviewing your key management in all customer-facing areas is critical to achieving buy-in on the process and to build consensus on key objectives for each of the 12 building blocks.

Vision + Mission Statements - This is where you make CEM part of your organizational "DNA." This includes adding customer-centric language to the vision and mission statements to maintain consistent focus on the goals of CEM.

Determine Long Range Goals w/Timetable - Based on your current CEM Maturity level and management interviews, you can make realistic, achievable goals for CEM implementation, along with a detailed timetable.

Branding the CEM Program - Many companies elect to "brand" their CEM initiative—"Customers First" for example—to communicate their program in a memorable way. Branding is the basis of establishing a communications campaign that will ensure high visibility and long-term commitment to a successful outcome. This helps to rally support among stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders, and channel partners.

Account Management

While similarities naturally exist, no two customers are the same. Each one has its own set of needs and business models that shape their expectations of doing business with your company. As a result, you cannot consistently exceed the expectations of each customer if you treat them all the same.

As part of our CEMDNA Playbook Strategy, we have identified four approaches to help you understand the needs of each major type of customer so you can create a CEM strategy designed to succeed with each type. This process is meant to leave nothing to chance in your interactions, regardless of the specific customer touchpoints involved.

Segment Customer Base - Do you know who your key accounts are? As a group, they make up just 20% of your customer base but deliver 80% of your revenue. These are key accounts that you cannot afford to lose, so you want to be sure their expectations are consistently exceeded. You also probably have some strategic accounts with tangible "big name" value or are in new markets you want to develop, even though they may not yet be generating a significant amount of business. You can't afford to lose them either, so commit to a high level of customer service and support. Then there are marginal or "dead" accounts whose business contributions are limited, but still provide a revenue stream and occasionally make a new purchase. These are not "strategic" accounts, so you don't want to invest too much in service and support. In fact, if these accounts are unprofitable, you may be better off without them.

Key Accounts & Segmenting Contacts - Since these are your company's "bread and butter," this step drills down into key accounts identified in the segmentation step above. Here, further distinctions are made according to decision maker, recommender and influencer at each key account. This is vital since the expectations of each type of individual will vary, and this dictates the level of service/support that should be expended to consistently exceed those expectations.

Company 360 Alignment - This step examines your perception of the customer experience with the customer's own experience or reality. Through a series of interviews with customer-facing staff, we capture your perception, including data based on any actual surveys already conducted. Capturing "reality" requires an independent survey conducted by a third party, such as Omega, to obtain actual "unvarnished" views of how customer centric the culture is and how well you're consistently exceeding customer expectations. Comparing these views is always revealing, and helps you understand where you fall on the CEM Maturity Scale.

Action Alerts - In the course of normal interaction with customers, and specifically in survey work associated with a Company 360 Alignment, situations will arise that create an unexpected revenue opportunity and/or an unforeseen problem situation. Responding as quickly and as efficiently as possible is key to exceeding customer expectations in ad hoc situations like this. We provide a formal, company-wide Action Alert℠ event procedure to make sure the situation is captured by date & time, point of contact, name, title and company of the customer. The Action Alert includes a full description of the situation, good or bad, and a pre-determined escalation procedure is executed to act on the alert as quickly as possible.

Partnering for Profit - This is a methodology to ensure your key accounts view you as a value-added partner. The objective is to help you establish an ongoing, proactive relationship with your most valuable customers by consistently communicating the value of the services/products you provide. This approach typically results in retaining and growing key accounts and generating new business referrals. The basis for this methodology is to maximize the value of your product/service within your key accounts that results in increased productivity and profits for your customers.

Enterprise Feedback Management

To fully understand your customers needs, you must gather pertinent data from them and then sort through it to find the keys to building customer loyalty. Good or bad, this feedback and how you manage it is a critical component to a successful CEM strategy. Customer and employee surveys form the basic building blocks of your CEM strategy. Done poorly, surveys merely provide lots of data. Done properly, this data is used to produce valuable and actionable information that helps companies develop a successful CEM program.

Deciphering the data requires a comprehensive strategy like our CEMDNA Playbook Strategy which helps companies through the process of data collection, analysis and reporting.

Data Collection

Omega has many years of experience measuring customer satisfaction, and we are experts in designing, implementing and analyzing the best program to fit your needs.

Surveys today are primarily conducted via the web or by telephone, although each method has its pros and cons. Web surveys are very inexpensive to conduct and allow customers to complete the questionnaire at their convenience. On the other hand, business people are bombarded by emails and may overlook the survey invitation. Respondents generally will not endure lengthy web surveys, and tend to keep answers short, which can lead to vague responses. Telephone surveys carry a cost in terms of phone charges and cost of staff or outsourced personnel to place the calls. And many calls result in voice mail, so multiple call attempts are generally required to reach the desired contact. However, the quality of information collected is better than with web surveys because the person asking the questions can probe for more complete responses and clarify answers that may be confusing.

There are two types of data collected through surveys: structured and unstructured. Structured data is numeric data, yes/no and multiple choice questions/answers. Unstructured data is open-ended and verbal comments (verbatims) collected during the survey process. Structured data is easy to collect and record via spreadsheets and database programs. Unstructured data needs to be interpreted manually, although new technology with text mining tools can automate the collection and reporting of verbatims. Open-ended questions (verbatims) are handled more successfully via phone surveys than over the web. For this reason, plus the importance of direct, personal contact, phone surveys are recommended for key accounts.

Whether phone or web surveys are used, it is important to determine if respondents are decision makers, recommenders or influencers, as this can influence your entire CEM strategy.

Learn more about our Customer and Employee Surveys.

Survey Methodology & Reporting

Leveraging our vast experience designing and implementing a wide array of customer and employee surveys, Omega has fine-tuned a methodology that has proven to be highly effective in providing our clients with the data they need to impact their CEM strategy:

Rating System: Customer Satisfaction - Survey results are presented in two standard measuring methodologies: percent satisfied and weighted average. The purpose of the two rating methodologies is to provide the percent satisfied, which is the traditional method of measuring satisfaction, and the weighted average, which is used to manage the service organization's resources to exceed customer expectations.

The Scale - When analyzing survey responses, we use a five (5) point scale to measure satisfaction and importance. Survey respondents are asked to rate their satisfaction with products and services by using a scale of one (1) to five (5), where 1 = Did Not Meet Expectations and 5 = Exceeded Expectations. When rating importance, we use a scale of one (1) to five (5), where 1 = Not Important At All, and 5 = Critical Importance. As our preferred methodology, we have learned that this system provides the easiest and most accurate measure for customer loyalty.

Satisfaction
1. Did Not Meet Expectations
2. Below Expectations
3. Met Expectations
4. Above Expectations
5. Exceeded Expectations

Importance
1. Not Important At All
2. Very Little Importance
3. Somewhat Important
4. Very Important
5. Critical Importance
Percent Satisfied (Percent) - For each question, the percent satisfied is calculated by summing the respondents for each of the scales that answer five (5), four (4) and three (3) then dividing the answer by the total number of respondents for that question. The percent satisfied is generally used for marketing purposes when speaking to the "outside world," including your customers and prospects.

ScoreBoard Index (SBI) - For each question, the weighted average is determined by multiplying the number of respondents in each of the scales by the value of each scale (5-1), summing the results and dividing by the total number of respondents for that question. This number is a more accurate measurement of customer loyalty and should be used to run your business and drive business processes.

The Difference (Percent vs. SBI) - As stated above, percent satisfied should be used to speak to the "outside world," your customers and prospects, and the weighted average should be used by your organization internally to run your business. In a hypothetical example, you could achieve 100% satisfaction by all respondents rating you as a three (3), which will not give you a clear understanding of their loyalty. Although 100% looks like an outstanding score, your weighted average is only a 3.0 out of a 5.0. In order to achieve customer loyalty and build customers for life, you must consistently score a weighted average of 4.0 or above. Omega calls this the "Loyalty Zone," since scores in this range show a company has locked in profitable, long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) - This is an overall score for an entire category (such as telephone support). It is a roll-up, or average of the scores, for all questions per category. Companies often use the CSI as the basis for employee recognition and rewards under their CEM strategy program. For example, your contact center staff may need to achieve a CSI metric of 95% in order to receive a group reward or bonus.

Delta Analysis - We ask your customers what customer service issues are most important to them, and then ask how they rate the quality of service in each area. This process, also known as gap analysis, is critical to your operations because it identifies areas where you may be over investing as well as areas of potential competitive vulnerability. For example, let's say customers rank documentation as not very important, but they rate the quality of your documentation as outstanding—in fact, exceeding their expectations. If that trend is consistent among customer responses, we would say that you're over investing in this area, and recommend you reallocate your resources.

Trend Analysis - This analysis illustrates a side-by-side comparison of the current year's customer satisfaction vs. prior year scores. The analysis highlights individual touchpoint attributes, as well as the overall touchpoint category. The data compared includes the same time frames measured prior year vs. current year to precisely illustrate trend results.

ScoreBoard℠ Reports

Omega's reports—known as ScoreBoard Reports—are generated through an online Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) reporting tool in which all survey data (web and telephone) is entered—providing fast, real-time access to our client's customer satisfaction data.

Through EFM Reporting, our clients receive the exact information they need to fully understand their customers and take action where needed. The following is a list of some of the top reporting features that provide this crucial data:

Frequency Table

Frequency Chart

Trend Table

Trend Chart

Summary Table

Summary of Means

Cross-Tab

Response List

Statistics

Top Box

Top Box Cross-Tab