A while ago I heard someone make this statement, “you need to let go in order to grab on.” At first it didn’t make much sense, but as I considered it I realized the profundity.

The statement means that sometimes risk is required, sometimes we have something so-so but to move to something better we need to let go of it first.

As one is in pursuit of 100% customer satisfaction, there might be areas that need to be scraped. Of vision that needs to be changed of focused. Often change of a radical nature is required (like restructuring organizational hierarchy or requiring everyone in a company to spend at least some time to phone support). It might seem major, but maybe just what your organization needs to make it to the next level is to let go of some of your current practices.

Obviously one cannot rashly abandon successful ventures constantly in pursuit of becoming the next YouTube or Facebook, but this is a lesson that must be learned and embraced to be a successful entrepreneur or capitalist.

Here’s a simple example that I’ve heard: monkey bars. You remember climbing them when you were a kid—they’re quite difficult.

First you set your hands firmly around the first rung, and then step off and hang by just your arms. And then in order to grab on to the next rung—the next level of success—you need to let go of the current bar with one of your hands.

Applied to business: customer experience is super important, so when the feedback from your customers demands something more, don’t be rash but be willing to take some risk to achieve a new level of customer satisfaction…Sometimes you need to let go in order to grab on.

Assuming that customer experience is super important, what’s next? Well, a great tool to get in touch with a vast number of customers is the survey. But even a survey is an opportunity for a good or bad customer experience, so only conduct surveys very thoughtfully.

Jodi at MarketTools explains some best practices for creating surveys. They have some wisdom—check it out.

• Focus, Focus, Focus
• Clarify survey objectives: What problems are you trying to solve by asking customers about their experience?
• Anticipate Action: Think through how you might incorporate the survey results into decisions and actions.

Surveys should be carefully designed, both the flow of questions and the aesthetics. What a nightmare it would be if your very attempt to improve customer experience created miserable customer experiences!

It seems inevitable that with all the social networking options available, a disgruntled customer may take it upon themselves to be a one-person marketing campaign aimed at some negative situation they had and attach your company’s name all over the place.

This is just the kind of situation to avoid.

Customer complaints were once funneled deep into the bowels of a corporation, with the promise of making it a bullet item on some presenatation that would some day justify a requisition for some big change that takes year to put into place.

Now, customer complaints trigger a different mechanism. With proper management of customer feedback in place, a specific item mentioned by a customer can be looked into, rectified, and the first contact that takes place to the customer is the reassurance that the problem they faced has been resolved.

Further followup with this same customer is recommended, only to be sure a potential detractor becomes a promoter.

All of the customer followup and resolutions become board level topics. The process of doing the followup is now as important as the implementation of the fix-it measure, itself.

So says CableCom Productions of London, a telephone and Internet service provider.

1. Invest in maintaining good staffing levels.

A reality in health care is the need to cut costs, and sometimes this means deep cuts in staffing. However, investing in appropriate staffing levels insures the customer will enjoy a comfortable level of experience, and those delivering care will feel that they have enough time to spend with each patient.

2. Make prices on elective procedures easy to find.

Elective procedures are a good source of revenue for hospitals. Many times, the patient has to pay for these procedures out of their own pocket. This means that the patients will become picky customers and try to shop around for the best price. Many patients have given feedback that they have trouble getting a bottom-line price for a procedure from the hospital. This makes it more unlikely for a patient to have their procedure done at a facility that doesn’t have pricing readily available.

3. Have alternatives to emergency room visits.

Emergency room visits are more expensive than an office visit, and are not the preferred method for doctors and nurses to see their patients. And the experience is not convenient when the customer has to sit for hours in the emergency room waiting area. Hospitals can offer outpatient clinics in communities to give the customers an alternative to the necessity of the emergency room visit.

4. Avoid administrative red tape.

A hospital should look at the process a customer has to go through to access the health care throughout its enterprise. How easy is it for the customer to get access. Is your admitting experience quick and easy? Are doctors and nurses easy to find? By eliminating little things that cause frustration to the staff and the patient should be streamlined so that the focus is back on the patient and his experience at the facility.

Companies have gone beyond providing the expected list of “core” benefits. These include direct pay, health benefits, retirement, sick time, vacation pay, etc. In order to attract and keep excellent employees, companies are providing a host of “convenience” benefits.

Some innovative convenience benefits include:

* day-care facilities
* recreational facilities
* dry cleaning
* car washing and detailing
* food services
* financial services
* health care facilities

By attracting and keeping high-performing employees, companies can put into place high expectations for customer service and customer satisfaction results. The feedback that the company management hears from its employees bears out the fact that it is worth it for an enterprise to make the investment. There’s no surprise that companies that made the top 10 of the Fortune 100 list of best places to work are hiring!

And the top 10 winners are:

1. SAS
2. Edward Jones
3. Wegmans
4. Google
5. Nugget Market
6. DreamWorks Animation
7. NetApp
8. Boston Consulting Group
9. Qualcomm
10. Camden Property Trust

Some of the university offerings on customer experience include the following:

Duke University – Designing Customer Experience

Duke University offers an undergraduate elective, Designing Customer Experiences, which focuses on how to distinguish your business from your competition by paying attention to the customer experience. Case studies in the course include Apple and Starbucks. A team approach toward creating new strategies is investigated.

Cornell University – Services Marketing and Customer Experience Management

Cornell University includes a graduate level course in its hotel management curriculum, Services Marketing and Customer Experience Management. Topics include services consumer behavior and decision process. There is an analysis of “services of theater”, service “blueprinting”, and the “servicescape”. There is also integrated communications strategies for services. The course includes research in case studies, service recover, and invited speakers.

University of Michigan – The New Age of Innovation

The Business School at the University of Michigan has a course entitiled, The New Age of Innovation. The course introduces students to the emerging nature of competition and the critical capabilities that firms need to build to thrive in this environment. This course is offered to finance students. The study includes various business functions and new approaches to customer retention.

8 Reasons for an enterprise to collect customer feedback:

1. Demonstrate its commitment to listening to customers
2. Improve customer satisfaction and retention
3. Improve quality of services provided
4. Increase repeat business
5. Learn what the customer thinks of competitors
6. Help evaluate the sales organization
7. Obtain information on new product developments
8. Provide a way for customers to vent negative experiences

6 Common methods of obtaining customer feedback:

1. Customer satisfaction surveys
2. Email / website forms
3. Polling front line employees
4. Extracting from a customer database
5. Focus groups
6. Web-watching

7 Ways for an Enterprise feedback to Implement Action Items

1. Get executive buy-in
2. Establish goals
3. Invest in a centralized feedback management system
4. Maintain real-time data collection
5. Train employees on taking action
6. Provide communication throughout enterprise
7. Tie business outcomes to successful customer feedback programs

After registering at a hotel, a well-trained front desk host notices the guest’s iPhone.  Alertly, the host invites the guest to grab the hotel’s customer satisfaction survey app and to fill it out at his convenience.  The guest immediately breaks away from his activity on the iphone, grabs the app, and looks over the survey form.

Not bad, so far.

The guest clicks and scrolls, without too much knowledge of the experience he his having, other than the alert front desk host.  The survey is complete.  The feedback system is in place to properly track the incoming survey information.  Perhaps there is a real-time email delivery message sent back to the sending hotel.  Perhaps there has been training and the on-duty hotel manager is not only able to acknowledge the information, but has been empowered and instructed on what to do if action items need to be taken.

Really good.

Back-up and fast-forward feedback management one step.  Why is the customer filling out a customer satisfaction survey form?  It’s true that it is the correct mechanism to trigger all of the above events.  But is it the best mechanism?

What if the host informs the guest that the hotel offers a service called the “alert us at any time you are having difficulties with your stay” app?  “Please take a moment and jot down this 800 number or download this app…”  What the customer now has is a feedback mechanism that is not a customer satisfaction survey, but a properly laid means to communicate, “I just called for room service, and the phone wasn’t answered”.

If the proper mechanisms are in place, and the training has been properly conducted, within a few minutes the guest’s room phone will ring, and he will hear, “room service, sorry for not picking up when you called”.

It’s the enterprise equivalent of the sign on the back of the truck that says, “1-800 how’s my driving?”

In his article, Turn Customer Input into Innovation, in the Harvard Business Review (2002), A.W. Ulwick looks at a case study of how to structure the gathering of customer information and use it in innovating a product.  The main idea of the article is to inquire about customer-desired outcomes, rather than customer-desired products, when it comes to putting their ideas onto the factory floor.

The steps that one company took to go from customer-desired outcome to an actual factory-produced outcome are outlined as follows:

Step 1 – Divide the function of product up into a step-by-step procedure.  Invite in a wide range of customers who are familiar with each step of the procedure and interview them.

Step 2 – A moderator asks the customers to describe their desired outcome, not the design of the product, for each step of the procedure.   Lots of adjectives are thrown out, like “I would like it smaller”, “thinner”, “not so sticky”, etc.

Step 3 – The customer descriptions are sorted and duplicates are removed.  The company now has a complete list of descriptions that the customer values or deems important.

Step 4 – The customer are asked to prioritize each item by placing a qualifying value on how satisfied they are with each modification.  These values are fed into a mathematical formula to determine the relative attractiveness of each possibility.  These were written in function form, not as a product description.

Step 5 – The company’s design team converts the functional descriptions into product modification, or in some cases, totally new products.

The results are incredible, because of the customer feedback gathered at the input level.  The key to this success is to have the customer feedback focus on desired outcome, not desired product.

Successful companies are doing more than gathering data from customer satisfaction surveys.  They are making an investment in shaping a customer’s expectation and experience with their product or service by putting into place large-scale systems that can gather, analyze, and act upon feedback from customer interaction in an increasingly faster manner.

Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) refers to the organizational-wide managing of feedback from customers on the experiences they had with the company’s products or services.  Customer Experience Management (CEM), refers to the ability an organization has to create and fulfill the customers expectations of a company’s products or services.

EFM is a tool for CEM.

Goals of Enterprise Feedback Management

1. optimize the ability of an organization to collect data and take action in a timely manner
2. provide better customer experiences at every interaction with the company
3. centralize the management of customer feedback
4. focus on creating actions that drive change – not on collecting tons of data

Key Elements of Enterprise Feedback Management

1. feedback collection at every level of customer interaction
2. targeted, sample surveys that integrate with “organic” collection of customer information at point-of-contact
3. quick response time from collection of data to action on data (ultimately done in real-time)
4. enterprise-wide deployment of action items

Getting the customer to have a positive response to a company’s product or service is as important as the product or service itself.  In order to make a measurable increase in a customer’s positive response, a managed feedback mechanism must be in place, as well as a mechanism to carry out the recommended actions that the system produces. This is what is referred to as Enterprise Feedback Management.