Closing the Loop Archives

How Did We Do?

Posted on May 4, 2021 at 9:39 am.

55 | 55 | 5.9 | 81

Every year we follow our own advice. We ask ourselves and our clients: “How did we do?” Just like our own clients, we never quite know what to expect until all the numbers are in and until we have read all the verbatim comments.

It’s always nerve-wracking waiting for those results to come through. We might think we know what clients are going to say but we’re never 100% certain. It was especially true this year given that the last 12-15 months have been unprecedented. We have all moved to new ways of working. Business is conducted differently these days.

This year, we also spread the net for our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment very wide. We didn’t just limit it to the key decision makers and teams that we work with on a day-to-day basis. This year we canvassed the views of people who use the outputs of our CRQ and ERQ (Employee Relationship Quality) services. For example: account directors and service managers who use our Account Reports and results to build better relationships with customers; divisional heads who use the outputs to inform strategic direction and investments.

We wanted to understand what they think of the tools and consultation we provide and if it really helps them in their roles.

How did we do?

So how did we do?

And what do those numbers 55, 55, 5.9 and 81 at the start of the blog mean?

55
The first number is our response rate. Fifty five percent of the people we asked gave us 10 minutes of their time and completed the assessment. That’s not bad but could have been higher. Some of our clients achieve response rates of 70% or greater.

55
The second number is our Net Promoter Score. It’s the second time we have scored above 50. The actual breakdown is 58% Promoters; 39% Passives; 3% Detractors and the NPS calculation (percentage or Promoters less the percentage of Detractors) gives us our NPS score of +55.

5.9
The third is our CRQ score and that’s the second highest we have ever achieved. It’s on a 1 to 7 scale. An typical CRQ score for a European B2B company is a little above 5. A score of 6 is almost impossible to achieve (at least in Europe!)

81
The final number is the percentage of Ambassadors we have. In many ways, this is the most important number of all. It means that four out of every five clients believes that Deep-Insight offers something truly unique. You trust us and you think our service is second-to-none. This bodes well for long-term relationships with each of these clients.

Our New Approach – Workshops and Support

These are some of the best scores we have ever achieved and when we read through the verbatims, it’s clear to me that one of the key reasons for the high scores is the fact that over the past 12 months we have changed the way we work with clients.

In the past, you told us you needed more consulting support to get the maximum benefit from the customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) programmes we run for you. In particular, you asked us to provide more consultancy support in turning insights into action. We now do that by:

Running workshops to ‘onboard’ the leadership teams to the CX or EX programmes
Holding CX workshops with customer-facing teams before we ever think about contacting your clients and staff
Spending more time with account directors/ service managers to get commitments from customers to provide feedback
Doing the same after that feedback has been given and collated – to ‘close the loop’ with those customers

It was a new process for us last year and you are now telling us that it works. We thought it might, given that we have 20 years of experience in helping companies build and run CX and EX programmes. But we honestly didn’t know until we asked you.

“Are we there yet?”

While we’re really proud of these scores and the comments that accompanied them, no, we’re not there yet. Here are three things we need to do to get there over the next year:

Engage with clients/ individuals who did not provide feedback. While 55% is a decent response rate, a few of our clients gave us a limited amount of feedback. I’m pretty sure that, had they completed the survey last month, our scores would be lower. I believe we still have some work to do to improve the relationship quality with these clients so I will personally be reaching out in the coming days to talk to them about where we may be falling short.

Consider even more CX and EX support. You have asked for even more help to turn insights into action with your customers. We are committed to helping you achieve that, and will pick up the subject with you when we meet with you to ‘close the loop’ on this year’s client assessment.

‘Closing the Loop’ with our own clients. The final thing we need to do with all of our clients is to discuss their own specific feedback on our performance with them. We will be in touch shortly with each one of our clients. We will be asking for time to discuss each client’s specific results and feedback. Our objective is to agree a set of actions with each client that will improve the value we deliver in the coming 12 months. I’m personally looking forward to those conversations.

Thank you again – and expect a call from us

Finally, I genuinely appreciate the time you have taken to give us your feedback.

I must also say a big thank you to our own team in Deep-Insight who have managed to weather the stormy waters of the last 12-15 months. They continue to deliver an excellent service to our clients (your words, not just mine). In particular, I need to thank James Kind for planning, organising and running this year’s “Deep-Insighting Ourselves” assessment.

James joined us in March last year and no sooner had he stepped inside our offices, we shut them down due to COVID. Like many other people out there, James knows his colleagues primarily through Teams and Zoom meetings. I’ve been impressed at how he – and everybody else in Deep-Insight and our clients – has adapted to working from a laptop in an attic, shed, kitchen or bedroom.

In the coming months, all that will change as vaccines get rolled out globally. I don’t believe we’ll ever go back to our old ways of working but that might not be a bad thing.

So, well done James, and thank you to all of our clients. We’ll be in touch with you shortly to discuss your results and agree some follow-up actions.

John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight

Your Feedback on our Performance

Posted on July 9, 2020 at 4:23 pm.

Written by John O'Connor

Cobbler’s Children

There’s an old saying that “the cobbler’s children are the worst shod”. In the past that definitely applied to Deep-Insight. We advise clients like Atos, BT and Serco to build customer centricity through:

– Annual strategic assessment of all clients
– Clear plan for choosing the right contacts and getting them to commit to giving feedback via an online survey
– Comprehensive review of the feedback to agree strategic initiatives for the next 12 months
– ‘Close The Loop’ meetings with each client to agree actions to improve the relationship

In Deep-Insight’s early days, we even struggled with the first point. We thought the survey couldn’t be completely independent and honest as it was not being administered by a third party. We got over that objection pretty quickly. It’s true that our scores are a little inflated because the survey is not anonymous, but that’s not the point. The numbers aren’t the most important thing. Any customer feedback is invaluable. We have now been running CRQ assessments with our own clients on an annual basis for several years. Last year, we got our best ever scores.

The only problem is that in 2019 we probably didn’t include as wide a selection of contacts as we should and we could have worked harder at getting a higher completion rate. Last year, our completion rate was 49%. That’s not bad but this year we agreed we wouldn’t be happy unless we hit 60%.

So how did we do? Were we still the cobbler’s children?

Deep-Insight’s 2020 CRQ results

We were definitely more determined this year in getting commitments from you to give us 10 minutes of your time for feedback.

It worked – we achieved a 66% completion rate so my first message is to say ‘Thank You’ for such a wonderful response. Our results were very good too: a CRQ score of 5.7 and a Net Promoter score of +44%. Not as high as last year, but I’m still really pleased by those scores.

Retaining our Unique Status

We also retained our ‘Unique’ status which means that we are in the top 10% of our own database of scores. Uniqueness requires a combination of a winning ‘Solution’ and a wonderful ‘Experience’ for the client.

Areas for Improvement

Even though our clients see us as Unique, there are still areas we need to improve upon. Our core product offering is seen as really good but, in some places, we’re not seen as innovative enough and there are a few areas where we could invest more in our technology.

Closing The Loop

At this point, we have been in touch with most of our clients and scheduled a ‘Close The Loop’ meeting to discuss their feedback on us, and to agree some actions. One of the areas we will be seeking further feedback on is where we focus our development efforts in terms of ‘Innovation’ and ‘Technology’. Here are the three areas that we are trying to prioritise:

1. Further development of Deep-Dive. Deep-Dive is our online analytical portal. It has become an invaluable tool for us to extract insights for our clients but it’s not as intuitive as it could be.

2. Integration with Salesforce. Many, if not most, of our clients use Salesforce as their corporate CRM tool. Some of our clients import the CRQ and NPS results (as well as verbatim comments) from our assessment into Salesforce so that account managers and service teams can see instantly what the most recent feedback was.

3. More Benchmarking & Industry Comparisons. We have 20 years’ worth of benchmarking data and although we’re not big believers in industry averages, many of our clients would like to know if they’re in a particular quartile or decile for their industry.

Cobbler’s Children

We’ve tried hard this year so hopefully we’re no longer the cobbler’s children. Thank you again for your time and input into this year’s CRQ customer assessment. I really do appreciate it and we will make changes based on your feedback – particularly around where we should focus our efforts in the next 12 months.

John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight

Investing in the ‘Soft Side’

Posted on January 28, 2020 at 5:27 pm.

Written by John O'Connor

Customer at the Heart

Peter Whitelaw and I wrote a book last year called Customer at the Heart. It was a fun experience interviewing CEOs and sales directors from large B2B companies across Europe and Australia. One of the consistent messages we heard in those interviews was the importance of investing in the ‘Soft Side’. In other words, focusing on people as much as on process.

This is a really important point: if you are responsible for running a customer experience (CX) programme in your organisation, don’t under-estimate the importance of investing in ‘Soft Side’ activities if you want to generate real long-lasting results.

This means spending significant amounts of time with both your leadership and client-facing teams planning for success.

The Importance of Investing in the ‘Soft Side’

A quick recap on the four quadrants in the Customer at the Heart model before we go any further:

1. LEADERSHIP. The most important quadrant. Good Customer Experience (CX) programmes are ALWAYS led from the top
2. STRATEGY. Good CX programmes link customer, product, operational and organisational strategy explicitly to customer needs
3. EXECUTION. Success requires properly resourced CX teams that are brilliant at executing the Strategy
4. CULTURE. Finally, Customer Excellence must become integral to the DNA of the organisation: “it’s how we do things around here”

All four quadrants are necessary for a successful CX programme. The ‘Hard Side’ quadrants of Strategy and Execution are all about metrics and processes. ‘Hard Side’ activities lend themselves to key performance indicators (KPIs) and while the activities in these two quadrants are important and easily measurable, the quadrants of Leadership and Culture are actually more critical.

In our experience, Leadership is the most important quadrant while Culture is the most challenging. And yet, here’s the strange thing: in most CX programmes the ‘Soft Side’ is often overlooked and almost always under-resourced.

Our Approach

We have a different approach at Deep-Insight. We spend a lot more time with leadership teams and sales or account teams BEFORE we think about asking our customer’s clients for their views. If you want to run a customer survey in a hurry – “I need to get the results back by the end of the month…” – we’re probably not the organisation for you.

At Deep-Insight, the first 14-16 weeks of our process are critical and must be done properly. If you don’t invest the time up-front, your CX programme will not deliver the results that Management and the Board expect from it. More than likely, it will end in failure. It’s as simple as that.

Planning & Onboarding

The first phase in our approach is ‘Onboarding’ the organisation; The very first step is to secure the buy-in from the senior leadership team to the journey that they are about to embark on. And it is a journey because cultural change takes time. The second step is to onboard the rest of the organisation, primarily the sales and account teams. They own the customer relationships and if they don’t embrace the programme with gusto, the entire programme is at risk of being seen as a box-ticking exercise.

We typically work with dispersed sales and service teams in online workshops, and always with senior leadership support and involvement. These onboarding workshops are critical to driving up response rates and completion rates, as well as delivering action and improvements.

Insights to Action

The final phase is where the rubber hits the road. The online survey is complete. We have gathered some key insights from the feedback. Now it’s time to assemble the sales and account teams again. This time the focus is on their role in ‘Closing the Loop’ with the client. This is arguably the most critical part of the entire process. The account manager – sometimes with a member of the senior leadership team – must meet the client to discuss the feedback from all individuals in that client’s organisation.

In many cases, these discussions are straightforward because everything is fine and the relationship is on an even keel. In some instances, the client may be a ‘Stalker’ or an ‘Opponent’ and a much tougher and more honest conversation is needed.

The key outcome of these ‘Close the Loop’ meetings is agreement on the appropriate actions that are needed to improve and deepen the relationship. This gets built into the Account Planning process for that client.

Investing in the ‘Soft Side’

If your CX programme isn’t working the way you hoped it would, it’s probably because you’ve under-invested in the Leadership and Culture quadrants. The symptoms will be clear: disengaged account teams; limited insights; complete absence of action.

If you notice any of these symptoms in your CX programme, do get in touch.

If you’re thinking of establishing a CX programme, think about investing in the ‘Soft Side’ and learn from the experiences of others in this book: