The old adage “the customer is always right” may frustrate some companies, but getting to the heart of the customer voice through robust data aggregation and analysis tools has never been easier. Social media has now given everyone a feedback channel that customer service organizations can harness to improve offerings and stay competitive.

Perficient recommends a solution that captures not only the customer voice but the employee voice as well. After all, large service-based organizations such as cable, telecom and satellite providers often distribute service to their own employees.

In addition, employees may hold valuable customer trends not evident in customer feedback surveys. A feedback environment should be created to welcome and reward constructive feedback.  It is also critical the organization act quickly and efficiently on that feedback to implement positive change.

Any customer and employee listening initiative will be successful through a shared understanding of key metrics and the roles accountable for driving them. We recommend four steps for a successful program:

Step 1 – Define, refine, and build plan

• Establish a steering committee with broad stakeholder representation – this should encompass all relevant departments including customer care, sales, operations, etc.
• Determine key performance indicators, methods, root cause categories and listening channels – define how you will collect feedback and what you will do with it
• Establish a cadence of data retrieval – define how often to aggregate feedback and present to stakeholders
• Incorporate prior customer feedback where applicable – depending on how long your company has been in business, you likely have an extensive log of past customer and employee feedback to reference when analyzing new feedback
• Determine and baseline key metrics to measure success – define what success looks like, whether it is a reduction in customer complaints or new features added to a product

Step 2 – Gather and analyze feedback

• Collect data and evaluate root cause by listening channel – turn on the feedback faucet and begin to analyze the data
• Set program goals and compare results against measure gaps – evaluate how you are tracking to the goals
• Create a roadmap for customer experience improvement initiatives – prioritize opportunities and schedule initiative efforts on the company timeline
• Obtain necessary budget approval for project launch – required for any initiative, ensure proposals align with current product and service offer roadmap

* After Step 2 and before Step 3 is a critical point in the program – this is where most listening initiatives falter, resulting in large amount of unused data – so a focus on continuing the program is key *

Step 3 – Plan and execute

• Assign deliverables to owners with clear goals and timing – weekly or monthly meetings to ensure everyone is on the same page and focused on the goal
• Activate the plan and monitor progress – make results highly visible throughout the organization, whether posted on the intranet or on hallway video boards
• Incorporate new listening channels and metrics as customer behaviors evolve – ensure you are capturing feedback from new channels born in social media, for example
• Track results against any established industry-wide customer satisfaction measurement tool – the Net Promoter Score is just one example

Step 4 – Monitor and report

• Maintain buy-in and trust of executives and stakeholders with a continuous feedback loop – accomplished through a regular cadence of quantitative and qualitative reporting dashboards and steering committee reports
• Refine program based on evidence-based activities – new, relevant feedback will continuously flow as new customers and employees come on board
• Ingrain results into the company culture – foster positive, lasting results, turning your customers and employees into raving fans through incentives and creating a feeling like they’re part of something special

When you put it all together, a well-built customer and employee listening program can yield positive results year over year.

Contact Perficient for an in-depth look into your customer-facing company improvement goals or visit www.perficient.com.

In an economy working to build consistent and predictable growth, there is uncertainty impacting all stakeholders within the supply chain. Just as your company is likely facing pressure to reduce Operating Expenses (“OpEx”), your suppliers are living in the same ecosystem with similar challenges putting pressure on their profits. When the supply chain is asked to do their part in reducing the company’s overall costs, the options are to be Reactionary or Strategic.

During challenging times, there is a tendency to go after suppliers. The question becomes, “What can I get my suppliers to do for me?” This approach is reactionary and is most common when a company does not have a supplier management program in place or the value proposition of the program is not clearly understood.

From the supplier’s perspective, reactionary requests, such as across the board price reductions are punitive. This approach puts the supplier on the defensive and could leave bigger savings opportunities on the table. Pressuring suppliers may generate savings, but will simultaneously undermine long-term relationships and savings will be short-lived.

The alternative is to be strategic.

In today’s economy, suppliers know that they must be creative and responsive to their customer’s changing requirements and are often willing to adapt their current service and pricing models. A strategic partnership can yield savings well beyond the short-term reactionary reductions/cuts pushed down on suppliers. Suppliers are willing to think creatively and take on more operational and financial risk to build and sustain a healthy long-term partnership. By working with your suppliers and sharing your needs, you open the door for opportunities that enhance the long-term partnership and meet your immediate need for reduced OpEx spending. By way of example, step back and evaluate secondary services that your existing suppliers can provide.

Many times, companies spend time sourcing new suppliers to provide a service that their existing suppliers can perform, and are willing to bundle that service reducing overall total cost. This improves speed to implementing the solution, reduces administrative costs, and strengthens the partnership to drive sustainability and additional efficiencies over the life of the relationship.

Additional opportunities to leverage supplier resources can include:

• Augment staff with strategic supplier resources vs. traditional staff augmentation firms….many suppliers are seeing the strategic value to invest in “putting boots on the ground”
• Introduce and/or improve contract incentives to influence Supplier’s to place a higher priority on Continuous Improvement
• Engage suppliers to provide tactical back-office support functions
• Enable Suppliers to solve issues and problems

Do not hesitate to engage your suppliers early in the process and ask the hard questions. Avoid the tendency to keep suppliers at an arm’s length. Even if your company does not have a mature supplier management program in place, you will see great opportunities by opening up, sharing your pain points and demonstrating a desire to become partners in each other’s successes.

In January 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a controversial and influential paper entitled “Growth in a Time of Debt.” The paper studied economic growth at varying levels of debt across both advanced and emerging markets and concluded that countries experienced significantly lower growth when debt levels exceed 90 percent of gross domestic product.

Over the last several years, that relatively simple finding has been reported extensively by notable publications and has been cited by policymakers across the globe to justify strict austerity programs.

Three years (and countless protests) later, that conclusion was all-but invalidated when a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst attempted to replicate the findings of the study. After trying to independently recalculate the results of the paper, the student was granted access to the original Microsoft Excel spreadsheets used by Reinhart and Rogoff and quickly discovered that a simple spreadsheet error had substantially distorted the analysis.

This is not the first time that a simple spreadsheet error has been the cause of major problems.

In 2012, an Excel formula error contributed to more than $6.2 billion in trading losses for JP Morgan Chase & Co. in what has come to be known as the “London Whale” incident. Surprisingly, the error wasn’t related to the use of a complex financial formula with multiple variables. Quite the opposite: The spreadsheet in question incorrectly divided the difference of two rates by their sum instead of their average.

Nor are spreadsheet errors uncommon. Raymond Panko, a professor at the University of Hawaii, published a paper on the topic of spreadsheet errors – compiling the results of multiple independent studies. The results of the meta-analysis indicate that spreadsheet error rates are as high as 88 percent.

Excel is flexible, powerful, and ubiquitous. Organizations across the globe use the spreadsheet software for just about everything – from external financial reporting to simple bar graphs. While some of these activities are inherently riskier than others, they are not outside the capabilities of Excel when used properly.

Therein lies the problem: Most organizations are not good at managing spreadsheet risks – or teaching employees how to properly use Microsoft Excel. Here are four straightforward ways to help reduce the risk of spreadsheet errors:

• Assess Your Exposure to Spreadsheet Risk: Create an inventory of your organization’s key spreadsheets and categorize based on the frequency of use and inherent risk. Consider all of the potential consequences of an error and the magnitude of errors to understand your exposure.
• Document the Use of Spreadsheets in Process Documentation: Documenting the use of spreadsheets in process flows across the organization can help shed light on the specific areas where spreadsheets are relied upon – and provide a guide to bolster controls and reduce the risk of process escapements due to spreadsheet errors.
• Avoid “Hardcoding” Spreadsheet Data: Hardcoding data – the practice of removing formulas and replacing with static data – may make it easier to manipulate data, but it eliminates transparency and makes it harder to validate that the spreadsheet operated appropriately.
• Teach Employees Practical Tips to Reduce Spreadsheet Risk: While there may not be a “catch-all” solution to prevent spreadsheet errors, there are several simple data validation formulas and tools that can significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of spreadsheets. These tools and techniques should be a prominent topic in any Excel training courses.

In addition to the above, there should be a renewed effort to improve Excel-based instruction in the workplace. As stated previously – Excel is a powerful and flexible tool. By understanding and managing spreadsheet risks – and improving our understanding of the program, we’ll hopefully see fewer incidents like Reinhart-Rogoff in the future.

Stockholders and executives love to see new tactics followed by bottom-line improvements. But when that happens, is it always a direct cause-and-effect? Would the same improvements happen, in a dynamic and improving marketplace, had you taken no action at all? The ROI of strategic changes in a dynamic market may not accurately reflect the return reaped as a result of the strategy if it neglects to take into account the changing market.

As the economic footing has grown more stable, many companies are finding available funds to invest in their internal processes and find ways to improve performance. This is in contrast to the fairly recent past when companies were forced to scrimp on investing in their people and processes and focus on cost-cutting efforts, even if that introduced some inefficiency.

As companies embark on these new efforts, they will likely see performance improvements, but a key question needs to be asked prior to getting in too deep: How will we measure the results of our internal improvement initiatives knowing that the external market improvements will likely drive us in a positive direction anyway? In other words, how much of the improvement will be the result of the investment versus things just getting better? You could just be throwing money at a problem that will work itself out by just doing “business as usual,” then possibly compounding that by using the inflated results to inform future decisions.

To ensure that you know what you expect to achieve from any improvement initiatives in a dynamic market, you must carefully create the baseline to measure against and calculate expected ROI to:

Let’s look at an example

You believe that your project losses have been running too high and you believe that you can lower them through more stringent risk management activities (e.g., contracts, due diligence, inspections, risk-based pricing). Your plan is to introduce a program that mandates new contractual requirements and additional internal approvals for certain project types. You create a quick and easy ROI that says you can add these administrative steps (a 5% increase in time/cost) and losses will decline by 15%. On the surface, who would question that?

Everyone should question this. How are you going to measure whether this 5% increase in administrative cost is really the driver of the 15% decrease in losses? Is it possible that a significant improvement in the market will by itself lower losses as fewer of your customers try to pass their financial issues onto you? Could you really be adding 5% to your costs, not to mention customer annoyance, without any corresponding decrease in losses? Without establishing a baseline and truly understanding what is driving the current loss levels, you are just hypothesizing instead of analyzing.