CX & Customer Success resources

Waypoint Group hosted a local networking group we have endearingly entitled BICEP, Bay Area Innovative Customer Experience Professionals.  It was a fabulous opportunity for local customer experience folks to gather over lunch to share challenges and collect best practices from other local companies.  As one of the attendees expressed, “It was a fantastic way to discuss my program challenges with peers and gather great new ideas for how to drive very specific improvements!”  Represented were CX & Net Promoter professionals from Cisco, Intel, SAP, VMware, USF, PeopleMatter & Integris Performance Advisors.  Autodesk, HP & Symantec were also among the RSVP list, proving there is TONS of interest for this type of open forum, attended by, & provided for, local Bay Area customer experience practitioners.
Some of the take-aways offered by the participants included…

• Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) is a free service for creating word clouds for displaying comments
• A practice that moved the needle:  Even if the overall scores are “OK”, do take the time to read verbatims and follow-up with people who asked questions or stated issues
• Connect your Voice of Customer Program with your company’s lost-customer program by linking the financials of each lost customer to the costs of “proactive” service.  For companies with “trapped” customers, model the cross-sell offers to see the lost opportunity cost.
• Using Sales Pipeline data may be an easier way to show sales execs the power of customer feedback.  Pull out pipeline data from your B2B sales team and show the connection between pipeline and scores.
• Analysis tip:  Aggregate scores according to your company’s organization (e.g. by region, by product, etc), and show growth rate against Ease of Business score.  You’ll see “market share givers” vs. “market share takers” and how scores relate to sales performance.
• Create a 1-page list of specific customer verbatim comments for each of your company’s departments to show their impact on the customer experience.
• Impactful survey question:  “If you had a few minutes with NAME [your company’s CEO], what would you tell him/her?

Bottom-line:  Make sure to position your role as not one of running surveys, but instead to capture Voice of Customer in an actionable way.
We are thrilled to be able to provide a productive forum for local practitioners running customer experience programs.  We are planning our upcoming holiday event to be held in downtown San Francisco.  If you are interested in joining us, please let me know by sending an email to info@waypointgroup.org.
Hope to see you in early December – !