REFINING A UTILITIES VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER (VOC) PROGRAM APPROACH USING THE LADDER OF INFERENCE by Torin Lacher with contributions from Paul Hagen
A recent Energy & Utilities newsletter article, discussed how utilities could utilize Voice of the Customer (VoC) Programs to start listening to their customers and taking action by altering business decisions based on customer feedback. Oftentimes, organizations believe that they have a strong VoC program just because they collect customer feedback, but they are just scratching the surface. A truly strong VoC program is not one that only captures customer feedback, but a holistic program that listens to customers, analyzes and organizes the feedback you receive, communicates that feedback to relevant staff members, and then turns insights into action to improve key business processes. A strong VoC program can bring transformational change to your organization by enabling customer insights to be turned into actionable improvements and will evolve over time to adapt to your current customer base and business model.
In this article, we will talk about a 4-step approach that you can use to define and develop a strong VoC program for your organization and a simple tool you can use to help execute on this approach The Ladder of Inference! Throughout the paper we will be tying in examples for how one water Utility we worked with developed their VoC program; utilizing the results to improve upon their customer experience and build engagement. At the end, there will be a detailed case study around how this Utility developed and utilized the results from their VoC program. OUR 4-STEP APPROACH West Monroe Partners utilizes a 4-step approach to developing and defining the capabilities of a nextgeneration VoC Program: Listen, Analyze, Report, and Act (shown and defined below). These 4-steps describe the process and strategy to developing your VoC program to gather data-driven actionable insights out of customer feedback. At a high level, this may seem like common sense, but when looking into their own VoC program many organizations find that they are lacking in, or entirely missing, one or more of these steps. There are many tools that you could use to help your organization review and enhance your capabilities in each of these four areas. I am going to describe one tool that I have found to be extremely effective in doing just that The Ladder of Inference. The Ladder of Inference The Ladder of Inference is a powerful tool that helps avoid drawing incorrect or incomplete conclusions. When used in a social context, the Ladder of Inference helps individuals overcome drawing these incomplete or incorrect conclusions by setting up a framework of seven sequential rungs used to reflect on
your own thinking, make your reasoning more visible to others, and inquire into your peers reasoning and thinking patterns. If you re like me, I thought the Ladder of Inference was a wonderful concept, but could not think of a real-world application where I could use it effectively. I mean, how many people are going to remember and walk through the seven different rungs when they are having a heated disagreement with someone at work on a project they are passionate about? I definitely know that would not be me. However, after putting in a little more thought on how to use the Ladder of Inference, I realized that this tool was extremely applicable and valuable to conceptualizing and building a VoC program utilizing the 4-step approach described above. Oftentimes employees at an organization tend to draw their own conclusions about what they believe their customers want without completely understanding the customer s thought process and experience. Like the Ladder of Inference, a VoC Program helps bridge this gap of an organization jumping to conclusions by allowing them to gather, analyze, report, and take action based on their customer s feedback. This makes the Ladder of Inference the perfect tool to utilize to help build out a VoC program. An example of the Ladder of Inference tool in a VoC context is illustrated below: 1 Applying the Ladder of Inference to your VoC Program Approach Throughout the remainder of this article, we will show you how your organization can build out each phase of our 4-step VoC Program approach (Listen, Analyze, Report, and Act) by applying and walking through each rung on the Ladder of Inference. As we describe each of the rungs on the Ladder of Inference, we will 1 Source: The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
also provide real-world examples for how the water Utility we worked with conducted activities within each of these areas when establishing their VoC program. The LISTEN Step The First Rung: Observable Data and Experiences The Observable Data and Experiences rung of the Ladder represents all of the possible interactions a customer can have with your Utility. This could be through various meter-to-cash functions (e.g. contact center, field service staff, on-site payments), social media, or community campaigns. Customers interact with your Utility across many different channels and their interactions sometimes go unrecognized. All of these possible experiences and touchpoints that customers have with your Utility provide an opportunity for your organization to gather feedback. Real-world example: The water Utility we worked with interacted with customers in many ways; public website and payment portal, social media, call center, service appointments, and community events just to name a few. These all presented opportunities for the Utility to gather information on how their customers felt during each of these interactions. The Second Rung: I select data from what I observe This rung of the Ladder represents the customer feedback that you choose to collect. This is where your VoC program comes in! Now that your organization understands all of the possible customer interaction points from the Observable Data and Experiences step, the key is determining which interactions you want to get feedback on and measure. If you are at a Utility that is receiving many complaints about your field service staff missing appointment windows, you may gather feedback from all customers who have service appointments. Your organization can understand the channels and receive feedback on them. Start by choosing an area where you believe your organization could improve and then build upon it. Real-world example: The water Utility wanted to gather customer feedback related to their call center, online website and payment portal, and service request customer interactions; activities that made up the majority of their customer interactions. In order to gather feedback across these key customer interaction area, the Utility developed surveys to be delivered across six different customer touchpoints; Customer payment portal Public website Interactive voice response (IVR) Meter field service appointments Phone interactions with a customer service representative (CSR) Face-to-face interaction with a CSR in the Utility s lobby
The ANALYZE Step The Third Rung: I add meanings Now that your organization s Voice of the Customer program has the data (customer feedback) you have selected, you will need to interpret (or add meanings) to the feedback you ve received. This analysis could be through tracking or reporting tools that allow you to view all of the feedback you are receiving in one location, so that you can track trends over time. For example, the VOC team can add meaning to data by spotting a rapidly trending issue and flag it for urgent analysis and attention. If your Utility updates its website and notices a rapidly trending issue around customers not being able to log in, the VoC team can send this information to IT for urgent analysis and troubleshooting. Adding meaning also could apply to text analysis, allowing you to search for topics and emotions consistently conveyed within your results. By adding meaning around your feedback, you enable the organization to holistically review and see trending results over time increasing the amount of impact the results can make. Real-world example: The Utility we worked with decided to select a VoC vendor to help them gather feedback through surveys so that they could add meaning to the feedback they received across the six customer interaction points listed above. These surveys are distributed to customers who interacted with the Utility across at least one of the touchpoints the prior day and were custom to the type of interaction the customer had. After gathering the survey feedback, the vendor worked with the Utility to develop reporting dashboards that aggregated and visualized all of their survey feedback (across each touchpoint) in one central location. The dashboards helped show trends in feedback over time and provided a method for the Utility to see the customer experience they were providing in each individual touchpoint. Each survey also had an open-ended question that allowed customers to provide free-form feedback outside of the set question list. Incorporating comments into the dashboards allowed members of the Utility to review qualitative feedback as well; oftentimes validating the trending feedback results they were seeing and providing specific improvement opportunities. The Fourth Rung: I make assumptions based on the meanings I added Now that you ve interpreted your customer feedback and established a VoC program that can analyze data, you will need to make assumptions based on the feedback you are receiving. This step of a VoC program is often difficult because there is such a large amount of feedback, how do you know what assumptions will be truly valuable? Before getting the data, you most likely will have some idea for the pain points in your organization. The data from your VoC program will help validate these assumptions or provide insight into another problem you may have been overlooking. Once receiving feedback, engage business analysts within your VoC team to review the data and look for the root cause to customer responses. Through conducting this root cause analysis, your organization will not be reacting to symptoms (pain points) that come out in customer feedback, but will be able to point out the responsible department across the company that can take action to improve the customer experience for this issue within all future interactions. In addition,
having a VoC team of individuals analyzing and reviewing customer feedback will allow each person to create their own assumptions that they can then raise to the rest of the VoC team. Real-world example: Now that the water Utility had reports to aggregate and visualize the data, they developed a VoC team of individuals across the key business areas soliciting customer feedback (communications, field services, and communications). Members of the team were responsible for reviewing the feedback associated with their interaction channels on a monthly basis. Then the team would meet each month to discuss the results across all customer feedback channels to determine if they could find the root cause for why they were seeing negative or positive results based on the month prior. Conducting this analysis with each of the key business areas represented allowed the VoC team to come up with solutions across the entire business, rather than just their individual department. The Fifth Rung: I draw conclusions Now that you and your VoC team have made assumptions based on your initial analysis of the results, you will need to draw conclusions based on these assumptions. Based on the results and your root cause analysis, you will begin to recognize trends in customer feedback and develop a more detailed understanding for key areas of improvement. However, having these key areas of improvements identified still does not allow your organization to take action upon them. Your VoC team, working alongside impacted business areas for key improvements, should develop an ROI analysis that considers in part the importance for the customers and in part on the business impact (e.g. Cost/effort to fix; expected cost savings; possible revenue gains) to prioritize what improvements will be most impactful. Your ROI analysis and trending results will allow you to draw conclusions and prioritize projects affecting the most important changes to your customers and/or business. Real-world example: The improvement opportunities identified and discussed within the Utility s monthly VoC team meetings would then go into a list of potential improvement projects. Each project in this list was analyzed to determine the benefit on customers, how many customers would be impacted, the positive or negative impact on current performance metrics, how much effort it would take to complete the project, and any cross-impacts this project may have on other business areas. Conducting this analysis enabled the Utility to prioritize the projects that would be most beneficial to their organization and customers having a VoC team of individuals analyzing and reviewing customer feedback will allow each person to create their own assumptions that they can then raise to the rest of the VoC team. The Sixth Rung: I adopt beliefs about this world Taking your conclusions one-step further, your organization adopts beliefs about your customer s interests on a broader scale based on the conclusions you ve developed. This rung will help the organization understand the trends of what are the most important interactions that customers are having and where potential pain points lie throughout the organization. By adopting beliefs about your customer base on a
broader scale, you will be able to look for improvement opportunities across all business areas rather than just the ones where you have received feedback. For example, if customers are saying they would like more self-service options for updating billing information within their customer portal, the customer base as a whole may be looking for more self-service options across the business (IVR, online service requests, mobile notifications). After analyzing the customer feedback, the water Utility realized that it was extremely important that customers have a good experience when making a payment, which consisted of a large majority of their customer interactions. Customers consistently provided feedback on how to make the payment process easier and wanted to increase the amount of channels available to make payments. The Utility realized that making improvements in this area would positively affect the customer experience for a majority of their customers, so they adopted the belief that increasing the amount of self-service options and improving the ease of making payments across all touchpoints would yield the most beneficial customer experience feedback results. Also, through increasing the amount of self-service payment options, the Utility hoped to have the added benefit of reducing the amount of calls they received in their call center. The REPORT and ACT Steps The Seventh Rung: I take actions based on my beliefs This step creates positive change within your organization. Without taking action on the feedback you ve received, the feedback will go to waste, resulting in no organizational change. In order to inspire actions within your organization, report and communicate VoC results to the appropriate staff members to institute change. Through reporting this information outwards towards fellow staff members, it will allow these staff to gain insight into how they can best address improvement opportunities their customers have brought up in feedback. Staff members can use these results to develop new projects (i.e. help develop requirements for a new IVR system), enhance current solutions (i.e. allowing customers to save their payment information within the current billing portal), or drive business process improvements (i.e. flexible hours for field service appointments). These areas of improvement and suggestions will be prioritized as future projects knowing that they will have a positive impact on a large segment of your customer base. The water Utility was upgrading their customer payment portal after launching their VoC program. Since they were already obtaining data on their customer portal through their VoC program, many of the design and functional elements customers identified as improvement opportunities were taken into account when developing the new portal s requirements. This included saving payment preferences and options when making regular monthly payments, providing a mobile app that offering customers an additional way to make their payment, and adding payment arrangement options. The Utility is continuously monitoring their customer feedback across all channels and meet on a monthly basis to compare feedback, spot trends, and identify improvement projects and areas based on the results.
Tying all of the rungs together: The Reflexive Loop The reflexive loop is not a step on the ladder, but is rather the understanding that your VoC program will constantly be evolving. As customer feedback changes over time, a successful VoC program will adapt to these changes to solicit feedback from customers through different channels (e.g. social media or mobile apps) or interaction points (e.g. start surveying your own employees or sending out surveys on a newly launched website). This is an important concept to tie the entire Ladder of Inference tool together, because if your organization is not updating their VoC program to get feedback on the most critical business processes, your program will become less effective towards addressing the most pressing customer issues. Regularly review the feedback you are soliciting and constantly keep an open mind to how your program can improve to reach more customers or solicit feedback that is more useful. Now that you have an understanding on how to use the Ladder of Inference to develop a VoC program that can bring real change to your Utility go give it a try on your VoC program and see if there are any steps in the process that you could improve upon! Below, we have included the detailed case study on how the water Utility mentioned throughout the examples above developed and utilized their VoC program feedback. A Utility s VoC Program in Action: Decreased Customer Effort Leads to Increased Customer Satisfaction Recently, West Monroe had the opportunity to work with a large municipal water utility to develop their VoC program. This Utility serves over 170,000 residential and commercial customers and developed a VoC program as part of a multi-year customer experience transformational program focusing on improving customers interactions with their contact center, field services, and automated systems. The Utility applied customer feedback from their VoC results to improve upon their customer experience and increase customer engagement. Prior to this initiative, the Utility distributed customer feedback surveys through two channels: quarterly surveys sent to 400 randomly chosen customers and comment cards distributed to customers who contacted the Utility via the city s 311 program. There were a few primary issues with only gathering customer feedback through these channels, including: the Utility was uncertain if these customers actually interacted with them over the specified timeframe, they could not pinpoint the exact interaction the customer was referring to, and the feedback may not be fresh in the minds of customers.
In order to address these problems, the Utility wanted to develop a VoC program that allowed them to gather a large amount of actionable feedback from their customers. In order to do this, West Monroe worked with the Utility to develop customer surveys across five unique channels: public website and portal (online systems), IVR (contact center), live agent calls (contact center), lobby (walk-ins), and field services (scheduled appointments). West Monroe worked with the Utility and the VoC vendor they decided to use to develop and execute on a VoC strategy and survey tool implementation. Specifically, we collaborated with the Utility to develop survey questions for each interaction type, identify the data needed in order to distribute the surveys, and create meaningful reports to aggregate and visualize feedback results. Many of the survey questions related to customer effort and satisfaction related to the interaction and included an open-ended question for customers to provide feedback outside of what the questions could capture. Since implementing the surveys (online systems in August 2014 and the contact center, walk-ins, and scheduled appointments in April 2015), there have been over 19,000 responses from customers across all five channels! After aggregating the data and having their VoC team review the feedback, the Utility identified key trends in the feedback that they could use to drive design decisions for their public website, customer portal and the mobile app. This feedback included customers wanting an increased amount of self-service options when making a payment, reducing the number of clicks needed to get to the payment page, and compared the water utility experience to similar customer experiences with other local utilities. Using this feedback, the Utility was able address these common themes by updating their website and portal design to reflect the requested changes; turning the insights into actionable improvements. In addition to these improvement opportunities, there was a very clear picture across all interaction points decreased customer effort led to an increased customer satisfaction! In order to provide quantitative evidence that decreased customer effort led to an increased customer experience, we were able to take the feedback from the 19,000 surveys that were completed and plot customer satisfaction and effort scores. The correlation coefficient measures the strength of a relationship between two data sets and the values range from -1 (perfect negative relationship) to +1 (perfect positive relationship). In our scenario outlined below, we are measuring the relationship between decreased customer effort and increased customer satisfaction, so a correlation coefficient closer to one shows how strong the relationship is affirming that decreased customer effort leads to a higher customer satisfaction. For reference, below is a table that shows the range of positive correlation coefficient values and their representative relationship strength between the two variables:
Correlation Coefficient Value +0.00 0.29 +0.30 0.49 +0.50 0.69 +0.70 0.99 +1.00 Relationship Strength No relationship between decreased customer effort and increased customer satisfaction A weak positive relationship between decreased customer effort and increased customer satisfaction A moderate positive relationship between decreased customer effort and increased customer satisfaction A strong positive relationship between decreased customer effort and increased customer satisfaction A perfect positive relationship between decreased customer effort and increased customer satisfaction Utilizing the VoC data across each of the Utility s measured touch points, we charted the customer effort and satisfaction survey response trending scores for each month since implementing the survey tools. We then calculated the correlation coefficient using the monthly customer effort and satisfaction scores, where the scores ranged from low (1) to high (5). The graphs and correlation coefficient values for each touch point is illustrated in the figure below: Each VoC channel s correlation coefficient shows an extremely strong positive relationship between reduced customer effort & increased customer satisfaction! Correlation Coefficient IVR LIVE AGENT LOBBY MFS ONLINE OVERALL 0.666 0.854 0.851 0.819 0.986 0.961
Since the correlation coefficient between decreased customer effort and increased customer satisfaction for each of the five interaction channels was around or above +0.7, we could conclude that there is a strong positive relationship between decreased customer effort and increased customer satisfaction! This was an extremely important finding for the Utility because it proved that if they made business decisions and improvements to decrease their customer s effort, they would most likely achieve increased customer satisfaction and engagement. This was just one way that this water utility used their VoC data to gather customer insights and drive business improvements, there are many other ways that your Utility can tailor a VoC program to meet your organizational goals and needs! If you have any additional questions about VoC programs, please reach out to Torin Lacher, Experienced Consultant at tlacher@westmonroepartners.com or Paul Hagen, Sr. Principal at phagen@westmonroepartners.com.