Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche

Customer Surveys and Social Media

In which Jill maintains that “Who Were You in a Past Life?” isn’t the only survey on Facebook. At least, it shouldn’t be.

I just bought a car. And I just saw my doctor. In the spirit of their respective customer-focus initiatives—of course I don’t know whether either has a customer-focus strategy, but it’s a good bet—both the automobile company and the HMO surveyed me about my experience.

The automobile company called me a week after I bought my car. After leaving several voicemail messages, an agent finally reached me and asked me a series of shockingly banal and uncreative questions. “Was the showroom clean and well appointed?”  Look, I was there to buy a car, not to eat off the floor. “Was your salesman knowledgeable about the car?” Well, he couldn’t get the navigation to work but that’s only because it had never been installed. “Would you buy a car from this dealer again?” I don’t ever want to buy a car again, from this dealer or any other, so that one’s a loaded question.

The truth is: I didn’t particularly enjoy my car-buying experience—who does?—but I love my car. Did the automaker inquire about their new customer’s initial impressions with the product? No. Did they even ask what I thought of their brand before and after my purchase? Nope. Did they ask if I’d tell my friends about the car? Well, if you read this blog you’re my friend. Do you know what kind of car I bought? You get my point.

The HMO’s survey was more structured, and their questions were more relevant. Do you feel like your doctor spent enough time with you? Do you feel she really listened to you? Did she offer useful information? Were the nurses courteous? Did they pronounce your name right? Were all your questions answered by the time you left?  These factors really do contribute to the patient’s care experience, and I appreciate how deliberate and well thought-out they were. Trouble is, the form was two pages long and I had to return it via snail mail.

The surveys were completely different in almost every way, save for one. There was no attempt to cultivate an on-line relationship. I’ve had automobile and healthcare clients, and both industries are extremely focused on-line customer interactions. Many have invested in building on-line communities, encouraging their customers to contribute to an ongoing dialog and gathering important data in the process.

So what gives? Why not ask me for my e-mail address, and have me fill in an on-line form so I could share the fact that I spent more time waiting around for my sales guy than I did talking to him? (Amazingly, this was not true of my physician.)

Better yet, what if one of the questions was:

Would you share your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn accounts in the space below? This way we can send you periodic updates and service reminders. Plus, we’d be happy to give you access to our site, which compares your responses to people who bought cars at the same dealership [saw the same doctor].

Sure, you could do this via e-mail (neither survey requested an e-mail address), but social media communications are generally more engaging, more interactive. I would really like to know whether I was hyper-critical of my car dealership, or whether other car buyers, like me, are repressing the memory of the purchase process and are now enjoying their new cars as much as I am. I’d be interested in understanding whether my doctor spends the same amount of time with all her patients, or whether I truly was special. In the process, these companies could not only learn more about themselves, but learn more about me. By opting in, I could receive tweets like:

@jilldyche We’ve received your completed survey! Here’s a link to how your answers stack up with some of Dr. X’s other patients. Tweet us @hmo if you have any follow-up questions.  Meantime, don’t forget your 5000 IUs of Vitamin D!

Customer feedback via social media not only personalizes the message, it reflects my preferred way of communicating. After all, differentiating customer treatment based on the customer’s history and preferences is the very definition of CRM. So what’s taking so long?

Rigor? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rigor! The Importance of Process

In which Jill urges BI teams to roll up their sleeves and put process into practice.

Most of Baseline’s clients already have a general sense of their desired outcomes before they retain us. They need to launch a new project or begin a design or development effort, and they want the benefit of experience to start the right way.

The savviest clients welcome the knowledge transfer that accompanies working hand-in-hand with a consulting firm. They often take a “learn it, watch it, practice it, entrench it” approach. This lets them embrace change in an incremental way, incorporating new processes into their BI, MDM, data integration, or data warehouse development initiatives gradually, after putting them into practice.

But believe it or not, I’ve seen diagrams like this one scare the pants off of people:

Figure 1. Sample Requirement Process

We built this framework—simplified here—to instill a process for what didn’t currently exist: business-driven BI projects. Recognizing that true business-IT alignment was lacking, we worked together with the client’s key BI business sponsors to bang out a more formal process in which both business and IT would be accountable for ensuring that requirements drove BI projects.

When IT grumbled we weren’t surprised. Change invites discomfort. But we were amazed by the rationalizations for clinging to old ways. IT staff had been accustomed to throwing work over to some contractors who’d become fixtures onsite, filling in generic project requisition forms and write the odd SQL query. Indeed most of IT’s BI work was reactive. Most tasks were delegated, and most took more time than they should have. The fact that each of the steps in the new process required inputs, outputs, ownership, and delivery made some people in IT downright angry.

Consider manufacturing as a metaphor for IT development. As twentieth-century manufacturers embraced Henry Ford’s assembly line concept, they were ensuring:

• Predictable outcomes. By instituting repeatable processes, everyone knew what the end-state looked like.
• Easier detection of anomalies and defects. As processes make outcomes more predictable, outliers come into sharper focus.
• Enhanced productivity, since roles, work tasks, and handoff points are established and well-understood.
• The ability to track and measure productivity, quality, and desired outcomes, thereby driving further process refinements and product improvements.
• More accurate time and resource estimation, since initial scoping efforts can be informed by established process times.

As ironic as it seems, in BI—as in manufacturing—rigor actually invites flexibility. When everyone follows a sustainable development process, ownership, decision rights, and completion milestones are baked-in. Early error detection mitigates the need for reinvention and rework, allowing IT and business constituents to be clear about their commitments, and deliver them more quickly. BI teams can spend more on creative improvements, like enlisting new users, developing on-line tool and data training, and using social media tools for closer team collaboration.

Most of my new clients tend to want to talk about new technologies to acquire and organizational changes to make. What they don’t understand is that by embracing best-practice approaches to development and getting the process piece out of the way, they’re making room to have more substantive conversations about people and tools.