Adaptive Role-Based Reporting

Earlier this year we talked about "putting the enterprise" in enterprise feedback management by providing actionable voice of the customer data to everyone who is directly or indirectly involved in the customer experience from executives to frontline staff. That means giving employees access to the right customer feedback metrics so they can see specifically how their work impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Despite the best intentions, however, customer feedback is often closely held within market research or a small group tasked with creating customer loyalty. While they may be getting rich customer insights and even create some action plans to improve customer satisfaction, their efforts often fall flat because they fail to get these insights into the hands of the people who need them most: their customer-facing employees.

If you're serious about creating a customer-centric culture, I challenge you to think about how you are sharing voice of the customer information with front-line employees today. If you wanted to provide role-specific, real-time, relevant reports to thousands of front-line employees, their managers, and your executive team, how long would it take you? If the entire organizational structure changed the next day, how long would it take you to ensure new people in new roles were accessing relevant, personalized data? If your answer is any longer than one day, you need to look at an alternative solution for adaptive role-based reporting.

A good adaptive role-based reporting solution gives organizations the capability to instantly share real-time customer feedback results with anyone in the company. But, what makes it really meaningful is that it can automatically tailor the specific data that each person sees by his/her role. By delivering customized information in a dashboard report that's relevant to the person receiving it, you give each employee the ability to understand and internalize his/her impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

While this may sound simple, it's incredibly difficult for organizations that tend to have a significant number of customer-facing employees and high turnover, such as contact centers and retailers. It can be a nightmare to keep up with who's in what role, which information is appropriate for them to see, and still deliver data on a timely basis especially when thousands of employees are involved. Fortunately, the right adaptive role-based reporting is designed such that it adapts to business changes from the onset. A simple import process updates hierarchies on the fly to reflect each organizational change, making it easy to add, delete, or move users in a snap. And, when hierarchies change, the reports individuals receive automatically change, too.

To understand the power of sharing information at this level, imagine a large retailer with thousands of locations across the world with a global initiative to improve customer satisfaction. They could create role-based dashboards for each district, region, store, and individual employee. District managers would have access to each region, store, and individual employee's results, allowing them to immediately pinpoint customer satisfaction issues or successes in specific areas so they can focus on taking appropriate action. (It's important to note that this isn't just about taking corrective action, it's also about replicating and rewarding successes.)

At the employee level, each individual can see the results of feedback related to their own customer interactions or those of their stores. They can see how it relates to overall corporate objectives and see real-time verbatim comments from customers so they know where to focus their efforts to create improved customer satisfaction. This can be incredibly motivating for front-line employees who often have little visibility into how their roles are affecting overall corporate objectives.

Suddenly an objective to "increase customer satisfaction by 30 percent" has real meaning to someone who is working to increase his/her own personal customer satisfaction scores by 30 percent. It holds people accountable and helps everyone get on the same page.

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Jodi Koskella manages product marketing for the Enterprise Products Group at MarketTools, Inc. She has more than 15 years of B2B software marketing and consulting experience with a background in Web analytics, data warehousing, and ecommerce.