After collecting your customers' feedback, you need to turn it into useful results in order to answer your marketing, product, PR and sales related concerns. Before generating any report, you need to decide on its frequency. Reports can be generated on a continuous basis or periodically (i.e., snap-shots). An apparel retail company, whose customers' shopping experience last less than an hour will need more frequent reports than a software company that provides service and solutions to its clients. Next you need to decide what types of reports you need. The reports must answer your issues, need to be tailored to your needs, and most importantly enable you to take actions. Based on our experience some of the commonly topics are: 1- Customer Service: What is your customer's experience in regard to your service delivery? Here you need to report all the touch points between your customer, your service delivery as well as your service delivery team. This may include respect/greeting,knowledge, skills, reliability, quality, communication, and environment; 2- Product Offerings: Is the customer/client aware of your service/product offerings? Do your customers know all of your service/product offerings? 3- Price & Value: What is their opinion about your price strategy? Do they believe that they are receiving good value for the price they pay? 4- Competition: What is their evaluation/awareness of your competitors and why they picked you? Are they aware of your competitors, and what are their primary reasons for choosing you? 5- Return & Recommend: Are they coming back to do more business with you,and why? Do you have loyal or just satisfied customers? And who are your at-risk customers? These are only the basic and starting reports for your customer experience program. Your voice of customer must enable you to generate many other useful reports for all your departments as on as needed basis.

Customer Experience Program -- Survey Design

How important is it to provide an incentive to customers who will be participating in your survey? Deciding on whether to offer and what type of incentive to give depends on the type of industry, your survey invitation, and your survey design. Some industries don't need to offer any incentive at all. Due to the nature of their survey (e.g. health care, public service) customers have enough motivation to participate. And a well designed survey invitation and questionnaire will naturally motivate customers. If you decide to offer incentive, you will not only increase your response but will also increase repeat business (bounce backs) as well as stimulate trial of selected categories. Our observations indicate that use of correct incentive will capture feedback from the largest possible category of all customers, will bring in meaningful repeat business and increase the bottom line, and will positively impact quality and amount of feedback. There are a variety of incentives to use. Their impact on survey responses will be different. Sweepstakes incentives are least effective in generating responses from customers. They work in certain situations, but responses will come from a very specific audience. "Percent off incentives work very well. The offer can exclude purchase of certain items, and specify a minimum "dollar" on the purchase amount. Free offers are also effective, and work very well for certain industries. Your customer experience program will work better with an incentive. In combination with a well designed survey invitation and questionnaire, incentive offering will motivate customers to participate,will bring in repeat business, will provide you with a better quality customer feedback, and will increase your bottom line. Michael