I recently attend the Consero Customer Experience Forum in Miami, FL and had a chance to speak with Peter Leppik, the president and CEO of Vocalabs, a company that applies the scientific principles of data collection and analysis to the problem of improving customer service.

Vocalabs shared a white paper which recaps its view of the customer service survey maturity model, and I have highlighted some of the key concepts in today’s blog post.

I like the maturity concept, because before you can improve the end to end customer experience, you need to understand the current state. In order to understand the current state you need to have the right listening posts in place.

Per Vocalabs, there are 5 levels of survey maturity:

0- Ignorance: The company has little or no formal process in place to collect customer feedback

1- Tracking: The company collects high level customer feedback and trends it over time, but does little else with the information

2- Accountability: The company collects customer feedback, sets targets for feedback scores and has a closed loop process to respond to customers who give negative feedback

3- Continuous Improvement: The company collects both high level and detailed customer experience feedback. The company then uses this feedback to take actions to improve the experience such as enhancing products, streamlining systems, and/or training and coaching employees.

4- Agile: The company does everything mentioned in the continuous improvement phase, plus identifies additional methods to yield unheard customer insights and continually refines the existing methods of information collection based on the changing customer or business needs.

Within each level, there are 3 primary activities that take place:

Data collection: considers the techniques used to collect feedback and associate it with other information about the customer and his/her experience

Reporting: Considers the tools and techniques used to view, deliver, analyze and store the customer feedback data

Process: Considers with a company does with the feedback it collects

Per Vocalabs, as your customer survey model becomes more mature, companies are able to gather more actionable feedback for each dollar invested. When you laser focusing your actions on the most important areas, you will improve the customer experience faster and and with more impact.

Vocalabs published a simple, online self assessment tool on maturity, which is linked here http://www.vocalabs.com/my-maturity  Check it out!

Customer Survey Model - http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Other_business_conce_g200-Customer_Service_Survey_Form_p46440.html
Customer Survey Maturity Model – Photo by 89studio

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