Advice on Collating Qualitative Data from Customer Interviews

Liam Farley

Hi everyone,

We've started a project to interview customers about their journey so far with us. Part of a wider initiative around (finally) having a customer journey mapped. Does anyone have advice on how to combine responses into themes that will inform us where to prioritise improvements to the customer journey? Importantly in a way that these are searchable and can be segmented by journey stage, region, etc? G docs and sheets feel inadequate but I'm not confident in getting some bespoke tool for this (but willing to try if people have strong recommendations).

Thanks in advance!

Steve Bernstein

Hi Liam,
What you are describing is the domain of "voice of the customer" programs (often enabled by tech such as Waypoint's TopBox, Qualitrics, Medallia, etc, which help you collect customer feedback, provide analytics, and connect with financials to help drive the right improvements.) That said, I'm glad to hear that you are looking for process, not technology, before looking at any tools/automation. 

So my short response is that you will need to tag the responses manually and then use correlation or regression techniques to derive the priority. Not sure where you are in the process so difficult to advise further. Do you have an interview guide, have your internal coalition established to be able to listen/act, and know how the effort will drive financial results?  Those are key starting points, and good processes/programs will:
1. Capture quant and qual feedback directly from the customer without suffering from a "halo effect" that often occurs with interviews. The quant piece is key so you can use stats to drive the theme, and the qualitative will inform some more specific symptoms
2. Allow you to define the relevant persona that you are seeking the feedback from, e.g. do you want to understand the sentiment of the "buying committee"/key-stakeholders along with end-users?
3. Obtain feedback during the relevant stages of the customer lifecycle. That is, getting feedback directly in the customer's lifecycle stage makes things far more actionable
4. Obtain an 80%+ participation rate -- remember that silence is a huge precursor to churn, so take the steps to demonstrate that you truly care and are listening, then replaying back what you've heard and what you are doing about it, so that you drive up engagement.
5. Surface root causes that need improvement. Know that customers will provide symptoms, so understanding the upstream disconnects that causes the missed expectations is key.

Those are my top-5 anyway, and happy to keep the discussion going!

/Steve

Liam Farley

Thanks Steve for your response and putting a name to the program (VoC).

We have an interview guide and support internally that knows this will drive financial results (the how could do with more work). I'm unsure as to your 80% participation rate point, can you please clarify what this is a component of? The number of interviewees? 

Cheers!

Anita Toth

Hey @Liam Farley. Great stuff! I love to see that your company has gone beyond surveys and is collecting interview data (which is insanely powerful). ??

In terms of driving financial results, this visual shows how the VOC program directly drives financial results:

Learn Better -- find the points in the customer journey that happy customers become unhappy 

Retain More -- take that results and make the necessary changes to remove those points

Grow Faster -- customers are happier = increase in retention and LTV 

Each iteration of the flywheel means

1) the process of discovering problems and fixing them becomes faster
2) more customers are retained because overall they are less likely to become unhappy 

Interviewing customers and bringing together all the qualitative customer data into a VOC leads to:

1. stronger and more confident business decisions
2. happier customers
3. greater opportunities for positive word-of-mouth marketing and referrals from customers

Hope this helps to see how your VOC program drives financial results. ?

Steve Bernstein

Hi @Liam Farley -- The question is, who do you want to interview? I mean, the word "customer" is very vague... I suspect you want to talk to a number of contacts across the following categories:
- by Persona: a mix of decision makers, influencers, champions, end-users, etc
- by Tier: a mix of contacts from different account segments, such as from Strategic accounts, high growth accounts, small accounts
- by Sentiment: a mix of contacts that are happy and/or successful, and those that aren't
- by Subject: you may want to "deep dive" into certain areas with certain types of contacts, such as perceptions of value, support, product, services, etc

So here's a high-level process for customer interviews that works like a charm:
1. Start with ensuring ALL the contacts that you should be communicating with (in some way) are in your CRM, ideally tagged with a persona, and if the CSM doesn't know who ALL the right contacts are by persona then this is a good opportunity for them to address that gap.
2. Ask each contact to complete a short assessment of their experiences and outcomes with your firm. The ONLY way you'll get them to complete this assessment is by demonstrating that you are listening -- just chucking an email over the wall won't do it -- but a request from the CSM or their own internal champ is good way to show them this is worth their time to participate.
3. With the high-level feedback received, you can identify common themes in which you can then drive the appropriate deep-dive interview process.
4. Call those customers with a genuine follow-up script in hand so you can get to root-cause of customer sentiment.

Some detail:
Because of all the different combinations we generally find best results from a broad program that seeks feedback from all the right contacts at the right time (i.e. where they are in their journey). With your commitment to listen and address what they tell you (in some way, not necessary 1:1 but 1:Many follow-up communique's might also be appropriate), ask your customers to *assess* the level of success and their experiences with you. Your assessment questionnaires should ask about sentiment (e.. "recommend"/NPS question) and also high level across various touchpoints (e.g. the way your company manages the relationship, provides updates, best practices, etc) and outcomes (value, success, leadership). These should be asked by PERSONA and TIER (for example, no point in asking a Decision Maker from a Strategic account to assess your Product Support! Doing so just looks silly and provides a poor experience for your customer... a VoC program had better exemplify the type of experience you want your customers to feel!).

These on-line questionnaires should take no more than 3-4 minutes for your customer contacts to complete, and this is the area in which I stated you'll want to achieve an 80%+ response rate so you truly know who's with you and who isn't, along with some high-level view of why. With this information, it becomes very clear who to contact, what you should ask them in your follow-up (the KEY is to ask what they expected and where the expectation came from so you can obtain true root-cause of their sentiment), and how to make best use of everyone's time.

We call this approach a "Relationship" assessment that gives you high-level view of what's working / needs-improvement from the customer's perspective. Now that you have that feedback, it becomes easy to follow-up with deep-dive interviews.  You now have comprehensive data about what is working and what needs improvement, why your customers feel that way, and detailed insight into customer expectations and requirements.  You'll have stronger relationships with your customers because you'll have demonstrated that you care, are listening, and are prioritizing improvements that impact them the most. What more could you want?!? :-)

Here's a whitepaper that describes this a bit more in a high-touch method, which can be automated with the appropriate technology: 
https://waypointgroup.org/whitepapers/silver-bullet-customer-health-scoring/

I hope this helps and I'm happy to elaborate,
/Steve

David Ellin

@Liam Farley, you certainly have some terrific information from my friends Steve and Anita. Given that your qualitative interviews are part of your VoC program and will come after having some quantitative data, I'd suggest making sure of three things:

1) Make certain the interviewer is deeply familiar with what products/services the customer uses and their industry (if you serve multiple industries). Believe it or not, I've seen interviewers get on the phone with a customer and ask them about products they didn't buy and never used. Embarrassing to say the least.

2) Align at least some of your questions to the quantitative scores your customer has provided where you want to dig deeper. One great interview question is, "Can you tell me why you selected the rating of X for the question about ___________?" Or stated another way, "Please tell me more about your perspective on ________." This will accomplish two important things. First, you'll show the customer you were listening and paying attention to their survey quantitative survey responses. Second, you'll get actionable information on specific survey results.

3) Thank the customer for taking the time to participate in the interview. Let them know that you will be using the information to formulate actions to drive continuous improvement (or possibly new product features). Ask them if you can circle back if others in your company would like additional insights. This will make the customer feel special - like you actually care - and their feedback is important to your company.

David

David Ellin
Senior Customer Success Consultant, Centric Leadership Strategies

Liam Farley

Yes I agree @David Ellin, thank you @Steve Bernstein and @Anita Toth for your detailed and thoughtful responses!

@Steve Bernstein, you've rekindled discussions about re-doing our personas. For point 2 about short assessments of experience, you mentioned a CSM or internal champ requesting this. I don't see the link between the request coming from those parties and showing we'll listen to their assessment. It feels like you can only show you've listened after the fact (completion of assessment) or if they complete the assessment with someone. Sorry for the confusion!

We're finding it difficult to contact those in the discovery and procurement stages of the journey as well as personas (mainly decision-makers). Does anyone have any methods that have worked for them to increase engagement from those areas, please? They're often in a separate team within an institution who we or the end-user may not actually have a specific contact for (central teams in universities can be black holes sometimes).

@David Ellin, thankfully we serve one industry (higher ed) and it's a pretty narrow usage too. I like the suggestion to follow up on the quant scores as a way to show you're listening and asking about others potentially circling back.

As you can probably appreciate we're not going to be making any radical changes to this in the last weeks of the year. But next year we'll come in hot and I'm sure will have more questions and experience to share with others too.

Thanks again!

Steve Bernstein

Hi @Liam Farley - Sorry I wasn't clear... you are right that you need the customer to truly know that you are listening, and with all the noise around "surveys" that is hard to do. So here's a few tips, and more at
https://waypointgroup.org/stop-chasing-renewals-heres-how-to-keep-customers-engaged-so-renewals-and-more-will-just-come/
1. Stop using the word "survey." No one wants to participate in surveys. "Assessments" of their experience and success are what you are after...
2. Name the program (DON't call it "NPS survey" !!) to give credence to the program and use the name whenever you can to demonstrate that it's real. Some of the program names our customers have implemented are SAP Listens, InteliSecure Tunes In, Talix Connect, etc... 
3. As part of your request to participate, show evidence that you listen. Are there actions you've taken based on customer feedback that you can use as evidence? do you have a page on the website that you can link to that describes the program as a DIFFERENTIATOR? Do you have reviews that show you listen? Etc...
4. There are 4 main steps in getting people to respond: 
  A. "Pre-note" -- this is from the CSM and could be part of an existing meeting, and let's the customer know this is "coming on [date]" and ask if will they participate. Get to YES via a "help us help you message." In other words, get them to OPT IN.
  B. For "difficult" personae (such as DMs and Influencers) the invitation should come from someone they know and trust. Engage your CHAMPION (once they've opted in to participate) to ask their colleagues to opt in and the best way to do this is to be transparent in the responses... your champ certainly ALSO wants to know what everyone around their company is thinking and feeling about you, so a commitment to share and collaborate on the improvements (Joint Success Planning for larger accounts) would be in order.
  C. Invitations should come from management (the most senior "believable" person), and reminders can come from the CSM as part of their push to get a high participation rate (shoot for 80%... it's doable and we see it all the time). A persona outreach from the CSM to drive up the response after the invitation was sent also helps.
  D. Don't forget the follow-up after the response. This keeps your customer contacts engaged, demonstrates listening, and strengthens relationships!  Don't waste the opportunity!

Hope this help and happy to continue this excellent discussion... thanks, Liam!

/Steve

David Ellin

Great info, @Steve Bernstein. I'd like to suggest one additional idea.

If your survey/assessment emails are coming from a system outside of the company's email system, make sure to inform the customer what the email extension is. Otherwise, it may be rejected by their company's security software or email system. Ask them to have their IT department "white list" the extension so the emails get delivered to the intended participants.

David

Liam Farley

Thanks again Steve and David for the great tips, particularly leveraging champions to reach the more difficult personas. I've started down the rabbit hole of related articles Steve. This will be an ongoing source of value as we delve into this in the new year.

Cheers!