Business intelligence often involves analyzing and processing large batches of data to make informed decisions. The ability to sort through and take action on data is vital for leaders grounded in strategy, but it can be challenging to leverage this approach to personalize communications with individual customers. Many platforms excel at identifying aggregate patterns from the data, but don’t offer a way to home in on the details of individual situations.
For Carol Fallon, being able to care for the individual is the make-or-break factor in customer service. In her role as senior director of operations at Lionbridge, personalization is everything. Lionbridge is a global company that offers translation and localization services to help its clients truly speak the language of the communities they serve. The company aims to give its customers the same level of consideration, focusing on the details that matter.
“One of our key goals is #NeverLate, where we strive to never provide a late deliverable to any of our customers,” Carol says. In 2019, Lionbridge began exploring ways to update their customer service model to meet the goal of always sending deliverables on time. A key piece of this model was the rollout of a Net Promoter Score (NPS) program.
Integrating a systematic NPS program
Lionbridge already had an internal system in place for collecting customer feedback, but Carol says it didn’t quite provide the level of detail the team needed.
“It did track compliments and complaints, but it was clunky to use and did not have an industry standard scoring such as Net Promoter Score,” she says.
Implementing an NPS program would create a system able to balance the big picture and individual customer needs. Carol and the operations team set an initial goal of reaching an NPS of 35, keeping the “never late” aspiration at the forefront. To get the level of detail needed, Lionbridge would need a suite of tools that could work together seamlessly. The platforms would need to provide a way to “slice and dice data” and see the big picture alongside the minute details.
“We needed to see key strengths and weaknesses across the organization, comparing quarter to quarter or year over year, and have a systematic way to action the feedback across accounts."
-Carol Fallon, senior director of operations, Lionbridge
To ensure adoption across the organization, Lionbridge needed a dashboard to showcase these pieces in one place. The solution came in the form of Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI) integrated with SurveyMonkey.
Diving deep into customer feedback to fuel success
To start, Lionbridge launched an NPS program across 40 customer accounts. Surveys are sent through SurveyMonkey, and the team can respond within the same platform, streamlining the process of connecting with individual customers. NPS and feedback data is then combined with other data sources in Power BI dashboards. Visualizations within the dashboard are used by teams across Lionbridge to understand patterns and dive in on areas for improvement quickly.
“We can drill into specific areas in the dashboard and then use that information in our team meetings,” Carol says. “Our CEO uses the dashboard in his meetings to review the current NPS, we can also give kudos to teams that are doing really well and call out areas in which we need to implement an improvement plan.”
Power BI and SurveyMonkey are used daily across Lionbridge’s teams. With this new model, Lionbridge has expanded the list of stakeholders it collects feedback from. Rather than sending surveys to the main contact at each client organization, teams can survey individuals at different levels of the client’s business, providing better insight into how projects and deliverables are benefitting each individual and enabling the team to make personal connections. The Power BI dashboard provides a level of detail the previous internal system couldn’t deliver, Carol says.
Improved customer sentiment and individual connections
Since implementing the suite of tools, Lionbridge’s team has seen a fast return on investment, and the NPS goal soon raised 30%. One of the first teams to launch NPS started realized an increase of 86% from 2019 to 2020. Carol notes that there has also been a 20% uptick in the number of survey responses compared to the previous system, providing more opportunities to connect with customers to help them solve challenges.
“I can think of one customer specifically where the rest of his team gave us a high score, and his was low,” Carol says. “We were able to connect with him to work on the issues and get a positive score; really, he wanted someone to listen and understand his challenges.” Carol says using the Power BI and SurveyMonkey integration has increased transparency across Lionbridge, fueling customer success. The initial rollout of the NPS program covered 40 clients, and Carol expects to have 500 online by the end of 2021. Carol also plans to automate more parts of the process and begin using the system to tie customer service to revenue.
“Using SurveyMonkey and Power BI has improved our customer sentiment, and that’s going to have real business impact,” Carol says.
Integrate customer feedback and NPS into Microsoft Power BI dashboards with SurveyMonkey Enterprise.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.
