The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Seemed appropriate for a rainy, pastoral type of day:

 

NICE Systems, which sells products that lets enterprises and security organizations "extract insight from interactions," according to company officials, and AnswerOn, which sells customer retention, acquisition and loyalty products to telecommunications service providers, have announced that Cincinnati Bell has selected the joint NICE-AnswerOn Customer Churn Reduction product.

 

It integrates NICE Interaction Analytics and transactional data analytics from AnswerOn.

The end-to-end product helps Cincinnati Bell create more accurate churn prediction models by integrating multidimensional analysis results into their churn reduction models: "It cross-references customer interaction and transactional data, and alerts customer retention personnel in near real-time," company officials say.

 

It helps Cincinnati Bell build offers for at-risk customers, deliver the offers and basically measure, monitor and fine-tune the effectiveness of churn models and retention offerings. It's deployed in a hosted model via a managed service.

 

Jeff Baker, Director of Planning and Support at Cincinnati Bell, says to provide service to our customers and ensure customer satisfaction, "we need to be able to use insights from both customer interactions and from transactional data."

 

 For instance, he explained, "if we see highly emotional calls, combined with a drop in phone usage, this requires our immediate attention or a change in the service package." Indeed. More red flags in one place would qualify as a Communist march.

 

"Retaining subscribers is vital, where a mere two percent monthly churn rate can result in many millions of dollars lost on a monthly basis, even for mid-sized service providers," said Barak Eilam, president of Interactions Business Applications at NICE.

...

Marketo, a marketing automation company, was honored with "Best Mass E-mail" product as part of Salesforce.com's AppExchange Best of '09 Awards. Winners were determined based on feedback and reviews from Salesforce.com customers, according to Salesforce.com officials, who added that Marketo's mass e-mail product has received more than 45 reviews with perfect 5-star ratings for ease of use, value, and support.

 

Last year Marketo Lead Management also won the AppExchange Best of '08 Award for "Best Marketing Automation" product.

 

Phil Fernandez, president and CEO, Marketo, said "receiving an AppExchange Best of Award two years in a row and continuing to earn perfect 5-star reviews from our customers is proof of our customer success-focused culture at work."

 

Hundreds -- hundreds, friends, hundreds -- of companies around the world are now using Marketo products, company officials say, to "manage e-mail dialogues with each and every sales prospect, create lead nurturing and lead scoring campaigns, and measure and analyze marketing effectiveness with less effort - resulting in increased lead conversion, higher response rates, and improved efficiencies."

 

The Mass E-mails category, one of ten separate categories, recognizes products that let users build segmented e-mail lists, create and distribute e-mail templates, and track post e-mail drop activity within Salesforce CRM.

...

 Benefit Software, a Software as a Service provider of online employee benefits enrollment and communication products, has announced the results of its 2010 client/employee satisfaction survey, finding that more than 90 percent of employees polled give Fringe Facts Online high marks as a tool that helps them make decisions regarding their benefit elections.

 

Employee satisfaction surveys are important to the Fringe Facts Online service, as employers use survey results to improve their employees' online enrollment experience.

 

Results from this year's ninth annual survey include the following nuggets:

 

·         For nine consecutive years, more than 90 percent of surveyed employees report that they found their online enrollment service easy to use.

·         For nine consecutive years, more than 90 percent of surveyed employees report that they would like to use the online service again.

·         For nine consecutive years, 8 out of 10 employees report that the online enrollment resources helped them make more informed decisions.

 

Sounds like the past nine years have been fairly stable.

 

Decision support tools have become more important as plans are increasingly complex and employers have given employees more responsibility in selecting their own options. In fact, Towers Watson's Annual Enrollment 2010 Flash Survey found that getting employees to understand new plan features was "the biggest challenge employers faced."

 

So to address the challenge, nearly half of employers surveyed -- 45 percent, nearly half indeed -- offered online decision-support tools to assist employees with their decisions, and three-quarters (do your own math) believe employees altered their plan decisions based on the use of these tools.

 

"Altered" to mean "improved," of course.

 

William Smith, Vice President of Sales at Benefit Software, said "starting in 2009, some of our larger clients asked us to drill down further into their survey results. We started to analyze satisfaction by gender, years of service, age, salary, and employee status. We also measured how these population segments used online resources and rated benefit options."

 

These larger clients, Smith said, have seen "statistically significant differences in responses in areas such as overall satisfaction and web site resource usage."

...

When Domino's Pizza asked consumers to tell the truth, it ended up back at the proverbial drawing board. Cutting board, sorry.

 

Recently, Domino's Pizza did something practically unheard of in the business world. First, it asked its customers for honest feedback. Second, it actually listened to the painful truth -- according to its documentary ad, "The Pizza Turnaround," unflattering words like "cardboard" and "totally void of flavor" were tossed about with abandon.

 

Finally -- and here's the shocking part -- the company reinvented its product from the crust up.

Do you listen to your customers like this? Don't be too sure, says new product development expert Dan Adams, who said instead of giving your customers what they want, you're most likely giving them what you want them to want.

 

Adams, author of New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth, says most companies are starting with a product and trying to talk their customers into giving it their stamp of approval: "What looks like soliciting feedback is really a bit of a dog and pony show."

 

Ask your customers what they want in a way that lets them know you really hear them, Adams advises: "A lot of companies pay lip service to this idea. As consumers we've all had survey cards slapped down in front of us or fielded post-purchase telemarketing calls. Reconsider how you are collecting customer feedback. Are you doing it in a way that really engages the customer so that you can get the truth?"

 

If you watch Domino's ad, you can see how ego-crushing it was for the company's employees to hear customers speak their minds about the flavorless crust and ketchupy sauce. Yet, you can also see how necessary it was for them to hear the harsh truth, Adams says -- it energized them to revamp their product and make it much, much better.