As associations catch on to the value that comes from listening to the Voice of the Member, and more and more associations start asking their members questions, trends are emerging that are paving the path for success. Here are a few that I’ve found in my research in the PropFuel customer base.
1. Connection, not content. According to Community Brands Technology Adoption Report, “Super Members” are improving on the loyalty spectrum whereas everyone else is falling off. Specifically, looking at 3 categories of members: Value Seekers, Rank and File Members and Super Members, the metric for member loyalty decreased over the course of the last two years for the Value Seekers and Rank and File, but the loyalty for Super Members increased dramatically. Naturally, there’s plenty of room for interpretation here, but the trend is that associations today need to create a stronger connection with their members rather than focus on the typical discounts and publications, if they want to grow a strong and loyal member base. Capturing the Voice of the Member is a strategic approach to listening and creating a dialog with your members. This results in creating a stronger relationship and connection converting and recruiting more Super Members. Super members are advocates and carry their membership with pride.
2. Continuous insights rather than periodic studies - Annual or periodic surveys have their purpose. It’s research. It’s a good way to dissect your members and study them. The challenge is that typically you’re getting a very low response rate of 10% or so, and it’s a snapshot in time. It’s far from a dialog or a way to maintain a pulse on your member’s sentiment. Regular check-in’s allow for an association to capture the Voice of the Member at major milestones along the member journey telling us why they’re doing what they’re doing and how they feel about it when it really matters, not a year later. Regular checkin’s tend to drive a much higher response due to the mechanism of being able to ask 1 or 2 questions with a very frictionless way for the member to respond directly in the email or on the website. A good example is in the New Member Journey. When a new member joins the association, we want feedback throughout their first year, NOT after they choose to let their membership lapse. We also want to be able to take action on their feedback immediately. Ask the member why they joined and your platform should send an automated response correlated to how they answered the question. Relationships are formed with many touchpoints, not one long survey.
3. Merging sentiment with behavioral and transactional data - Most associations know what their members are doing but they don’t know why. The behaviors are the WHAT. But behaviors are triggered by sentiment, or desire, and that’s the WHY. If you understand the why, then it becomes possible to understand the needs of your members much better. Behavioral and transaction data represents a members reaction to what you put in front of them, whereas sentiment data tells you what to put in front of them to begin with. Sentiment is the cheat sheet for how to please a member.
4. Better technology - Technology is way better today than it was even 5 years ago. Remember that even the iPhone hasn’t been around very long. Think about the evolution of enterprise platforms. Artificial Intelligence is actually a useful tool now, not some science fiction concept in a movie with robots and automation is common-place in our marketing. So when we talk about Voice of the Member, we’re actually talking about interactive listening. That’s a combination of better listening capabilities combined with better action-centric behavior. We can capture feedback better than ever with greater response rates and react or respond to it with automation and artificial intelligence so that we can engage thousands of people at scale and use humans to interact with exactly the right people at exactly the right time.
5. Listening beyond the customer. Employee feedback and partner feedback provide another perspective of what we need to know to run a healthy ecosystem and to tell us even more about our members. Our employees are the ones interacting with members every day. Isn’t it possible that they may know something about our members that’s worth hearing? And aside from the customer feedback, wouldn’t it be valuable to listen to what our employees want and need in their roles to feel fulfilled? Thriving employees perform better and are far less expensive to an organization than one where turnover is high. By creating a customer-centric culture, your employees will bend over backwards to create an amazing experience for members in each and every interaction. Strangely, 95% of company leaders claim to be “customer focused”, yet only 31% of organizations recognize and reward employees for improving customer experience. (Source: Zoominfo Customer Engagement Stats)
6. Hyper-customization - Hyper-customization means that we’re not talking to segments anymore, we’re talking to individuals based on their personal interests. This doesn’t require complex software or an expensive marketing system. For example, using PropFuel, ask a question and an action will respond to the member based on how they answered the question. That’s hyper-customization. Stop pushing boulders and start moving pebbles. In other words, stop sending canned drip campaigns to new members and existing members in groups when you’re supposed to know them already and focus on the individual members by offering them content and information specific to their needs and desires. Of course, this requires asking members questions to identify what they need at the individual level. That’s the Voice of the Member.
7. Everyone has a voice. Social media has trained us that we have a voice. Take out your phone and find a popular social media influencer in your Instagram account or on Facebook. I’ll do it right now… I follow Arnold Schwarzenegger on Instagram, for whatever reason. He made a post earlier today and it has 2,495 comments. Who’s reading those? It doesn’t matter. People don’t care. They just want to say something. And that’s the thing. People want to say something at every juncture. Are you giving your members that opportunity? Here’s another example. I had dinner at a dive bar in my hometown tonight. I’m not proud, but it’s the truth. Poopsie’s is a small, local hangout and they’re known for their one-size bar pizza. They have 119 reviews on Yelp. Customers will say something if given the opportunity. Amazon has reviews and ratings for every product you can imagine. Native deodorant has 1,424 reviews. Who feels that strongly about their deodorant?!? But people have a voice and they want to use it. Each month, Yelp and Trip Advisor have 750 million reviews, while Facebook has 5 billion comments. People expect to be able to say something. Maybe not in the 80’s or 90’s but today you must give your members an outlet to talk to you.
8. A Focus on Customer Journeys, not transactions - Most organizations at this point have acknowledged that transactions are just a subset of the member journey. The voice of the Customer is designed to capture feedback at each moment along the customer journey allowing the organization to build an ongoing relationship, or a connection with the individual. Transactions alone do not lead to relationships. Below are some stats from a Bain & Company report supporting the value of focusing on the customer experience as opposed to transactions alone.
- Superior experiences deliver 6-14x higher customer lifecycle value
- Voice of customer programs result in up to 55% greater client retention
- Companies that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4-8% above their competition
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