Keith Schorah

The Next Installment in our series of 12 Trends in Voice of the Customer for 2012 looks at the crunching large amounts of data and examining customer preferences to make the customer experience part of the brand:

Making customer insight part of the brand experience

Customer feedback is increasingly being used in company strategy and has become a rich source of insight. As collecting feedback becomes more frequent, companies will look to integrate feedback gathering into the brand experience. The methods of collection will be matched to the brand with integration into the total experience in mind.

Data Rich Environments

With the increase in available channels for customer feedback, a huge amount of data is being gathered from customers. Channels such as social media create a large amount of useful data, but there is a necessity to analyse this data in order to gain insight. An increase in the complexity and speed of analysis will allow companies to learn...

It pays to please your customers. According to the Retail eyes report, 74% of customers would be prepared to pay more for a product if it came with better service. Data gathered through a voice of the customer platform gives a valuable insight into how customers feel about your service. For the most part, companies use focus on the data which tells them what they have done wrong or what their customers don’t like. But why wait to respond to Negative feedback? By focusing only on the negative, these companies are being reactive; fixing issues after they have affected the customer experience – incurring the risk of churn and cost of resolving issues.

So how do you become proactive? Circulating positive insight throughout the company can help to bring the customer into the minds of everyone in the business and motivate a customer centric culture. The same positive insight can also be used to guide best practice to best serve the customer.

By combining with key...

Collecting feedback is only the first step in the journey to improving the customer experience. The act of gathering feedback from customers in itself raises the expectation that action will be taken. Many of the top companies are realising that there is a need to close the loop by getting back to customers to ensure any issues are resolved.

By consistently closing the loop on customer issues, a database of solutions to issues is built up. Analysis of this database will identify recurring issues. With this knowledge, efforts can be focused to allow similar issues and their cause to be resolved by a single improvement action.

Closing the loop is the first step to learning from customer feedback. By implementing improvements, past sins can be avoided and as customers start to see action being driven from their feedback, loyalty grows.

Companies often don’t realise how many interactions they have with customers. These touch points can be at different stages of the buying process. It is fundamental that a company needs to understand what each of these relevant stages are. Customer journey mapping allows not only visualisations of these touch points to be created, but the process of developing the journey map will create organisational learning of the service elements and communications which are key to delivering a positive customer experience at each stage.

Using the customer journey map, an event based sampling strategy can be implemented. Feedback can be measured at each key stage, triggered by an event such as after a service call. Such a strategy can provide sufficient insight to drive improvements of each stage, which will contribute to driving improvements in the customers overall experience. Determining the points at which feedback is gathered ensures that feedback is timely and relevant.

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