Allegiance Blog

More than 350 Voice of Customer (VOC) and customer experience professionals gathered today at the Metropolitan Hotel in Las Vegas for the first day of VoCFusion 2012. In temperatures approaching 100 degrees, attendees stayed cool inside and shared experiences on how to apply customer intelligence to fuel financial and operational growth.

The service model is the way your organization enables customers to do business with you. It consists of touch points that set the tone for overall customer satisfaction, trust and loyalty — including interactions with local branch operations, transactions with the phone/help center and advertising and social media outlets. Satisfaction at each of these touch points should be measured and managed to influences customer loyalty.

The fundamental goal of the fledgling CX discipline is not to gold-plate company offerings. It’s to treat target customers in a way that increases long-term company profitability. Most managers don’t get that.

You made the business case for an employee voice program, executed the survey, and responded to initial results. Now what? As the presenter of the case on the front end, you have an obligation to ensure this investment meets the promised rate of return. Here are some powerful ways to ensure the program delivers.

Today, most VOC practitioners generate insights from their data by following the basic flow of the scientific method. They pinpoint some kind of problem that they want to investigate, such as customer churn or dissatisfaction. Then they think up a hypothetical explanation (a hypothesis) that they can test. Data mining changes all that.

Brace yourself – while arguably the most important part of a successful employee engagement program, acting on the results is where things seem to get tricky for a lot of companies. Response tends to go one of three ways: 1) overwhelmed by the data; 2) defensive of the data; or 3) a sincere desire to respond to the data. However, now that you know what is most relevant to your team, you can tailor your communication and strategic direction accordingly.

in a today’s highly competitive world, companies that don’t’ do anything with customer feedback might as well not bother to gather it in the first place. The challenge (and the reward) lies in quickly analyzing feedback to identify customer insights and share them with the people who can do something about it. Here are some examples from Allegiance customers.

In my previous post, I provided some of the elements needed to make a solid business case for a formalized Voice of Employee (VOE) program. Now that you’ve got the WHY, let’s move on to the design mechanics you need to ensure your program delivers!

Intuitively, everyone seems to get it: happy employees are productive employees and productive employees impact the bottom line in countless ways. Yet, why isn’t this enough to secure funding for a systematic and ongoing employee voice program? Because you simply can’t count on translating common sense to resources in today’s business environment that relies on hard ROI figures and up-to-the-minute financial performance to drive investment. You need to make a solid business case.

During last week’s webinar with Forrester analyst Kerry Bodine, we discussed the importance of what she calls the “customer cascade,” which goes like this: Companies need to develop deep customer insight in order to design and deliver great customer experiences and ultimately reap the financial rewards that follow. Insight, action, result. It’s a true and beautiful pattern, and it’s been pretty well documented in recent years.