Allegiance Blog

For a good number of the Vice Presidents of Sales, the economy is forcing them to rely upon cross/up-selling current customers to generate anywhere from 10% to 50% of their annual quota.  One of their big concerns is the increase in customer attrition.  Given the current cost and difficulty of acquiring new customers, customer attrition is not only making it very difficult to meet sales quotas but it is also eating into the company’s overall profitability.  

An old idea that is gaining new popularity among sales managers is the idea of using customer feedback tools (surveys, Twitter, etc) to help identify customers who are likely to defect to the competition and rescue them before it is too late.  Although not fool proof, I’ve seen companies identify and rescue 6,300 customers over a single year representing over $2.2 million in recovered revenues.  

Care needs to be given to basic survey administration best practices to avoid the problems of survey fatigue, useless data, and to ensure at-risk customers are contacted in a timely and proper manner.  For tips on avoiding the most common customer feedback pitfalls, see Bob Thompon’s post “Five Voice of the Customer Pitfalls.”

We hear it from businesses every day – how can they gather customer feedback from surveys, social media, Web, e-mail, call centers, etc. and respond quickly to avoid losing customers? And what is the best way to turn feedback into insights that can be acted upon to improve their business?

Allegiance conducted blind focus groups and interviews with top VOC practitioners for two years to identify their greatest challenges. Based on their input, today we are launching Engage7, the first Voice of the Customer (VOC) platform that integrates social media and mobile/SMS feedback management, text analytics, ad-hoc and transactional surveys and powerful reporting into a fully automated VOC offering.

Rather than using traditional market research for customer insights, businesses can now use Allegiance Engage7 to directly collect and control real-time customer feedback data from multiple sources, including transactional and relationship surveys, multi-channel feedback (e-mail, phone, Twitter, Web) and unstructured customer comments.

Engage7:

• Integrates feedback into a single, integrated platform
• Provides a full view of multi-channel customer feedback in real time 
• Gathers and analyzes feedback from multiple sources — social media, Mobile/SMS, e-mail, phone, Web — together with research survey responses from ad-hoc and transactional surveys and unstructured customer comments
• Includes advanced text analytics based on natural language processing to automatically read open-ended comments and freeform text

Companies benefit by:

• Eliminating multiple feedback monitoring tools, saving time and money
• Accessing real-time and continuous data so they can rescue or up-sell more easily
• Automatically turning freeform comments into quantitative data that can be acted upon
• Selectively identifying Tweets about a transaction or purchase so they can improve the customer experience in real time
• Taking action to boost customer retention, differentiate their business and grow revenues faster

Customers are increasingly in control of the conversation, and companies need to be able to respond quickly to retain customers. Engage7 will accelerate the way companies attain critical customer insights and make business decisions.

A new research report from industry analyst firm Aberdeen Group called “Customer Experience Management: Engaging Loyal Customers to Evangelize Your Brand” reveals how organizations that achieve superior performance in customer retention and customer satisfaction grow and harvest customer advocates.

Some of the most compelling survey findings include:

- 70% of firms that enjoyed Best-in-Class performance periodically used customer feedback to influence strategic decisions (versus 29% of Laggards). [By comparison, the report notes that even though "70% of Industry Average organizations indicated they collected customer feedback...only half of these organizations actually used feedback to influence strategic decisions."]

- 96% of respondents saw value in formalizing a strategy to encourage or incent loyal customers to promote the brand, product or service.

- 37% of respondents currently have a formal program in place to systematically identify and encourage loyal customers to become advocates for the brand, product, or service.

- Over the next 12 months, more than three-quarters of all organizations will either have in place, or be in the process of pursuing, a formalized program to promote customer advocacy.

The report also cites a  March 2009 Aberdeen study titled “The ROI on Customer Feedback: Why It Pays to Listen to the Voice of the Customer” which found that the number one pressure driving investments in customer feedback initiatives is to increase customer retention and customer loyalty.

Since every interaction that a business has with a customer is an opportunity to positively influence the customer experience as well as grow customer retention, customer loyalty and customer advocacy, it makes sense that customer feedback has become a critical component in these initiatives.

Kimberly Mathie, MarComm Manager, Allegiance

There’s certainly a lot to be said about the importance of listening to customers, especially in the current economic environment. And in these new videos, some industry experts highlight the importance of not only listening to customers via a formal voice of the customer (VOC) program , but also increasing your customer retention efforts.

1) A new video interview with Spencer Tall, Managing Director of Allegis Capital, on ”Why Listening to Customers is Critical”.

2) A new video interview with Todd Rowe, Group VP & General Manager, WW Mid-Market Division, SAP, on customer retention and the importance of the voice of the customer (VOC) in this economy.

Kevin Mellander, Director of Customer Care, Allegiance