Allegiance Blog

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.

If you don’t proactively design your customer experience, one will be provided for you. How easy is it to buy your product or service? Is your customer’s experience littered with overly complicated phone trees, slow response times, or unknowledgeable staff? Have you mapped out your customer’s experience and do you thoroughly understand all of the points of contact with your typical customer?

In our professional lives, surveys are an indispensable tool in our enterprise voice arsenal. When combined with operational data, business performance metrics, social media chatter and other less-structured forms of customer voice (e.g. call center logs, online comment cards, in-bound emails and letters), survey results form the critical foundation of a rich and robust voice of the enterprise choir.

You may have been in the data gathering business in the past, but the future lies with data insights. You cannot gather more data only to deliver tepid insights. Your value and your place at the highest levels of the company is weakened by this result. However, your value is highest when you deliver insights to the right people and help them act upon them.

Both Forrester Research and Gartner have predicted continued annual growth of between 15-20% for the customer experience and voice of customer industries. At Allegiance, we certainly see this growth happening. But what kind of changes will occur as more corporate boards, c-suites and leadership teams add savvy VOC pros? How will business change as a result of the insight that comes from these experienced people adding their voice to the mix, and sharing the data they produce?

This is the first in a series of blog posts regarding use of features and functions available in the Allegiance Engage7 Voice of Customer platform. Allegiance Engage7 has several advanced survey campaign analytic capabilities that enable you to treat invitation data as first-class data, similar to response data. We realize that who is invited, how many responses you get, and the response rate are vital to data analysis.

It has been a joy to watch our clients’ Voice of Customer initiatives season and mature over the last few years. Some things do get better with age, and a finely-honed VoC initiative is no exception. This is a reminder, however, to continue sweating the small stuff. Specifically, I mean reacting to tactical customer feedback in a prompt fashion: Addressing customer concerns and complaints swiftly and sincerely with empathy, and responding quickly to customer compliments to reinforce their enthusiasm. Read this post for an excellent example.

Best practice companies are not only listening to voice of the customer, but they are using that feedback to increase customer retention and loyalty, solve customer challenges and develop new products and services. They are also using new technologies to streamline surveys and feedback management programs to gain a better understanding of why customers do business with them. From our experience working with them, here are nine habits that make them successful.

What do Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, and your
company’s Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives have in common? Metrics, analytics, and
insights that can provide teams and businesses with unfair advantages.

Allegiance recently conducted a focus group of VOC practitioners at leading companies. One of the questions asked was: What is on your wish list for what you’d like to see in a VOC program in the future? Read this post to view a few of the responses and add your own.