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.

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?

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?

Together with price and product, customer voice has become the accepted third tool that top companies use to beat out the competition. These companies are doing more than merely measuring customer satisfaction or driving marketing campaigns. They are using customer feedback to drive change among their many business units. Read on for some specific examples.

Your customers are comparing experiences as they deal with top-notch customer-focused organizations. It is important to determine how your organization’s customer experience stacks up against other experiences your customers are having on both the business and the consumer sides. Read more to learn the three steps that will help you begin to plan the best experience for your customers.

A sold out attendance Voice of Customer (VOC) professionals and Customer Intelligence experts gathered Monday at the Allegiance Engage Summit to share experiences and discover new ways to leverage customer insights to drive business growth. Read on for some highlights from today’s speakers.

The brand promise is the expectation that you set about your brand with your customers. Each of your touchpoints reinforces and fulfills the brand’s promise. Creating a customer interaction map forces you to think about the customer lifecycle and to consider or visualize the experience at each touchpoint – and ultimately, it identifies where the brand promise is broken.