Allegiance Blog

Many VOC professionals have realized that in order to add value to the organization, they must spend less time telling a VOC story and more time telling a business story. Think of this new approach as a fundamental mental shift starting with the VOC leadership team. You must ensure that the data you collect is actionable and relevant to other business leaders in the organization. The best way to do this is by asking leaders what they really want from you instead of giving them what you think they want.

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The design of any world-class customer feedback program should include a closed loop process that makes the customers feel that they have been heard and promotes learning about what to do to improve the business in ways that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Think about the many customer touchpoints of your organization, and then think about the various departments in your organization that might be asking customers for feedback at each of those touchpoints. It can be quite overwhelming — for you and for your customers! To make sense of it all, you should compile a Customer Feedback Map to accompany your Customer Touchpoint Map.

The core objective of your feedback program is not to drive improved survey metrics. The ultimate objective is increased business performance and improved results. Dutifully reporting to a senior executive or business unit owner that “customer engagement scores have increased for the past eight quarters” is nice. Telling that same audience that “in this same time period, quarterly sales increases of 8%, on average, and a steady decline in customer attrition of 24% have been associated with increased customer engagement” is a much more compelling story.

Most companies are good at collecting data from customers. In fact, it’s common practice to have a customer feedback program in place. However, for some companies, dealing with the results is when things begin to get fuzzy. What are our customers trying to tell us? And how do we take that information and use it to effectively improve the customer experience?

Here at Allegiance, we continue to see more companies choosing to rescue customers in real time rather than wait months for the results of a large customer satisfaction survey. These businesses are embracing a new approach to traditional customer research that gives companies the ability to collect feedback from social media, engage customers in real time and use advanced analytics to understand what makes customer tick and predict what they’ll want.

Social media has become the no. 1 online activity, so it’s essential for businesses to pay attention. When a small percentage of customers share their experiences with your company via social media, you have an opportunity to engage or re-engage these customers.

Sales managers are increasingly looking into 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.

Too many businesses focus solely on the minds of customers and forget the importance of connecting emotionally – to customers’ hearts. What drives their passion, loyalty and engagement?

Customers make decisions about staying or leaving a business relationship based upon a multitude of factors – and attitude and emotion play major roles. By collecting feedback in real time, and at all possible customer interaction points, a company can learn firsthand what customers think when interactions happen and why customers become emotionally charged.