I recently met up with a group of Voice of the Customer (VOC) practitioners for lunch in Atlanta. The purpose of the luncheon was to enable VOC practitioners to come together and swap ideas, network, and to get fresh ideas. For me, it was a terrific opportunity to meet folks who on a daily basis struggle to identify the best way to collect, analyze and act on VOC data; how to build political support and fund their initiatives. There were as many different industries represented as people at the table. Companies varied in size from the gargantuan down to small 50-person companies. It was a terrific cross-section of VOC practitioners. Amid the laughter and lively discussion, I noticed a few trends emerging from the conversation.
- Net Promoter Score. Everyone at the luncheon was familiar with Net Promoter and a few used a loose interpretation of it. However, most everyone acknowledged the limitations that come from only knowing a score without receiving any insights into how to improve that score. The answer seems to come down to the nature of the data collected – are you merely looking to see if they were satisfied with their past experience or do you also have a future focus by identifying current and anticipated needs. (I felt fortunate to know that enterprise feedback management (EFM) technologies, such as those offered by Allegiance, are available to help VOC leaders address this area of concern.)
- Alignment of the cosmos. Senior executives are starting to focus heavily on current customers and how to increase share of wallet and how to better measure and improve customer loyalty. Some of the luncheon attendees felt it was prompted by the recession while others felt it was the improvement of ROI analysis. All seemed to agree that they had better success gaining political support and funding when tying VOC to business outcomes.
- Balance the good with the bad. Many attendees lamented that VOC professionals focused too much on the negative feedback and to a certain extent, ignored learning how to turn positive customer experiences into phenomenal customer experiences, learning the link between revenues and movement on the customer loyalty scale, soliciting feedback about product innovation, identifying what emotional needs the company/product/service fills and how to strengthen that emotional tie.
Regardless, the VOC luncheon was a great opportunity to hear about some of the issues that are currently top of mind with today’s VOC leaders.
Matthew Bowman, Director of Campaign Marketing, Allegiance
