Working in an industry that has flat or declining growth is like enjoying your time on the deck of a sinking ship. My years at Allegiance have been the opposite; they have been marked with positive vibes and filled with excitement as a new industry finds its foothold and begins to grow. These job-growth charts from Indeed.com showcase the growth of our industry:
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?
The future of business will change dramatically with executives from the VOC world helping to shape decisions. An organization with greater actionable data is fundamentally different, and better. More actionable insight in the hands of the right people means a business is better able to act quickly. Of course, more money is likely to be made, which is usually the primary goal of business. But even better (I think) is that employees will feel more empowered, see the value of data in action and feel the joy of making smart decisions. And customers love a business that listens and then responds.
So 2012 will bring a lot of opportunity to the VOC/CX industry. Business will improve as a result. And, I hope that each of you realize the value you bring to your company. When everything is exposed in a business, it’s really people and processes that make things happen. With better VOC, people can be more effective and processes improve.
Far from a sinking ship, our industry is healthy and growing for many reasons. Thanks to all of you for helping to make that happen. Here’s my challenge to you: Think Big. You can change your organization for the better by bringing together business data, feedback and survey data, and creating more actionable insights.
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.
With a solid VoC initiative underway and having firmly established their guidance as critical to their organization’s success, many mature VoC teams are turning to more sophisticated analysis, reporting and forecasting. They are looking for opportunities for continuous improvement. I applaud these efforts and will be thrilled to see what 2012 brings to these VoC pioneers and their programs.
Remember to Sweat the Small Stuff
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 More »
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:
1. Well-defined goals and objectives: Successful VOC managers know what overall business objectives are at stake, why they are collecting the data and how they are going to use that data to make decisions.
2. Executive buy-in and internal support: Successful practitioners work alongside the executive team in communicating and sharing important customer feedback and VOC program goals and objectives with all employees.
3. A formal VOC program: Managers who follow best practices set up multiple communication channels for customers to communicate with the company. They help create and implement formal processes to support customer feedback data collection and management efforts.
Read More »
At last year’s Allegiance Engage Summit, Billy Beane gave attendees an insightful and entertaining presentation on the importance of analytics. With the movie Moneyball being released this week, it’s a good time to re-visit this blog post and how it applies to VOC.
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? At the basic level, you both have employees, operational metrics, and outcomes. But there are more similarities. Do these sound familiar?
1. Traditional key metrics used to measure performance
2. Undervalued or undiscovered insights that can make a big difference
3. Analytics to aid decision making and resource allocation
4. Competitors that have much larger budgets
On the heels of the Allegiance Engage Summit, I re-read Moneyball by Michael Lewis. This time, my copy was autographed by Billy Beane himself. Beane’s inspirational Summit talk reminded us that sports and business have much in common: metrics, analytics, and insights that can provide teams and businesses with unfair advantages.
Read More »
Allegiance recently conducted a focus group of Voice of Customer (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? Here are a few of the responses:
- Ability to leverage CRM to the Voice of Customer.
- Integrate multiple sources across customer communication channels, so that social surveys, e-mails etc., are able to be pulled in, in an integrated fashion.
- A better way to ensure smart dissemination of information so that the data isn’t sliced and diced down to levels that don’t make sense.
- Access to applications that go beyond surveys and reporting.
- Higher ease of use especially, as we work with champions who aren’t analysts. (Apple-ize it.)
- Rolling up both the transactional and loyalty data that we’re collecting over time into some sort of cold, warm, or hot type of flag for sales.
- Automated way to have the system go through segmentations and give something at the end that says “this went up, this went down” instead of having to go through the same charts every quarter to figure it out.
- In those cases with very targeted feed back systems on accounts, we need a way to audit who was surveyed and when, and flag inconsistencies.
- Being able to prepare the 360 degree view of the customer. “I don’t want an account rep to go out on an account, not armed with information that is in the transactional survey aboutan issue that has been brewing for 6 months.”
- Consistent tool set to eliminate all the manual work and eliminate bias. (Different people code the same thing differently, based on their bias.)
Read More »
There is a lot of talk in the industry about making Voice of Customer data more actionable. But to achieve this, you must first understand the type of data that is uniquely available and actionable in a successful VOC program.
Actionable data is data that you can use to improve the operations of the company. It goes beyond answering “what” to understanding “why.”
VOC programs fail most often because they provide just scores, changes in scores, or data that is only part of the solution. This only tells business managers that their SAT scores are down this month without telling them the reasons why or pointing out comments and stats to help them see the impact of fixing the problem.
If you present your VOC results as broader business story, rather than just a VOC/SAT report, success will skyrocket. It is hard to do, and requires thinking big, being ready to tackle processes beyond your job scope, and thinking like an executive.
Unfortunately, many VOC practitioners place their efforts on the collection side, improving surveys and feedback mechanisms. They need to think more strategically about VOC data. More surveys are not the answer, but more strategically designed feedback mechanisms that yield actionable data is what is needed.
Read More »
With the growth of digital transactions, more consumer data is becoming available through smartphones, GPS, mobile banking, etc. The availability of “big data” means marketers and customer experience professionals have the potential to gain deeper insight into customer behavior.
For Voice of Customer data, the combination of data mining and text analytics provides the best analysis method. Text analytics turns comments on social media or the web into structured data that can be analyzed. Data mining can be applied to uncover the hidden value of the information or link it to other sources to compare trends and relationships.
Ideally, the variables culled from text analytics are used alongside structured and transactional data from many other databases (such as customer satisfaction scores, geographic data, demographics, purchase and usage histories, product-feature data, etc.)
Through data mining, we can identify and refine patterns and trends among the hundreds, even thousands of variables that often come with “big data.” We can then make predictions based on information obtained from analyzing and exploring this data.
Read More »
Forrester recently announced the winners of its 2011 Voice of the Customer Awards at the Customer Experience Forum. We were very pleased to see JetBlue, a customer of Allegiance, among the winners, and another Allegiance customer, EMC Corp., among the finalists.
Although the idea is not new, companies are now actually achieving competitive advantage by using customer feedback. 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. For example:
Operations: JetBlue has used customer feedback from a wide variety of channels to drive operational changes that resulted in improving the compliment to complaint ratio for Flight Attendants by 300%, reducing the number of passengers with LiveTV issues by 10%, and dramatically improving customer satisfaction scores at specific airport locations.
Read More »
Ok, let’s face it. A lot of the blogs posted by VOC experts and those offering VOC solutions focus around best practice, what the research says, or perhaps it may be just one person’s opinion. That is a not bad thing; it is helpful, entertaining and gives us something to consider.
However, this time, I thought I would let you hear what a couple of leading practitioners in the VOC space are saying.
Some time ago, Allegiance began hosting weekly broadcasts (that turn into podcasts) on BlogTalk Radio. Yes, talk radio on the Internet. The topics have ranged from survey design best practices to social media, and I have to say, Allegiance is gaining quite an audience.
Recently, at the Allegiance Summit, I took the opportunity to host some interviews of some of the leaders and trendsetters in the VOC world. So this month, rather than read my blog post, I’d like you to listen to my blog post.
- Arkadi Kuhlmann: Chairman, President and CEO of ING Bank. http://tinyurl.com/64veskq
- Jim Bampos: Vice President of Customer Quality at EMC corporation. http://tinyurl.com/6z4t6q8
Read More »
As a light snow fell in Park City, Utah, hundreds of Voice of Customer (VOC) professionals and customer intelligence experts gathered for day two of the Allegiance Engage Summit. Attendees enjoyed great speakers and hands-on workshops that focused on how to uncover and apply insights from customer feedback to achieve positive business outcomes.
Here are some highlights from Tuesday’s speakers:
Guy Kawasaki, Author and Former Apple Chief Evangelist
Guy Kawasaki at Engage Summit
- Business should focus on becoming more likeable and trustworthy while engaging customers to win more business.
- Companies should “remove the speed bumps” and make it easier for customers to do business with them.
- Default to Yes – always be thinking “How can I help this person.”
- Keep your message simple and tell a story to get the message across.
- Plant many seeds, engage with many and enchant all the influencers.
Read More »
