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.

Join us for Allegiance Radio in 2011. Every week, Allegiance will announce the weekly topic and time along with the URL to connect to the live broadcasts. These will come as tweets on the Allegiance Twitter account or Allegiance on Facebook. You are invited to “call in” to chat live on the air, or you can listen after the airing of the broadcast via podcast on iTunes or any other audio playback device.

The focus of VOC is not to gather more surveys and data; it is to create actionable business intelligence that moves the needle. VOC practitioners are not great at this second part today, but getting better, and quickly. This is the reason VOC programs are gaining quick adoption now when they have stalled in the past. VOC best practices require a shift from data gathering, creating charts and reports, to providing prescriptive and predictive outcomes that support a business story.

After months of client meetings, focus groups and quantitative studies, one thing stands out: data is everywhere, and VOC pros want help making decisions from their mountains of data. That’s why we are committed to accelerating the delivery of actionable business intelligence from VOC data. It’s not about gathering more survey data, it’s about the insights business leaders need to move the needle.

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.

It’s important to put all of VOC scores and feedback into the broader context – how well do you do stack up against your competitors? I’m talking about benchmarking, which means making comparisons to help you understand the perception of your business relative to the competition in the minds of your customers.

Getting executive buy-in is crucial to any successful VOC program. Here are three main points to keep in mind when working with your executive team.

Most companies with Voice of the Customer programs are struggling to gain insights from survey and feedback data. The right technology is ideally suited to bring all VOC and operational data together, to easily pinpoint relevant trends, and to reveal actionable insights.

Today’s theme at the Allegiance Engage Summit was analyzing patterns in data to find insights that can improve your operations. Speakers included Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland A’s, Vicky Stennes, VP of In-Flight Experience at Jet Blue, and Bruce Temkin, Tempkin Group.

The Allegiance Engage Summit 2010 will be held on May 16 – 19, 2010 at the Chateaux Resort at Silver Lake in Deer Valley, Utah.