Allegiance Blog

Not long ago, when customers had an issue with poor product or service, they had limited options. Either they could write a letter using pen and paper, or they could make a phone call hoping to talk with someone who could make a difference. Getting the company’s attention was only the beginning. Getting a response was another story.

Today’s world of customer feedback has evolved far beyond a phone call or a letter. A customer today can use a smartphone to make a complaint or use online chat. They can send an email or text to family and friends, or even tweet and blog negative news to thousands at a time. In fact, I recently learned that there are more than 100 million blogs and web forums in the English language alone — and more than 2 million Tweets in a typical day.

The point is, when customers are talking about your organization, do you hear it? And even more important, do you react and respond? Today’s customer really is in charge of the conversation, and businesses today must listen and respond to these new and critical communication channels if they’re going to stay on top of the issues and control the perception of their name and brand.

So how do you build a quality Voice of the Customer (VOC) or feedback program? What are the most important elements for automated feedback technology and solutions? Experts recommend the following:

• Do-it-yourself surveys are still critical for today’s enterprise. Departmental managers need to execute smart surveys on their own.
• Transactional surveys take many forms including receipt-based, IVR, Text/SMS, online, email or print. These are usually departmentally-based programs that rerun the same post-event survey with the intent of rescuing customers.
• More sophisticated VOC programs include relationship surveys that dive deeper into understanding customer attitudes and turnover risks. They usually involve one or many departments, sometimes CEOs or even the entire c-suite, and are part of the company-wide culture.
• New tools to pull unstructured comments from social media platforms are becoming critical to staying on top of unsolicited feedback. You should consider a VOC solution that has this function built in.
• Mobile and SMS surveys are the wave of the future and the way the younger generation communicates. Be sure to incorporate feedback tools that can interact with mobile devices.
• And don’t forget text analytics and text mining tools to round out your solution. These tools will simplify your efforts to understand the many verbatim comments that come into your organization. It’s timely and expensive to sort through them manually. Advanced tools can do this for you.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect VOC system to get started. Get going today. You can improve as you go, and be sure to build in your program a practice to close the loop with customers. They want to know what you did with their feedback, even if it’s not what they were hoping to hear. As Jeremy Whyte, Director of Customer Feedback with Oracle said, “It’s not enough to listen to the voice of the customer — the feedback must be acted upon.”

Customer loyalty is no longer driven by products but by experiences that create emotion. Emotion is created when the customer gets something they are not expecting. Listening to their needs and concerns and then creating an action plan to change your business practices will help you achieve this.