Having been part of the customer experience space for a number of years I have noticed a huge change in its perception and how it is impacting businesses. The book published by Forrester last year titled Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business delivers perhaps the clearest guidelines on how organizations should hold customer experience close to their future plans to thrive as a business.
One of the key themes of the book is for organizations to take an outside in approach to viewing the experience they provide to customers. To achieve this I believe that organizations need the tools to gain an unrivaled view of what their customers are saying and thinking, to quickly act on and drive the business in the best direction.
Traditionally organizations may have taken a simple EFM approach, using irregular surveys to sample their customer base, sending out mystery shoppers or organizing focus groups. But does this really offer an accurate and clear external view of what customers’ experience? Is it enough information to drive the business by, and capture everything that is important to customers?
Voice of the Customer solutions have already passed the above in the past couple of years - for some to include: operationalizing feedback within the business, enabling individual employee performance improvement, and actively identifying and recovering customers in danger of leaving the business.
So where are VoC solutions headed now? What’s in store for 2013? Here are a couple of my thoughts…
1. Further overcoming big data challenges: while technology has come on leaps and bounds to tackle the challenges that come with big data, the amount of data we have is still increasing. VoC solutions must include more information on customers and their numerous interactions with the business in a quick and manageable format to be able to effectively utilize the insights gained.
2. Capture the unknown: currently most organizations capture VoC insights from customers who have actively engaged with the business. But what of those customers who bought the product or service and then the next interaction was for them to leave? There is significant potential in listening and understanding the experience of customers who don’t interact with you, to ensure the experience they have with your business is consistently good.
3. Reporting at an individual customer level: the ability to map, view and act on a customer’s lifecycle to understand the whole journey they have had with your brand. By putting this information in the hands of front line staff they are able to offer a significantly better and more tailored experience for the customer.
4. Getting a holistic picture: combining direct customer feedback, indirect interaction analytics and social media analytics with inferred VoC across the whole enterprise will enable your organization to gain an unparalleled view of the customer experience and capture exactly what every customer thinks about the experience and where you can improve.
So before I sign off I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year, and all the best for 2013!
Tom Lynam
For more info on the NICE Fizzback Voice of the Customer Solution please visit our main website.