Last week the annual NICE User Group (NUG) event, Interactions, took place in Orlando, Florida. Attended by over 1500 customers the event brought together professionals from all industries, all who were focused on providing a better experience and level of service for their customers.
The event featured a number of Fizzback customers from Sprint, Alliance Data and Capital One on the main stage presenting keynote sessions to Virgin Money, Bell Canada and Talk Talk in breakout tracks. It was a true showcase of the value that leveraging and operationalizing direct Voice of Customer within the enterprise can bring.
In this post, I want to draw on some of the key messages that I thought ran through the event for those focused on the Voice of the Customer (VoC).
The growth of Voice of Customer: Even as recently as last year’s event, the type of conversations that I was having with customers were about whether or not they measured NPS or customer satisfaction. Yet now this seems to be the norm, and companies are increasingly looking into how they improve their measurement techniques and if they can discover new and better ways in which they can measure the customer experience. This is reflected in the recent work from the Temkin Group who states that companies are becoming more mature in their approach to VoC.
Quality Driven Feedback or Feedback Driven Quality: One of the key themes was the relationship between quality metrics and feedback scores. As direct VoC becomes more commonplace within the business I have increasingly heard and spoken to customers who are now utilizing feedback to drive what quality metrics they are measuring off the back of an interaction. For me this is a key shift as businesses start to measure performance not by what they perceive to be a good experience, but by what the customer perceives is a good experience.
Driving Cultural Change is key: While collecting feedback and acting on it is obviously important, it is equally important to drive cultural change as well. To effectively improve the customer experience it is imperative to have the backing at a strategic level, and to use the directive to drive change throughout the business. All our presenters talked about a strategic level desire within the business to offer a better experience to their customers, and this filtered down through the business to have a positive impact on the frontline. While these were achieved in a number of different ways (the company choir singing verbatim comments in the lunch hall or bonsuing staff on c-sat scores to name two examples) the effect was ultimately the same, a cultural change within the business of delivering a better customer experience.
I want to finish this post with a short conclusion; as the world in which you interact with customers evolves, it is increasingly important to understand the experience that they have, get closer to your customers and ultimately offer an exceptional level of service. While this might sound alarming, it is also an opportunity to differentiate yourselves through customer experience, driving increased revenues, loyalty and satisfaction.
Tom Lynam
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