Customer Feedback Listening Posts

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One of the major themes spanning presentations at the Clarabridge user conference was the need to listen to the Voice of the Customer across multiple channels or listening posts. As Bruce Temkin mentioned in his keynote, in a Forrester survey of 141 $500+M companies, 62% are implementing a Voice of the Customer program. Such programs are driven by the realization that Voice of the Customer is an enterprise asset that needs to be collected across departmental silos.

What channels should you be tuning into to receive the Voice of the Customer? Troy Powell, Ph.D., vice president of statistical solutions, of Walker Information, surveyed attendees to his session to determine the most popular sources of customer feedback today. Other presenters mentioned their own unique listening posts as well.

The channels for customer feedback:

• Surveys (97%) - Almost every attendee uses surveys. VOC started with survey research, which remains the structured-feedback cornerstone of any Voice of the Customer program. Let the availability of text mining change your approach to questionnaire design and use text analytics for survey analysis as well, but surveys ask the questions that your customers aren't talking about on their own.
• Contact Centers (78%) - Chris Jones of Intuit said that the contact center is one of the key listening posts for Intuit. Chat logs, email correspondence and web-form submissions to service portals each provide an excellent source of information about customer frustrations, in their own words.
• Employees (53%) - Front-line employees can be a transmitter for the Voice of the Customer. Use surveys and employee communities to enable staff to share what they are hearing from customers.
• Online Communities/Panels (47%) - User forums and online communities for Intuit software applications are another of its listening posts for VOC. Chris said, "The business as a culture loves customer feedback, and this gives them all the data we can. It's fun to not know what you don't know."
• Social Media (31%) - The blogosphere and microblogosphere (e.g., Twitter and its competitors) provide timely information into what a select group of your customers and prospects is thinking and saying to one another. Rory Byrne from Kapow Technologies said, "The chief benefit of social media is the timeliness of the information. The viral effect snowballs into a pattern: companies ignore it at their peril."
• Customer Councils (28%) - Advisory groups consisting of large accounts (for B2B firms) or randomly selected consumers (for B2C), whether meeting offline or online, can provide a rich set of ongoing information about customer perceptions.
• Reviews - Unlike social media streams, reviews provide rich sets of additional information. Rory discussed harvesting customer reviews from e-commerce sites, extracting ratings, structure, value, qualities and metadata along with the reviews and comments. You hear what customers are telling one another in public about your products and services.
• Maintenance Logs - Turning to a unique channel, Wynn Parrish of BE Aerospace discussed mining the maintenance logs for aircraft. Each airline is required by the FAA to maintain such logs, providing an excellent source of B2B Voice of the Customer. BE Aerospace manufactures passenger seats for aircraft, and these equipment maintenance logs provide detailed information about problems with reclining, arm rests and tray tables. The information is too tedious to inspect manually but text mining it provides an important early warning indicator to potential problems, often before the customer themselves escalates them.
• Recordings - Diego Lomanto from Verint said, "A conversation with a customer over the phone is one of the richest forms of data that you can acquire." With speech analytics, you can turn those recordings into insights. Financial institutions record every service interaction but historically have not listened to those recordings; speech analytics enable them to analyze large volumes of calls. The three main benefits:

1. Automatically categorize calls to understand what they are about, replacing manual categorization
2. Conduct root cause analysis to understand the sources of the calls
3. Identify trends you weren't aware of, as you hear customers talking about new topics.

Chris Boudreaux from Accenture provided an excellent summary. "Every source is key. It's one thing to get a bunch of information from the web and customer interactions, but how do you make that part of every customer record, measuring what the customer sentiment is? Integration is critical."

Rory Byrne from Kapow said, "It's the old problem from the BI world, how do you get data out of silos? How do you get access to the data so that the decision maker has the information they need? The more feedback channels you can add in, the more relevant it becomes across the enterprise."

Interested in learning more? I'll be hosting a webinar series in February called "The Voice of the Customer in Surround Sound". Almost every company listens to customers through surveys, but each department listens on its own. It's like watching your customers on an analog TV with monophonic audio when you could be watching them on a high-definition flat screen TV with Surround Sound. You can register for these research webinars here.