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Businesses Need A Unified Approach To Listening To The Voice Of The Customer

by Dick Bucci, Principal, Pelorus Associates - July 19, 2013

Businesses Need A Unified Approach To Listening To The

Voice Of The Customer

If you think you're getting a little more love from your bank, you might be correct. Big banks and, to an even greater degree, the smaller community banks are listening to the their customers and trying a little harder to dissuade them from wandering off to their competitors. An example was the change of heart by a large financial institution regarding monthly fees for the use debit cards. The bank was motivated to back down when confronted with a an online pledge signed by 300,000 clients ready to switch banks if te additional charge was implemented.

Businesses of all types and particularly those in mature industries are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain significant points of competitive differentiation. Product and service innovation will always be extremely important, but new ideas can quickly be copied and very often fast followers offer even stronger products and services than the first mover. Lowering prices may produce some short-term sales gains but competitors, especially those that market primarily over the Internet, have lower fixed costs and can readily match price movements. This is why customer retention has become an obsession with brand conscious businesses and institutions.

Customer satisfaction is considered by many marketing expert to be a necessary though not always sufficient requirement to achieving customer loyalty.. The term “customer satisfaction” gets bandied around quite loosely in today's world but actually has pretty complex underpinnings. The customer's degree of satisfaction is related to expectations. If a company makes a practice of promoting customer service as one of its virtues then consumers are naturally going to expect more from that vendor then from its peers. On the other hand, many customers have relatively low expectations of service from big-box retailers and cut-rate airlines. One reason that JetBlue and Airtran have often ranked at or near the top in customer satisfaction is that the perceived service level is well above what consumers might reasonably expect from a low-fare airline.

Customer satisfaction is a moving target. A single interaction that is either extremely positive or extremely negative can change the consumer’s overall view of the company.

This is where the art of customer satisfaction and analytics comes in to play. The process by which customers become extremely satisfied, or even delighted, is highly complex. Many factors go into building and diminishing customer satisfaction. Some of these are under the control of customer-facing personnel but most are not. To understand the factors that drive or diminish customer satisfaction in your organization requires capturing and analyzing customer data from multiple sources.

It is essential that the contact center take ownership of capturing, analyzing, and reporting of this critical metric. This is because the contact center, as the primary point of a direct interface with consumers, is inevitably going to be credited or blamed with the level of customer satisfaction achieved. End-user surveys are the best way to gauge customer satisfaction. Only the consumer is in the position to make these judgments. Automated surveys, via interactive response over the telephone or responses to web surveys can provide the best combination of timeliness, cost effectiveness and accuracy.

However, contact center management should consider launching a more ambitious effort, one that would take into account feedback from multiple touch points, not just the contact center. Unified VoC and analytics platforms have the ability to collect consumer feedback from multiple touch points and through multiple channels. The powerful speech and data analytics engines allow management to track key consumer metrics over time, spot deviations, and drill down to find the root causes of decreased purchasing frequency and even brand abandonment. Armed with this information, business management has a much clearer idea of what they need to do to positively impact customer satisfaction. The causes may have little to do with the contact center. There can be problems with personal service at the retail level, insensitivity on the part of collections people, confusing billing practices, poor instructions, quality issues, high prices, competitive activity, or a mix of these factors. The root causes may vary by geography, product category, or customer characteristics. Only a unified solution can collect data from multiple sources and piece it together in such a way that management has a clear path toward taking corrective actions.

Dick Bucci
Principal
Pelorus Associates
dbucci@pelorusassoc.com
www.pelorusassoc.com

 
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