Voice of the Customer (VoC) is often spoken of in reference to feedback within a care or support organization. In a partnership with Clarabridge, Intuit Small Business is showing how these tools can be effectively translated to include shoppers as well. Deep, qualitative data can often be the difference in providing a customer experience that meets and exceeds the growing demands of today’s consumer.
In searching for a deeper look into customer insight, many companies simply don’t know where to start. They may have basic surveying tools, but are unable to dig into the question of why a customer feels the way they do about the brand.
During Loyalty360’s Thursday webinar, “Active Listening Drives Dynamic Customer Engagement: Add a Powerful VoC Program to Your Shopping Cart,” representatives from Clarabridge and Intuit Small Business shared with listeners how customer data can be handled in a way that creates tangible business results.
Susan Ganeshan, CMO of Clarabridge, used an analogy to describe the issue of data silos, explaining that it was the same as trying to look through a keyhole. The keyhole may allow you to see part of the scene clearly, but there’s no way to see the whole picture. Likewise, companies face the obstacle of seeing the entire picture of customer insight, rather than just a small section. It’s easy to see the “what?” of customer feedback; the challenge for brands now is to capture the “why?” of customer sentiment.
Natural language processing (NLP) goes a long way toward digging deeper into VoC data, providing brands with valuable information about which products customers are talking about and, more importantly, how they feel about those products. Once this data is drawn out, Ganeshan noted, it’s critically important to distribute it widely to multiple departments and keep employees informed about the full spectrum of incoming feedback.
In measuring the effectiveness of a VoC model, Ganeshan said that a large portion of results can be found in company savings, rather than earnings. Using customer insight technology is most effective at retaining customers and reducing churn, drastically cutting the cost of acquiring new customers.
Ross Voorhees, Senior Business Analyst of the Small Business Division at Intuit, told attendees that companies seeking a greater, more memorable customer experience should be “understanding the customer journey end-to-end, and determining how the customer feels every step of the way.”
Before finding a VoC solution, Intuit found that it was swimming in quantitative data provided from website metrics, but was lacking in more in-depth qualitative insight. The solution was the company’s existing online customer service chat channel. Using Clarabridge’s text analytics, Intuit was able to leverage this channel to gather qualitative data.
“Answers are just answers until they’re matched up with a question,” Voorhees said. “Data isn’t meaningful until it’s used to solve real issues within the customer experience.”