What advice would you offer regarding any brand who wants to embark on a Voice of the Customer journey?
Michael Hooper, Director of Customer Research for American Airlines, answered that question during a Wednesday session titled, “Planes, Trains & VoC: How We Use Technology to Deliver Better, Quicker, Smarter (Insights),”at the 3rd Annual Engagement & Experience Expo, presented by Loyalty 360 – The Loyalty Marketer’s Association.
“Find your champions of your data,” he said. “Feed the champions of your data and help them be evangelists for you. Getting feedback use data for modeling helps us to better understand. We’re getting smarter with our data.”
Matthew Loomis, Manager, Customer Listening, BNSF Railway, said his company doesn’t want to wait.
“We want to attack and get the data,” he said. “We’re proactively reaching out to different groups. We’re trying to be more aggressive. We have millions of data points and we need to figure out how to consolidate that.”
Echoing Hooper’s thoughts regarding the Voice of the Customer journey, Loomis said finding the proper technical solution is critical.
“We went out and found our champion of data,” he explained. “You need someone who will take the data and do something with it – and not just collect feedback. Find the right technical solution. What are we trying to do with data will help define the technical solution. Tie your data to profitability.”
How do you define Voice of the Customer?
Loomis said defining Voice of the Customer is different for different people.
“It means every way we could touch the customer that could positively or negatively impact them, we wanted to hear about it,” he explained. “Whatever it is for you and what it means for your client.”
Hooper said Voice of the Customer is “direct and in direct feedback about you. Customer relations is a big channel. It paints an entire picture.”
Regarding data, Hooper added that the “ownership thing” is often difficult.
“If you can get people in a room and talk about the benefits of data for the entire company, you will find some evangelists,” he said. “Maybe not all groups will agree, but you’ll find some who do.”
Loomis explained that his company plans to take data from other groups and combine it to find out if there are general trends within the entire organization or isolated incidents.