To implement a successful Voice of the Customer program, a company has to make it more than just another metric according to Gord Elder, VP of products and co-founder of ResponseTek – a leading software vendor for enterprise customer experience management (CEM) solutions.
Fundamentally, this poses a challenge for some companies due to their inherent cultures, Elder said to Loyalty 360.
“Some clients implement VoC programs, but their whole goal is just to have a metric,” Elder said. “They didn’t set strategic goals and felt they just needed better customer metrics.”
The most successful VoC programs are run by companies with central customer experience teams that “truly own the customer experience across the business,” Elder said.
“They’re really looking at the customer journey, the lifecycle, how to measure it, and how to distribute it,” he explained.
Too often, though, companies work in siloes that create internal barriers, Elder said.
“Some companies haven’t reorganized themselves and that creates a barrier from an organizational perspective,” he said.
Elder suggested that company marketing teams should be included in operations discussions.
“Marketing teams are somewhat outside of that process,” he said.
ResponseTek uses a real-time analytics module called Buzz Tracker. The ResponseTek Listening Platform can automatically translate every customer comment from all channels into business metrics, allowing immediate interpretation of satisfaction and loyalty drivers as a standard capability.
Businesses constantly struggle with systematically extracting insight from the massive amounts of text-based customer communication occurring through customer surveys, social media, email and chat interactions. Without automated analysis, key themes and topics identified by the growing number of customer interactions are going unnoticed.
Buzz Tracker instantly analyzes all verbatim comments, including historical data. The user can easily filter results, drill into details, focus on a specific source, and continue to tune the analytics on-demand.
“Our goal is to improve the quality of the customer experience across all facets of business,” Elder explained. “After every experience a customer has, Buzz Tracker measures how it went for them. Before Buzz Tracker, many companies were spending a lot of time doing old school classifications or coding of verbatim, which is very labor intensive and expensive.”
Elder said a hot topic in the customer experience industry is a callback program.
“It’s driving identification of unhappy customers and systematically following up with them,” he said, “usually by phone. The ROI and impact has been quite phenomenal and the impact on downstream loyalty is quite measurable. It’s a key trend we see continuing because it’s a personal touch. It’s not automated.”
Callback programs aren’t about being reactive, Elder said.
“It’s about systematically closing the loop with customers and that, in and of itself, will drive loyalty,” he said.