Loyalty 360 had the opportunity to hear from Elena Hutchison and Jodi Koskella to glean insights into their voice of the customer, loyalty and engagement philosophies. Join them for a webinar on August 25th at 1:00PM Eastern, when Market Tools will present, “Listening Is No Longer Enough: Customers are providing feedback to all parts of the organization. The time is now to link that insight and take action—or risk losing customers to competitors.”
Elena Hutchison is an experienced market research practitioner with nearly 10 years of experience designing, administering, and analyzing qualitative and quantitative research. Elena’s extensive background in statistical analysis informs her design of accurate and reliable sampling plans, while her years of experience as a research consultant have honed her ability to write survey questionnaires that yield authentic and actionable results.
Jodi Koskella manages the Enterprise Product Marketing for MarketTools CustomerSat offering, she is responsible for strategy and communications around Enterprise Feedback Management. She brings to MarketTools 15 years of B2B software marketing and consulting expertise with a background in retail, web analytics and data warehousing.
L360: What is your loyalty & engagement philosophy?
Koskella: We believe that customer loyalty is built by creating an ongoing dialog with your customers, where you take the time to truly understand their needs and use their feedback to guide major business decisions, especially those that directly affect customers. This dialog helps with long term planning and loyalty as well as dealing with short-term issues such as rescuing at-risk customers.
L360: What trend or technology do you feel is having the largest impact on loyalty and engagement today?
Koskella: We’re seeing a trend towards getting the entire organization focused around customer satisfaction and loyalty, instead of having it be an objective of just a few key executives. Our customers are sharing data across their entire enterprise so that customer facing employees (such as contact center agents and store employees) are actively engaged in tracking customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics. This is key since these employees usually have the highest impact on satisfaction and loyalty, and yet often don’t have visibility into customer feedback and satisfaction metrics.
L360: Do customer surveys still hold value in today’s VOC data mining tactics? If so, what you unique value does this approach allow? If not, what is the new alternative?
Hutchison: Yes, they definitely still hold value, and they hold even more value when married with data mined from other sources such as customer call center notes, social media and other customer related metrics. There’s still no replacing actually asking customers for feedback- the information you get from surveys can drive priorities, suggest new product ideas, give you a pulse on satisfaction, create new business opportunities and help save at-risk customers. The immediacy and authenticity of real customer feedback is something that will always hold significant value, and it only becomes more interesting as these new sources of customer data become available.
L360: Where are the opportunities for out of the box ideas in gathering VOC data?
Hutchison: I’m not sure most businesses have mastered the holy grail “in-the-box” idea of meshing customer satisfaction data with actual business outcomes to find out what types of experiences can really drive actual repurchasing, increased purchasing, etc. Once I see businesses taking their customer survey results and tying them to what that customer actually DID (churned, renewed, repurchased, increased spend, etc.) then we can talk about new and different “out of the box” ideas.
L360: What is the biggest mistake many companies tend to make in gathering and using customer data?
Koskella:
- Using outdated metrics to measure the success of your program.
- Gathering feedback in silos (only survey’s and not social media for example).
- Surveying customers about information you’ve already gathered from other parts of the business.
Hutchison:
- Putting the data in a binder and letting it die.
- Not allowing data to filter down in real time to operational day-to-day people who can do something about it on the individual respondent level.
- Getting feedback and then not doing anything about it.
L360: What are some key takeaways attendees can expect to learn from the August 25th Market Tools webinar?
Koskella: Attendees can expect to learn different ways they can fully utilize Voice of Customer data - moving beyond just listening to what customers have to say to understanding how to make sense of that data and take action on it for improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Hear more from Jodi & Elena and attend Market Tools webinar: Listening Is No Longer Enough, August 25th at 1:00PM Eastern. For more information visit here or Register Now.