Customers are sharing their opinion about your company. They are sharing it not only with you, but also with their friends, with your competitors, and in some cases with the whole world. Are you really listening to what they're saying? If you don't, your competitors will.

As technology enables deeper voice of the customer (VoC) insight, opportunities arise to take advantage of customer insight for product development, service enhancement, and long-term relationship-building with individual customers. Many companies have VoC efforts in place, but too few are taking full advantage of the potential.

The key is to create processes around customer feedback and insight to become a "listening organization," says Rob Key, CEO of social media consultancy Converseon. "In 2008 companies needed to track voice of the customer," he says. "In 2009 new tools emerged to collect new customer information, but the information was still siloed. 2010 will see the maturing of the industry. Voice of the customer programs need to grow up and be infused across the enterprise."

There is plenty of work to be done in the space. In Forrester Research's 2010 Customer Experience Index, only 13 of the 133 firms received excellent ratings, while 45 firms received "poor" or "very poor" ratings. Forrester also reports in its Crafting Your Voice of the Customer Program report that "despite widespread customer feedback programs, fewer than a third of firms closely monitor the quality of their interactions with target customers or systematically incorporate customer needs into decision-making processes."

Bringing customer insight to the boardroom
In today's marketplace, VoC should be a strategic objective and everyone's responsibility. It's not the job of customer service or marketing anymore. In fact, at many companies, voice of the customer is a senior management issue.

Online photo printing company PhotoBox conducts "weekly huddles" with the heads of operations, sales and marketing, and IT to track customer feedback. Monthly steering meetings involve the CEO, CFO, and CTO to set priorities. "We gather in the same room once a week and the only topic is customer feedback," says Renaud Besnard, operations director. "The 'customer-obsessed meeting' is the most important meeting of the week."

Each department has a dashboard that charts the progress of their projects as they relate to customer satisfaction. Besnard says the team distributes actions and priorities to each department based on customer insight.

PhotoBox, one of this year's Gartner & 1to1 Media CRM Excellence Award winners, isn't alone. "We think customer feedback will continue to be infused throughout companies, and customer input as a strategic focus will be at the core of successful companies," says Jeff Resnick, global managing director of innovation and partnerships at Opinion Research Corp. (ORC). "One department may be responsible for the collection of feedback, but managers across departments will use the information as a core part of their operating culture."

Unconventional sources of insight
What information drives these decision-making processes? Traditional customer feedback is still important: customer surveys, focus groups, complaint calls or emails, call monitoring, and the like. But new tools such as online conversation mining, sentiment analysis, ratings and reviews, Web analytics, and social media monitoring allow companies to gain insight both inside and outside their organizations. "You can pretty much find a conversation about anything online in massive forms," says Michelle de Haaf, CMO of Attensity. "What's interesting is the ability to listen to specific types of conversation. New tools give traditional data more context," such as ratings that compare products, or comments about why a product was good or bad.

Listening to the voice of the customer can be as simple as three steps, says Loren Weinberg, senior vice president of web content management firm FatWire:

• Listen to what customers say across channels – collect feedback in both traditional and online channels on both sides of the company wall.
• Analyze customer behavior – watch what people do on your site and combine it with web content analytics. This is sometimes aggregate data, but it adds context when mixed with other customer feedback.
• Use social capabilities to encourage dialogue – ratings and reviews and user-generated content are easy ways to interact with customers while gaining valuable insight. Mix the voice of the customer with the voice of the company and its employees.

A combination of all three will give a company insight on customer satisfaction, behavior, and what improvements to make. "The ability to have a [customer] experience that is interactive and attuned to customer needs is critical," Weinberg says.

Orvis adds brand value by closing the customer loop
Listening to customers is important, but the new VOC landscape is one that involves closing the loop to let them know their input is valued. At outdoor sporting goods retailer Orvis, reconnecting with customers who provide feedback is crucial to maintain the relationship. The company added ratings and reviews to its products, using Bazaarvoice, and emails a thank-you note and posts a thank-you comment to those who rate products. It also launched an "ask and answer" discussion forum for both employees and customers to help each other with questions. The company emails customers whose questions have been answered, as well. "It keeps the dialog constant and brings them back to the site," says John Rogers, vice president of marketing at Orvis.

For customers who call or email with product complaints, Orvis goes the extra mile to call the customer back when the problem is resolved. "Customers are giving us feedback and going out of their way to do it," Rogers says. "They're our best customers. You absolutely want to keep them happy."

A byproduct of this closed-loop process is that the transparency builds trust. "On the site it shows that we closed loops," Rogers says of the posted comments. "A company that listens to customers is one that you want to do business with. It becomes a marketing tool."

Right now many customers think their feedback "goes into the ether," adds Barry Libert, chairman and CEO of social software firm Mzinga. "The new feedback loop builds trust and changes motivation [to provide insight]." And new tools allow for automated responses and workflow to ease the challenge of closing the loop at an enterprise level.

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