Are You Voice-of-the-Customer Challenged?
Companies today are challenged with how to make operations efficient while delivering value to the customer. The answer to both of these customer management questions hinges upon effective collection, analysis, and deployment of your organization's customer feedback.
But a new report issued this week by Allegiance reveals that feedback collection and analysis is easier said than done. The "Voice of the Customer Industry Research Report: Insights and Trends for Today's VOC Practitioners" shows that senior voice of the customer practitioners are faced with daily challenges including: closing the feedback loop with customers, tying customer experience to ROI, disjointed reports, an inability to prioritize actions based on the results, and obtaining executive buy-in.
Allegiance surveyed and conducted focus groups with senior voice-of-the-customer practitioners at large companies in a variety of industries from January to July to gain insight into how feedback was being leveraged in their organizations. The results were surprising.
Of the findings, 68 percent of respondents said it was important or very important to link customer feedback with revenue or ROI, and 51 percent reported they do not currently practice this; only 8 percent of the respondents felt their current feedback monitoring processes were innovative, while 21 percent said their processes were mainstream, and 15 percent believed they were behind the times; and 43 percent indicated it is important to link customer feedback to ROI, yet 51 percent is actually linking feedback to ROI.
Voice of the customer is gaining momentum in companies, as executives increasingly realize the importance of collecting and acting on customer feedback. But we have a long way to go to convince executives to invest in the tools and processes to better manage voice-of-the-customer strategies.
How are you actively influencing your company's customer feedback initiatives?
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It seems that many companies still think they can control the customer. I know that in one of my prior jobs I spent a great deal of time telling engineers, managers, and others that the customer is not going to go for what they had planned.
I got ignored a lot. That company recently laid off people for the first time. Mostly because of the recession but I can't help but think if they really had the customer more in mind, they might have avoided some of the layoffs.