The best way to ensure that customer feedback is actionable is to automate the process of soliciting, collecting and reporting on customer input throughout the business. In today’s world, this is a tall task for most organizations. Capturing and acting on real-time feedback from multiple channels –web, phone, email, live chat– is a difficult task, if not impossible, for businesses without a solution to support these efforts. Even when companies seek customer input, fewer than 50% actually act on the feedback they receive. Ignoring customer feedback results in customers feeling that their feedback is not valued, frustration and ultimately defection.
Our internal Voice of the Customer (VOC) program has been underway at RightNow for years and we have learned a tremendous amount. I want to share a little of how we implemented the program and some of the results.
We started by identifying the critical points in our customers’ lifecycle including initial contact, placing an initial order, concluding a deployment, placing another order and day-to-day customer service interactions. Then utilizing standard RightNow Feedback functionality, we implemented surveys to instrument each of those critical points in the customer lifecycle. The solution sends surveys after each critical event or interaction and automates the survey distribution process, tabulation of results, alerting on unsatisfactory responses to appropriate individuals based on the type of issue and summarizes a management dashboard so we get real time feedback on how we are doing.
Our VOC program is impacting our business across the board by bringing immediate focus to issues as they occur. Our product surveys help us identify and focus on product issues impacting customer satisfaction. Professional services identifies deployment process improvement opportunities. Feedback about technical support identifies main customer satisfaction drivers enabling us to improve the areas with the greatest impact. In total these efforts led to a 5 percentage point increase in net promoter score (NPS) in 2008.
How do you hear your customers’ voice?
Good advice here. While traditional on-premise companies should pay attention to existing customers, in the software-as-a-service model, it’s vitally important to the entire business model. I remind my clients that when customers don’t feel loved, they leave, and the price is more than a bit of heartache. It costs money; the vendor can’t recoup their customer acquisition costs.
I can see that structured means to collect and respond to feedback would be helpful. Fostering a community of customers is also a useful way for customers to build loyalty. Oftentimes, they learn more from each other than they do from you!
Peter Cohen
SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors
I cannot agree more, actually I wrote a similar post weeks ago
Edward
Frontier Blog – No one ahead, no one behind
http://www.hwswworld.com/wp
I’ve been trying to get assistance for the last few hours using a Chat feature that brings up the Right Now screen. Is there a phone number I can call to resolve my issue?
Hi Carolyn,Can let me know what web site you are on, I can try to escalate your service request to the appropriate place.
While I agree that continuous and automated customer feedback collection is a vital data source for any customer experience/perception improvement program, we have found that an interview-based VoC project provides unique insights to the customer’s experience. Although interview-based VoC data gathering and analysis is high cost, occasional/periodic sensing of customer voices in this way provides vital information of customer perceptions and product and service opportunities.