Listen Up! You can actually hear them.

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By Carlos A. Marchi-Cuevas, CECP, CME

How the voice of the customer can help you improve business processes, compliance and overall customer experience at your call center

I have dedicated my entire sales & marketing career to one thing: Customers. Half of it designing strategies and tactics on how to segment and get to them. The other half at the BPO customer engagement side. Understanding Customer Engagement preferences and optimizing ways on how brands interact with them while in compliance with ever evolving government regulations.

With no intention to get technical, during the last decades we have all witnessed how marketing buzzwords and engagement technologies have evolved (and come and go):

  • CRM
  • Segmentation
  • Multi-Channel
  • Audiences
  • Multi-Media
  • Data-Driven
  • Customer-Centric
  • Direct-Response
  • Database
  • Measurable Media
  • Customer intelligence
  • Programmatic Media
  • Omni-Channel

We have also seen companies from all industries invest incredible amounts of time and resources to design complex, hard to explain models to help them get closer to customers than its competitors, even their customers ask themselves: “Why in the world did they do that?”.

The real question is how many of them are really listening to their customers?

It might seem like an obvious question, but it is not. You may be surprised how many companies still rely on “snapshot type” surveys once a quarter (if lucky), to get some idea about what their customers have to say. There are companies today that their customer engagement units lack formal procedures on how to process customers positive and/or negative feedback arising from a sales or customer service contact.

Many years ago (when I was younger and had more hair), I had a mentor that, whenever we were either designing a marketing, customer-engagement or customer experience strategy, would often say: “When in doubt, ask your customers. They will give you the answer.” Boy, was he right? You bet he was. He taught us the importance and value of customer feedback. But not just any type of feedback, continuous feedback, listening to the voice of the customer, the type found in solutions like CustomerCount.

When you formally allow your prospects and customers to provide feedback, not only they will tell you what they want and don’t want, but they will also provide you with tons of ideas for free! In this respect, what could be better to design your engagement protocols than direct input from the audiences being served? Seems logical, right?

Companies that have decided to walk down this path not only have been able to gather valuable insights from their multiple audiences, but they have also learned from direct feedback how to benefit from more cost-effective customer interaction channels based on individual preferences. Most importantly they have seen a measurable increase in their overall NPS (Net Promoter Score) scores.

“The only path to profitable growth may lie in a company’s ability to get its loyal customers to become, in effect, its marketing department.” – Fred Reichheld.

Benefits of implementing continuous feedback, voice of the customer programs have numerous benefits:

  • Precise understanding of customers’ needs and wants
  • Enhanced problem resolution
  • Growth in customer experience indexes and overall loyalty
  • Identification of sales/service staff training opportunities
  • Insights for product development
  • Simplified regulatory compliance as customers authorize new engagement channels
  • Increase in employee satisfaction as they can serve customers better

It should not come as a surprise for any of us that all Fortune 500 companies have simple, yet robust continuous customer feedback programs where their customers become important stakeholders in the business strategy development. They understand the ultimate benefits of allowing customers to share their thoughts on their brands, products and services.

Remember that Customers are always saying something about your brand. Are you listening?

Talk to me at [email protected] or request an online demo.