A number of research organizations, including Gartner and Forrester, have recently written about how Customer Feedback Management (CFM) and Voice of the Customer (VOC) are converging in businesses, based on the spread of new social media technologies for gathering qualitative feedback. I came across great article written by Leslie Ament of Hypatia Research (http://www.www.hypatiaresearch.com/) that is a good description of how and why this is happening as well as what to think about if you are considering incorporating the new social media feedback channels into your customer feedback processes.
Customer Feedback Management (CFM) has traditionally been almost entirely based upon customer surveys. Mainly, customer satisfaction surveys. But, in the last several years also on customer loyalty surveys. CFM's purpose was to gather operationally useful customer information for customer retention, sales intelligence (i.e. prospect identification) and marketing input (largely by IDing super loyal customers to do case studies on).
Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs, though also reliant upon customer surveys - often customer satisfaction surveys or sometimes CSAT questions in broader customer surveys, also included customer feedback via market research studies, data from call centers, bulletin boards, chat rooms and the like. A variety of analytical techniques are used to distill the customer's "voice" from the data. Today, the number of on-line feedback sources includes twitter feeds, blog commentary, Facebook, LinkedIn and other on-line communities, as well as all the other stuff. VOC initiatives were organized around the need to maintain a clear understanding of company value proposition, competitive strength and weakness, new market opportunities, new requirements for existing products and the like.
Technology is beginning to allow a blending of customer feedback channels such that a fuller picture of the customer can be achieved by incorporating the best elements of CFM and VOC.
CFM was driven mostly by the customer service and sales organizations. VOC by Marketing. So it would seem that some new "Customer centric" structure needs to emerge in organizations to manage the convergence of all the customer data as well as the reporting and business process dynamics that will result. This is a point Bruce Tempkin has been making in his commentary at his blog "Customer Experience Matters" (http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/). Anyway the article follows below. Enjoy!
http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/14784
Customer Feedback Management (CFM) has traditionally been almost entirely based upon customer surveys. Mainly, customer satisfaction surveys. But, in the last several years also on customer loyalty surveys. CFM's purpose was to gather operationally useful customer information for customer retention, sales intelligence (i.e. prospect identification) and marketing input (largely by IDing super loyal customers to do case studies on).
Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs, though also reliant upon customer surveys - often customer satisfaction surveys or sometimes CSAT questions in broader customer surveys, also included customer feedback via market research studies, data from call centers, bulletin boards, chat rooms and the like. A variety of analytical techniques are used to distill the customer's "voice" from the data. Today, the number of on-line feedback sources includes twitter feeds, blog commentary, Facebook, LinkedIn and other on-line communities, as well as all the other stuff. VOC initiatives were organized around the need to maintain a clear understanding of company value proposition, competitive strength and weakness, new market opportunities, new requirements for existing products and the like.
Technology is beginning to allow a blending of customer feedback channels such that a fuller picture of the customer can be achieved by incorporating the best elements of CFM and VOC.
CFM was driven mostly by the customer service and sales organizations. VOC by Marketing. So it would seem that some new "Customer centric" structure needs to emerge in organizations to manage the convergence of all the customer data as well as the reporting and business process dynamics that will result. This is a point Bruce Tempkin has been making in his commentary at his blog "Customer Experience Matters" (http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/). Anyway the article follows below. Enjoy!
http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/14784
No comments:
Post a Comment