The Next Installment in our series of 12 Trends in Voice of the Customer for 2012 looks at the crunching large amounts of data and examining customer preferences to make the customer experience part of the brand:

Making customer insight part of the brand experience

Customer feedback is increasingly being used in company strategy and has become a rich source of insight. As collecting feedback becomes more frequent, companies will look to integrate feedback gathering into the brand experience. The methods of collection will be matched to the brand with integration into the total experience in mind.

Data Rich Environments

With the increase in available channels for customer feedback, a huge amount of data is being gathered from customers. Channels such as social media create a large amount of useful data, but there is a necessity to analyse this data in order to gain insight. An increase in the complexity and speed of analysis will allow companies to learn more about their customers.

The right channel for the right customer at the right time

Customers will offer feedback on different areas of service based on when they are asked for feedback. By using event based surveys and taking into account the customer’s preference, the maximum amount of useful feedback can be gathered from each customer.

Throughout the next year Voice of the Customer programs will continue to grow in both innovation and adoption. Within this series of 4 blog posts we have outlined the 12 trends which will define the growth of Voice of the Customer throughout 2012:

Unstructured Data Analysis

Whether it is conversations with customer service agents, Facebook comments, online chat sessions or notes from frontline sales teams; organisations have fantastic potential to create insight from analysis of their plethora of unstructured information. The challenge for organisations is to ensure they have the ability to add structure to this data, enabling them to apply meaningful metrics and identify appropriate actions based on the insight. The rewards for getting it right will continue to rise throughout 2012 , offering organisations the ability to increase their depth of customer insight without risking the alienation of their customers through over sampling.

Maximising insight from existing info

Organisations are increasingly data rich environments. Augmenting and linking customer insight with existing operational information such as CRM, logistics or financial enables organisations to increase their depth of insight without asking their clients basic questions such as who they are, what products they purchase, country, annual spend etc. The value of the insight this can deliver to a management team should not be underestimated, offering the potential for a single view of the ‘customer’ in real-time with clear insight into risk of customer churn by segment, region and financial impact.

Becoming Proactive

Rather than waiting for a drop in their customer satisfaction metric, organisations will increasingly look to get ahead of the curve and identify operational data which may have a reliable correlation to movements in satisfaction. By examining the customer journey through the business, operational measures can be used to trigger proactive customer communications which will alert the customer to what has happened and the actions the organisation are taking to ensure their experience is not adversely affected.