This Part of our Voice of the Customer trends for 2012 looks at measurement, increased speed and full service suppliers.

Measures and Questions

With a wealth of experience now present in the area, choosing a metric to measure customer satisfaction has moved on from being a one size fits all solution. Organisations will begin to look for the right metric for them from the many which are available such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES).

Full Service Suppliers

As the Voice of the Customer market matures and becomes more complex the need to understand how to interact with customers will grow. There is a need for a full service which includes the provision of both technology and consultancy to ingrain the system throughout the organisation.Vendors will use their knowledge to provide a consultancy service which will ensure there is the required skills transfer for organisations to manage their system going forward.

Increased speed of insight collection and analysis

As systems become more sophisticated the collection of customer feedback will become a quicker process with more automation. By choosing the right channel for the right time customers will be more inclined to give feedback, for example using an event such as a delivery to trigger a survey going out. Visualisations will allow insight to be analysed and displayed rapidly, this will enable immediate actions to be taken based on the insight.

Trimming the fat from an organisation is always a good idea, a lean organisation with no waste will always work more fluidly. Organisations regularly hear the industry analysts’ mantra of “cut, cut, cut.”   However cutting costs can only get you so far before you are as lean as you can be while still offering a good product. Industries such as Manufacturing have shown us that cutting costs can only get you so far before you start effecting product/ service quality and ultimately satisfaction which will in turn effect repurchase decisions. 

A change of mind-set is needed; in order to differentiate beyond price, organisations need to create more value in the customer’s mind. The CEO has to be the instigator, sponsor and the driver of changing strategy towards a more customer-focused approach, based on better insights into the customer base delivered through a Voice of the Customer platform. This will help board level executives to manage risk better, understand how resources can be arranged to better support the customer, change processes as necessary and prioritise actions to deliver an improved customer experience.  

For More, check out the latest issue of the Lean Management journal where I have a feature article on this subject. http://www.leanmj.com