In the final installment of our 12 trends in Voice of the Customer for 2012 we discuss the grow of social and how organisations will begin make their customer experience efforts part of their company strategy while empowering people throughout the organisation to use customer insight effectively.

Making it fit with the people in the organisation

Over the past number of years the methods of data collection and analysis have begun to reach a level of maturity. The focus will begin to move to how the people throughout the organisation use the information generated by voice of the customer programs and how they interact with the customers themselves to make the solution fit.

Becoming part of Company Strategy

Many companies such as GlaxoSmithKline have begun to use customer satisfaction data as the basis for their employee’s remuneration packages.This trend will continue with customer satisfaction eventually getting profit parity within organisations and strategic decisions being made based on customer insight provided by a Voice of the Customer program.

Making Sense of Social

Social media has grown as a customer feedback channel within Voice of the customer systems. The trend in 2012 will be for companies to do more than just react to feedback given through social media. Being proactive will become the focus to ensure the deeper issues within the company are resolved. Part of this will be linking customer’s social media profiles to their profiles within the system in order to gain a deeper insight into their feedback.

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.