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.

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.