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.

Developments in technology in recent times have created an expectation among customers that services will be available on demand.  With many services offering an online real time product experience, the risk of churn is significantly higher when customers are made to wait. 

Customer Service tools have been tracking this trend and it has spawned a number of new real time developments. Tools like Live chat allow users to log onto a company’s website and immediately be connected to a customer service agent. Along with this, developments within call centres have meant agents can now solve more issues for customers on the spot. 

The next step in the development of real time customer service is in connecting all the data available on customers into a single view. Having a single view of the customer allows a customer service agent to review all the possible solutions and choose the best one.