Data Integration Can Act As Key To Fully Functional Voice Of Customer Program

Bill Mcmurray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific & Japan, Qualtrics

Bill Mcmurray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific & Japan, Qualtrics

Data is now a critical component for all aspects of business, and it is one of the valuable assets a business owns to create the best possible experience for customers.

Customers now expect a reasonable degree of personalisation when they interact with businesses. They assume businesses will have at least some knowledge of their particular preferences and the touch points they prefer to use in their interactions with the business.

For a business to understand their customers, they can run a voice of customer (VoC) program, which involves surveying customers to understand their explicit needs and concerns. A successful VoC program not only collects data from customers, but also includes market research insights to understand future customer’s wants and needs, employees’ engagement levels, as well as digital and operational data from sources like social media, company websites and e-commerce, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. It’s then essential to integrate the data from all of those disparate sources so that it can be analyzed to deliver useful, accurate insights and improve the overall customer experience.

Employee engagement is a key metric within a VoC program since companies with engaged employees tend to outperform those that don’t. Employees can be surveyed using similar methods to those used when surveying customers.

Data Integration Lets Organizations Put All The Relevant Data Points Onto A Single Dashboard, To Analyze Diverse Streams Of Feedback And Information, Which Paints A Fuller Customer Experience Performance Picture

Collecting feedback from employees at every stage of their interaction with the business, from on boarding through to exit, can give the organization insight into how it can improve the employee experience and retain top talent, who will, in turn, provide a better experience for customers.

Data integration lets organizations put all the relevant data points onto a single dashboard, to analyze diverse streams of feedback and information, which paints a fuller customer experience performance picture. The dashboards need to offer the drill-down capability to inspect negative results to determine the root cause. VoC Dashboards also provide the opportunity for businesses to address customer issues on both the micro and macro levels.

Micro issues can be thought of as single-customer, single-instance issues that a company fixes and moves on. For example, an unsatisfied customer could be flagged and once they’re flagged, this customer’s profile would enter a workflow, which leads to a proactive attempt by the company to correct the customer’s situation. This process is commonly referred to as ‘closing the loop.’

Macro issues, on the other hand, are defined as many customers experiencing a recurring pain point that requires sweeping changes. For example, the checkout process at a retail chain may be abnormally long due to a lagging computer system. This issue impacts hundreds of thousands of customers and could potentially drive away repeat business. Fixing this issue requires large-scale changes and efforts on behalf of the company.

Data integration within a VoC program should be a key priority for organizations looking to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Organizations that use a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use VoC platform, like Qualtrics, to enable a flexible and agile VoC program, can take action and respond to customers in real-time, to make a negative or OK experience, an exceptional experience to create higher-value customers, more referrals, and lower churn.

Headquartered in Provo, U.S. and founded in 2002, Qualtrics helps organizations to manage the four major aspects of business including customer, product, employee, and brand experiences, that too on one platform.

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