While doing my Christmas shopping this past season, it seemed most every store had a survey they wanted me to take. Their clerks dutifully circled the survey website with their pen and told me about a juicy incentive to get me to fill it out. Since I’m in the business I decided to take all of them to see what they wanted to learn from me. Not so surprisingly, virtually all of the questions dealt with customer satisfaction and little else.

Before we go much further, let me state unequivocally that measuring customer satisfaction is a key data set of any customer feedback program. However, it is becoming apparent that many companies are leaving a lot of valuable information on the table – information that can help your sales department, drive innovation, and provide competitive advantage, increased revenues and profitability.

I outline below a list of possible topics to explore with your customers. This list is by no means comprehensive. Feel free to add other topics in the comment section of this blog.

Topics to consider:
1. What can we do today to improve our customer satisfaction score tomorrow?
2. Better yet, what can we do to turn our customers into “walking billboards” – touting us to all their real-world and online friends/colleagues? For tips, go to http://www.allegiance.com/solutions/total-engage.php.
3. How did the customer first learn about our company?
4. What made them decide to come to our store and buy today?
5. What caused them to buy the product they purchased on the day they purchased it? (buying behaviors)
6. Of a list of possible enhancements to our product or service, which do our customers value most?
7. What additional product or service can we offer that our customers are willing to buy?
8. What level and type of communication do our customers want from us? And in what form (post card, email, text, etc).
9. What are they saying about my competitors that I can learn from?

Soliciting this type information obviously presents its own unique set of challenges. Best practices on how to design, ask, and what medium to use is the topic for a future blog.

But having recently embarked on this quest myself, I know first-hand that customers, in most cases, are very happy to tell you what they think on more topics than just customer satisfaction. If you are interested to see where your company resides on the feedback progression scale, check out this blog: http://blog.allegiance.com/2009/12/where-are-you-on-the-feedback-progression-scale/

Capitalizing on customer feedback requires more than the occasional sending of surveys in response to ad hoc business needs. It requires a strategic and ongoing dedication to hearing, listening, understanding and acting upon the VOC through a formal program built upon actively listening to customers and regularly taking a pulse of their level of engagement.

That is the premise of a new paper now available from Allegiance, Inc. and Peppers & Rogers Group., Titled Capitalizing on Customer Feedback: Creating Measurable Value from Voice of the Customer (VOC) Programs, the paper provides analysis on how to apply business insights gathered from customer feedback to achieve sustainable growth throughout the enterprise.

Included in the paper are specific principles to follow in order to realize a return on investment in VOC programs. These principles include attaining clarity on the business problem to solve, analyzing structured and unstructured customer feedback with text mining and other technology, acting on customer feedback, and embedding customer feedback into the company culture.

In the paper, the reader will be introduced to:

• New ways to think about customer feedback
• Top nine most popular customer feedback strategies
• Five steps of VOC evolution
• Four principles to realizing a strong return on your VOC program
• Two real life case studies demonstrating the concepts in action

To download your complimentary copy, visit http://allegiance.com/prgvoc.

While many business managers see only doom and gloom ahead, some are focusing on a new way to unlock a prosperous future – even in a tough recession. Through the game-changing principle of engagement, companies can learn to use technology and best practices to extract new revenue from their existing customer base.

Historically engagement has been elusive and hard to measure. However, there are four outcomes of customer engagement that can be measured in actual dollars:

1. Share of Wallet – Engaged customers buy more products/services, more often
2. Positive Referral – Engaged customers persuade potential customers to switch brands
3. Customer Churn – Engaged customers remain loyal and stay longer
4. Feedback Response – Engaged customers give more feedback, which allows companies the opportunity to address concerns and save potentially lost revenue

Even using conservative numbers, the financial benefits of engagement are substantial. Our research shows that it can be measured, and it is not as difficult as companies think. In fact, we found that improving customer engagement by a small amount, as little as one percent, can have a dramatic impact on financial results. The economics of engagement are real, and they can have a major impact on any business willing to invest the time, energy and resources in a plan of action. While most companies continue to compete on the traditional battlegrounds of price, service and quality, those that capitalize on engagement will create an unbeatable advantage.

Here are few examples of companies who have experienced significant growth in revenues due to their engagement efforts:

Allegiance Customer Case Studies