Too many businesses focus solely on the minds of customers and forget the importance of connecting emotionally – to customers’ hearts. What drives their passion, loyalty and engagement?

Customers make decisions about staying or leaving a business relationship based upon a multitude of factors – and attitude and emotion play major roles. By collecting feedback in real time, and at all possible customer interaction points, a company can learn firsthand what customers think when interactions happen and why customers become emotionally charged.

At a recent luncheon with Voice of the Customer (VOC) practitioners in Atlanta, the author of this blog, Matt Bowman, director of campaign marketing for Allegiance, noticed a few trends emerging from the conversation. This blog discusses those trends and also provides some insight on why those topics have emerged as “top of mind” items with today’s VOC practitioners.

A new research report from industry analyst firm Aberdeen Group called “Customer Experience Management: Engaging Loyal Customers to Evangelize Your Brand” reveals how organizations that achieve superior performance in customer retention and customer satisfaction grow and harvest customer advocates. In this blog post, the author shares some of the key findings from the report, and also discusses the role that customer feedback plays in these initiatives.

Trust is at the core of every relationship. In the aftermath of the economic crisis, our common challenge in bringing business relationships out of the proverbial tank and back into the light is renewing a level of trust with our customers, employees, and shareholders. Here are three tips on how to do that.

Everyone who’s been watching TV or reading the news lately knows that banks have certainly had their fair share of challenges lately. But what’s been interesting to watch is how those challenges and the fall out from big bank failures and the economic crisis have impacted bank and credit union customer loyalty and engagement levels.

At the Gartner CRM conference, presenters discussed the convergence between CRM, marketing, voice of the customer (VOC) and customer experience. There’s no doubt that business leaders are getting more savvy, but so is the technology. And, as business practitioners, we have the opportunity to use advanced technology to accomplish things that we have wished would happen for years. In the end though, the “raising of the game” by all practitioners and leaders must happen, too.