Non-Invasive Voice-of-Customer Feedback
Don Peppers
Customer experience expert, keynote speaker, business author, Founder of Peppers & Rogers Group
The “observer effect” is one of the strangest principles of quantum mechanics. The act of observing a quantum particle determines whether it is a wave or a particle. Before an
actual observation, it is either or both, but once it is observed, it will be one or the other.
Similarly, obtaining voice-of-customer feedback is not as easy as surveying your customers to ask their opinions, because the act of asking the customer will contaminate your results. Not that surveys don't produce useful data, but genuine voice-of-customer feedback is subject to its own “observer effect.”
When I ran marketing for a small airline (long time ago), one of the things I did was to record a random 30 minutes of inbound calls at our reservations center. Basically, I would choose an agent and time of day at random, then record his or her calls for 30 minutes at that time. With this done, I made several copies of the recording and distributed it to the half-dozen or so other senior executives at the airline, so each of us could listen to it on our way to work the next day. This constituted our voice-of-customer program, a bit rough-hewn but at least free of any observer effect.
Resourceful executives go to great lengths to obtain uncontaminated – that is, truly unbiased – voice-of-customer feedback. Chip Bell and John Patterson, in their marvelous book Wired and Dangerous, tell us that the mayor of Santa Clarita, California meets regularly with hairdressers in the town, because they are likely to have the real dope on what citizens have been saying. And the manager of a hotel in Texas schedules focus group meetings with taxi drivers, because he knows that his hotel guests are more likely to share their honest opinions with them than with the front desk manager or in an online survey.
Flash forward to the e-social era, and voice-of-customer feedback can increasingly be obtained “in the wild,” that is, on a variety of interactive platforms and social media where customers make their opinions known without having to be asked for them. Gathering voice-of-customer feedback in a non-invasive manner is likely to become an extremely common activity in the future.
SatMetrix (now a part of Nice) has SparkScore, for instance, a social media analysis tool that can help a client deduce a company’s implied Net Promoter score without surveying its customers directly. It does this by examining the strength and pervasiveness of positive and negative sentiments on a variety of social media platforms, from Twitter and LinkedIn to specialized customer forums and communities. (Obviously, one of the capabilities this offers is to assess a competitor's NPS numbers as well!)
And non-invasive voice-of-customer feedback can also be used for discovering business-building opportunities on a one-to-one basis with individual customers. Peppers & Rogers Group’s parent company TeleTech, a customer experience company, has done this for some of its clients. Among other things, TeleTech provides contact-center services, particularly for clients needing high-quality, personalized interactions for their customers. For one financial services client, the audio files of inbound calls were digitally analyzed to identify any mentions of a set of important life events (births, retirements, college plans, etc.). More than 2% of inbound calls, it turned out, had potential “selling opportunities” related to such events, and analysis showed that if just 10% of these opportunities could be closed, the client could realize a total increase in customer lifetime values of more than $200 million!
Big Data has arrived, and Big Data means that the era of non-invasive voice-of-customer feedback is upon us.
Digital Payments Innovator and Business Development Leader
11 年Early days in my career were spent in mbna...probably one of the best and worst companies to start your career with. The commitment to the customer and cutting focus on the VoC was unmatched. The company policy for example was for all 'management' to complete a mandatory 4 hours of 'Customer participation'. That included hands on Customer contact in the call centre or side-by-side listening to understand the impact of 'management' decisions on the business. The worst part of working for mbna is that I have yet to find a company with the same passion, vision and relentless commitment to 'win'. P.s. The unsaid rule at the company was to always capitalize 'C' in Customer since it was understood that they were the most important part of the business and 'the boss'. Ah, I miss it dearly...
Customer Experience Management pioneer | Thought Leader
11 年I really liked the part about listening to customer phone calls, which I've done many times. To me that's a form of observational research (the unobtrusive, natural and unstructured type). Whether participants are aware they are being researched, and whether is it live observation or recorded are just other options. It's the same with social media. The method is not new, only the channel. I'm not certain an NPS (which is claimed to be a reliable score after all) can be derived or deduced from observing or listening at phone, social media or other conversations. But listening to the voice of the customer certainly does provide lots of good, actionable qualitative insights. How and if these are then quantified is not as important as what they are used for and that's where the challenge for organizations is. Listening is easy. Understanding is something else. And it's organizations who understand who are better placed to benefit.
Customer experience expert, keynote speaker, business author, Founder of Peppers & Rogers Group
12 年Gerald Bush - thanks for the more precise analogy to quantum mechanics! But the "observer effect" actually applies to almost everything, not just quantum particles. You can't measure the air pressure in your tires without letting a little bit of it out, for instance. Still, I think the quantum example is more exciting, don't you? And Michael P - thanks for the recommendation of OwnerListens. I just signed up for it. I'm now the master comment receiver for my consulting firm, Peppers & Rogers Group. Looks like an interesting service - but I hope your "welcome kit" isn't too full of sales come-ons...
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12 年Great article Don, and gives much food for thought on creative ways to discover the voice of the customer.
Chief Executive
12 年It's an interesting analogy to use Schrodinger's Cat concept for customer research! As in quantum mechanics, however, I would not make the mistake in thinking that a less obvious way to measure a wave or particle keeps it in the "wild" undefined state. Measuring it will result in seeing a wave or a particle. A customer calling a center, chatting to a hairdresser or posting on a forum has already selected what state they are in. Of course, that does not say that such observations are not valuable in the pursuit of science (or market information). It's just to say that the quantum (or natural) state is not something to sneak up on with more sophisticated tools. As in science, the best way to find out about customer preference is to do the experiment, offer them choices and see what they buy. This is the genius of lean methods for new product development. And with experimental design, it takes some thinking to be sure your initial "product" will yield valuable information, and that you have the "pivots" lined up depending on what you see.