CRM - January 2009 - (Page 30)

THE FEEDBACK FUNNEL an answer to people within hours and minutes, not days and months?” With customers demanding better and faster service, the ability to nimbly take unsolicited data and respond is crucial. “Feedback response time…shows you’re a company that cares and respects its customers, if you get to it quickly rather than just let it go into a black hole,” Cottle says. One innovative approach is to determine future customer behaviors based on the information available.“Predictive analytics is the opportunity for future consequences by understanding attitudes right now,” Cottle says.“It plays such an important role in business.” Collecting unsolicited customer feedback may require the use of speech analytics—likely the most literal interpretation of VOC. Many companies think they have to choose between surveying and speech analytics, Verint’s Alban says, but in reality the two technologies work best in tandem. “They’re actually very complementary to each other,” he says. “Speech analytics gives you information after the fact, which allows you to, in turn, create your surveys in real time so you can impact things as they’re happening,” he adds. Autonomy etalk’s Woolley says his company is seeing an uptick in speech analytics, with prospective or current clients making decisions about call recording applications based on those analytic capabilities. “It’s the fastestgrowing application in the history of the contact center market,” DMG Consulting’s Fluss adds. “We’re confident speech Keeping Your Community Engaged s companies increasingly turn to the Internet in an attempt to engage Web-savvy consumers, microsites—an individual or cluster of Web pages meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary Web site—are becoming more popular. According to Jeffrey Henning, chief strategy officer for Vovici, a Dulles, Va.–based enterprise feedback management (EFM) vendor, microsites are the 21st-century answer to the traditional focus groups that organizations used to rely upon to get candid, honest thoughts about their products or services. That said, the same rules and fears apply now as they did back when managers were peering at individuals through a one-way mirror and taking notes. “Like focus groups, sometimes you have the one loud individual and others change their thoughts because of that,” Henning explains. “It’s important that you have that broader perspective which is where EFM comes in. It makes it quantitative and ensures everyone gets a voice—not just the most vocal participants.” In his company blog, Voice of Vovici, he examined several prominent companies and how they infuse microsites into their customer feedback strategies. The successful businesses are not simply the ones that try to implement every single idea proposed, but rather make it clear that the ideas are being considered and the most popular ones will be given a shot. “Customers want to be heard just as much as they want their ideas to be implemented,” Henning says. Below is a chart based on Henning’s original, but with additions explaining how feedback is processed by the respective companies and shown to the customers themselves—in fact, what many consider the true goal of EFM. A Company Dell http://www.ideastorm.com Linked to from corporate home page Yes How ideas are acted upon A cross-function team participates in the community and internalizes the customer point of view. Members can promote or demote particular ideas. More of a resource for technology professionals, who can speak to one another about how they use Intel products. The company can then identify real-world usage and act accordingly. “Ask an expert” function allows Intel to assist customers with specific inquiries. Developers can post discussions or start forums, comment on any post, or provide a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to any suggestion; a counter displays the number of views each post has received, as an indication of popularity. A link called “Proof” enables any visitor to see the status of any idea (under review, reviewed, coming soon, or already launched). Intel http://communities.intel.com No Microsoft http://channel9.msdn.com No (but a link does appear on the Microsoft Developer Network home page) Yes Starbucks http://mystarbucksidea.force.com 30 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2009 www.destinationCRM.com http://www.ideastorm.com http://communities.intel.com http://channel9.msdn.com http://mystarbucksidea.force.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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