Add Customer
Voices to CRM
ABOUT 90% of software vendor clarabridge’s customers have chosen its SaaS offering, ac- cording to ceO Sid bannerjee. this is not surprising, given the costs and headaches of deploying and maintaining a VOc infrastructure in-house. companies need a
data warehouse for customer information, says James Ko-
bielus, an analyst at Forrester research. “think of twitter
streaming in all the time,” he says. “even if you filter for a
subset relating to the demographic you’re tracking or your
own customer base, it quickly becomes too much.”
Another challenge is integrating VOc tools and platforms
with existing crM and bI systems. “You want to pass feed-
back data and alerts into your crM application so when
you call up a customer record, you see not only what they
just bought, but how they rated their last interaction,”
says bruce temkin, a managing partner at temkin Group.
conversely, crM systems can help VOc systems pri-
oritize surveys and responses from customers based on
which respondents are hot prospects or big buyers. Most
VOc vendors offer their own proprietary dashboards and
querying tools, and they’re starting to link up with leading
crM and bI systems. bI and crM vendors should enter the
VOc market this year, according to Forrester.
but even with a hosted VOc platform, designing and
deploying the infrastructure is far from simple, early
implementers agree.
“the big challenge is integrating unstructured VOc data
with structured databases, in particular crM data,” says
Jeffrey Liss, senior vice president at charming Shoppes.
“Our crM group is working toward that goal.”
— ELISABETH HORWITT
senior vice president of corporate strategy at the plus-size
women’s clothing retailer, which includes Lane Bryant, Fashion
Bug and Catherines stores.
Before that time, the company’s method of collecting and
disseminating customer feedback was less than organized, Liss
recalls. Various departments and brand groups gathered input
from customer emails and online product reviews, while store
personnel received verbal comments from shoppers. Anything
deemed relevant was “passed up the command chain” to top executives via email distribution lists, Liss says. As a result, “we had
a lot of anecdotal information floating around,” and executives
had no way to distinguish important data from rumor, he says.
After a considerable amount of research and thought, Liss
came up with a “voice of the customer” (VOC) strategy to
collect both quantitative and qualitative input from various
customer feedback channels; analyze it for sentiment, meaning
and importance; and then forward relevant data to the right
This sort of organized approach is becoming even more
critical as the company adds new feedback channels, such as
an online survey tool that will ultimately deliver approximately
10,000 customer comments per week, according to Liss.
When it comes to interpreting such comments, “sentiment
analysis is key,” he notes. For example, “if a customer says, ‘I
that of 105 companies with formal VOC programs, 63% were
still “figuring out what to collect, and how,” says Bruce Temkin,
a managing partner at the Waban, Mass.-based research firm.
But a Forrester Research survey conducted late last year
shows some momentum behind VOC programs. Of the 118
customer experience professionals Forrester surveyed, 52% had
a VOC program in place and 29% were actively considering
one. “Big companies have finally embraced the link between
customer experience, loyalty and long-term financial success,”
says Forrester analyst Andrew McInnes. “Investing in voice-of-
the-customer programs is the next logical step.”
Indeed, businesses are recognizing the value of customer
input for a growing number of strategic areas, including mar-
keting, product development and quality assurance. Moreover,
VOC systems can also be used to collect comments and criti-
cisms from industry pundits and the general public.
» “It takes time to learn
how to harness the power
of [a VOC] tool,” says
Jeffrey Liss, a senior vice
president at Charming
Shoppes.
VOC Gets Social
Another driver for VOC programs is the social Web’s growing
clout as a consumer sounding board. In a first-quarter 2011 consumer survey by Temkin Group, about 20% of the respondents
said that they had used Facebook to report a bad experience,
while 13% said that they had used it to report a good experience. Moreover, 11% had reported a bad experience on third-party review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, and 7% had used
such sites to report good experiences.
Still, many business leaders remain wary of data garnered
from social media, which can be less than accurate or reliable,
to say the least. Temkin Group’s third-quarter 2010 survey
found that only 22% of VOC programs were currently using
