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Your
Customers...An Underutilized Asset?
By
Cedric Nash
Effective use of customer feedback can fuel increases in customer
satisfaction, loyalty, growth and profitability. Whether it acts like
rocket fuel or coal depends on you: how you organize your feedback
efforts and what you do with the feedback – in short how you manage this
valuable asset.
An asset? While not a traditional asset that appears on the balance
sheet, customer feedback is a kind of intangible asset. How so? It is
essentially data that belongs to the firm (if they collect it) and that
represents knowledge and insights about customers. It can certainly be
translated into action and "put to work" to help the firm reach tangible
objectives.
If you don't effectively utilize this asset, it won't be immediately
noticeable. No FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) violations
here! But in the longer term, competitors who make better use of their
customer feedback asset will likely win the day. It's a new class of
asset – a "discretionary intangible asset" (the opposite of a
stupidity tax).
Most firms, however, don't perceive the full value of this asset and
don't make the necessary investments and efforts to put it to work
effectively. In these cases, Customer Feedback is an underutilized
asset. It could be delivering great value but it is not.
Firms that do fully value customer feedback tend to have well defined
programs to systematically capture, understand, and act on the customer
feedback. Also, they are often leaders in their sectors in several key
measures of success: customer satisfaction & loyalty; revenue growth
relative to their competitors; profitability. This is not coincidence.
It's not rocket science to put in place a program to effectively manage
the customer feedback asset, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune. It
does, however, take a serious organizational effort, but the ingredients
of how to successfully do it are known. Boiled down, they are:
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Leadership – the focus on customer centricity must
start at the top.
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Commitment - to the goal of getting good at managing
customer feedback.
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Resources - financial and human (often a cross
functional team).
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Tools – to collect and analyze feedback, to help
develop follow up action plans.
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Know-how.
Sometimes these programs go by names like Voice of the Customer (VOC),
Customer Experience Management (CEM), Total Customer Experience (TCE),
etc.
Customer Centricity, together with QuestBack Boston, has developed a
service offering to rapidly put in place a turnkey Customer Experience
Management program. We have the programmatic know-how and the tools to
help you quickly create an effective customer feedback process, and to
jumpstart it. It can be up and running in a short timeframe and for a
modest investment. Best of all, we teach you to fish. Once you are up
and running, you can run the program internally, while having access to
the Customer Centricity / QuestBack team as necessary. If this sounds
like what you need,
contact us – we'd love to help you better use one of your greatest
assets!
About QuestBack:
QuestBack is an enterprise feedback management tool for gathering,
analyzing and acting on feedback from critical constituencies. With
unique ASK&ACT TM follow-up capabilities, QuestBack makes customer
feedback data immediately actionable and supports the implementation of
feedback management processes. The company is based in Europe and
represented in the US by QuestBack Boston LLC.
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