Forrester Voice of the Customer Award winners announced

American Express, Dell Computers and IT reseller CDW have all been named as the winners of Forrester Research’s 2010 'Voice of the Customer Awards'.

The Award is intended to recognise initiatives that have helped organisations improve how they collect, analyse, interpret and react to customer feedback. Some 40 brands across the financial services, healthcare, retail, technology and travel sectors were judged against five criteria: clarity of approach, business value, positive impact on the customer experience, innovation and the repeatability of their practices by third parties.

Harley Manning, a vice president and research director at Forrester, said: "The best Voice of the Customer Awards programmes demonstrate that executive involvement, measurement and insights that are tied directly to action are critical to customer experience success."

Financial services firm Amex won its trophy for focusing on employee engagement. Its ‘Relationship Care’ ethos centred on the idea that every customer interaction was not simply a transaction to be undertaken, but rather an opportunity to deepen the relationship and improve loyalty.

As a result of this approach, it saw a double-digit increase in ‘Recommend a Friend’ scores and the highest customer satisfaction rankings among credit card companies for the last three years.

Dell, on the other hand, was commended for its work on customer and employee collaboration activities. Such activities included the provision of IdeaStorm and EmployeeStorm forums to enable clients and staff respectively to share new product concepts. The vendor also used customer ratings and reviews to get ideas on how to enhance its existing offerings.

Some 400 of the ideas generated in this way have so far been turned into products, but Dell has also challenged its engineers to gain average ratings of 4.5 or five out of five stars for any new ones developed.

CDW, meanwhile, gained its award for its ‘closed-loop listening’ process. The IT reseller surveys thousands of customers each year and creates ‘hot alerts’ to follow up on responses immediately. One such alert notified the firm’s sales people as to potential up- or cross-sell opportunities, which led to it generating millions of dollars in additional revenue last year.