Thanks for your response Don. The intention in this article, particularly where I have focused on building a “clear, fully-defendable financial business case” was to make clear that CX professionals need to focus on providing genuine business benefit (in financial terms), rather than some of the “fuzzier” elements of a programme e.g. an NPS score, or a satisfaction metric. There are many ways of articulating financial benefit … from those on the operational side of the business (e.g. process improvement, compliance etc.), to those on the revenue generation side of the business (e.g. new customers, churn reduction, cross sell etc.). While we didn’t focus on any specific method of calculating ROI. Your example of lifetime customer value is certainly one area on which practitioners could focus, if it is a key metric for their organisation. If there is one other point that I would like to get across beyond the deliberately broad nature of the article, it is that it is crucial to invest the time up front to build your CX business case… speaking and working with all parts of the business (inc. marketing and finance) to articulate the potential business benefit of the CX programme. In order to continue to develop your CX programme, and to work towards genuine customer centricity, it is critical that you are able to continually demonstrate the ROI that CFOs are looking for.
I absolutely agree that proactive customer feedback is the really Big Data that can bring a Voice of the Customer programme to life. The ability to capture the mountains of unstructured and unsolicited customer data across a multitude of channels is the only way to hear the uncut, honest, no holds barred voice of every customer. Text is the primary method used for recording and expressing thoughts, ideas and feelings, so organisations that want to act upon the real Voice of the Customer ignore this at their peril. Organisations need to be able to transform relevant textual content containing customer sentiments, intentions and ideas into clear, reliable and actionable insights, integrated within a comprehensive and structured customer experience programme. The ability to process multi-media data in addition to text has also become a challenge, as customers use photos and videos more and more to convey opinions! All this might seem too much to handle, but increasingly technology is making Big Data manageable – and incredibly valuable when it comes to identifying the real drivers of loyalty and dissatisfaction, and linking them to the bottom line.
My answers
Thanks for your response Don. The intention in this article, particularly where I have focused on building a “clear, fully-defendable financial business case” was to make clear that CX professionals need to focus on providing genuine business benefit (in financial terms), rather than some of the “fuzzier” elements of a programme e.g. an NPS score, or a satisfaction metric. There are many ways of articulating financial benefit … from those on the operational side of the business (e.g. process improvement, compliance etc.), to those on the revenue generation side of the business (e.g. new customers, churn reduction, cross sell etc.). While we didn’t focus on any specific method of calculating ROI. Your example of lifetime customer value is certainly one area on which practitioners could focus, if it is a key metric for their organisation. If there is one other point that I would like to get across beyond the deliberately broad nature of the article, it is that it is crucial to invest the time up front to build your CX business case… speaking and working with all parts of the business (inc. marketing and finance) to articulate the potential business benefit of the CX programme. In order to continue to develop your CX programme, and to work towards genuine customer centricity, it is critical that you are able to continually demonstrate the ROI that CFOs are looking for.
I absolutely agree that proactive customer feedback is the really Big Data that can bring a Voice of the Customer programme to life. The ability to capture the mountains of unstructured and unsolicited customer data across a multitude of channels is the only way to hear the uncut, honest, no holds barred voice of every customer. Text is the primary method used for recording and expressing thoughts, ideas and feelings, so organisations that want to act upon the real Voice of the Customer ignore this at their peril. Organisations need to be able to transform relevant textual content containing customer sentiments, intentions and ideas into clear, reliable and actionable insights, integrated within a comprehensive and structured customer experience programme. The ability to process multi-media data in addition to text has also become a challenge, as customers use photos and videos more and more to convey opinions! All this might seem too much to handle, but increasingly technology is making Big Data manageable – and incredibly valuable when it comes to identifying the real drivers of loyalty and dissatisfaction, and linking them to the bottom line.
Karine Del Moro, Marketing Director, Confirmit