Vinay Iyer recently wrote a very interesting post about the importance of Capturing the real 360 degree ‘Voice of the Customer.
You can read the post here: Dear Facebook: Please Give Us A ‘Sympathize’ Button.
There are some very interesting things that he talks about:
Find smart ways to “mobilize the promoters” and “recover the detractors.
He also explains why context is key in any form of survey done with the customers.
Though, I agree with all of his suggestions, I still think that this is a reactive way to engage with your customers and could work for simple transactional situations. For example, this process works really well if you are selling books on the web (like amazon.com or selling a consumer durable products.
In situations which are more complex, like for example, selling enterprise software to large corporates, the execution of the process breaks down. There are many reasons to this, most important being
- Long sales cycles involving multiple engagements between the buyer and seller organizations involving many different people. In this situation, everyone has a different view of the elephant, so to say, and hence, no one able to provide the right context, in which case, the entire premise of the net promoter score and the contextual feedback is lost.
So, how does one get this contextual information in this situation?
In my opinion, we should then change the question a bit, in order to gain the insight:
- Instead of asking if “Would you recommend the product/service to your friend”, we could ask “Would you recommend this engagement to your peers in the industry?” and then add the contextual question – why?
What this does is the following:
- Collect the feedback relevant to the most recent engagement with the buyer and provide the contect to it (good or bad)
- This infomation is clearly insightful and actionable for the team that did the engagement with the buyer and provides them an opportunity to improve their engagement model.
- This also helps the seller to identify and fix any process or engagement that is broken so that he can continuously improve their sales process.
This can then prove to be the foundation on which the 360 degree customer engagement model can then be built.
PS: He also provided some interesting ideas for Facebook to work on (creating a dislike, sympathise, want or a Jealous (ok, this was my addition to the list) buttons apart from the Like button that they already have.
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