You know every time you get that nasty call from one of your customers lambasting your company for its poor level of quality? Or what about the delighted customer who sends you an e-mail singing your company’s praises for being so customer-oriented? In both these instances, it’s important to realize that this is one of the few times your customer is taking the time out of his/her day to actually talk to you. So the question now is: Are you listening?
Well, if you ask a sampling of customers who reside in Britain, the answer is no.
No matter how much they scream and cry, customers still feel as though they are not being heard by companies. In fact, a recent survey indicates that if you examine the issue of customer engagement in Britain, 89 percent of consumers reported that they are likely to tell organizations that they do business with if the service that they received was poor. However, almost half – 44 percent – do not believe that the companies take notice of, or really care about, the feedback shared, according to a report put out by the Customer Contact Association (CCA) and sponsored by Verint (News - Alert) Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT).
“Organizations are devoting much time and effort to responding to the voice of the customer but operating in a multi-channel environment requires a fresh approach,” Anne-Marie Forsyth, chief executive, Customer Contact Association, said. “We need to apply new intelligent monitoring techniques if we are to prevent valuable insight slipping through the cracks. Consumers, particularly younger ones, are far more likely to turn to Facebook (News - Alert) than pick up a phone to make their views known. Those that do will stand the best chance of courting and keeping the customers of the future but also the brand ambassadors of the future.”
The survey asked U.K. consumers and CCA members about their experience with various companies, and results indicated that these consumers and members are most likely to try to make their voice heard on social media – both the good and the bad – in the hopes of eliciting a response from the companies. Forty-six percent stated that they are likely to voice their dissatisfaction through social media, and similarly 46 percent of consumers agree that “social media can hold brands and organizations to account like never before.”
But are all those Twitter (News - Alert) and Facebook status slammings being heard? Apparently not, as a third of CCA members revealed that they often overlook social media completely as they look at less than two percent of customer interactions across these platforms. And, ironically, 62 percent admitted that they could benefit from actually listening to what their customers have to say on social media.
Based on the survey results it is evident that consumers might be talking but organizations are not listening – or they are listening in the wrong spots. For consumers, they largely prefer to provide feedback via postings or e-mails, with 44 percent of respondents citing this as their preferred route. Yet 65 percent of organizations reported that they acknowledge less than one quarter of the emails they receive for customer insight. Contact center agents even overlook their own notes made on service calls as just one third of the businesses surveyed stated that they regularly refer to these information sources for valuable customer insight.
With the survey results indicating that businesses have a long ways to go in terms of developing better customer engagement strategies, one company has set out to help facilitate this movement, ACCENT Marketing Services.
ACCENT, a performance marketing company for brands that are passionate about keeping and growing customers, recently sat down with TMCnet to discuss just how important it is to listen to customers and why companies should adopt to ACCENT’s Continuous Engagement Improvement Process, which couples ACCENT’s resources with a data-driven approach to help brands get the most out of their customer relationships.
According to company officials, companies ought to go through five steps when trying to reach their customers: listen, learn, connect, influence and optimize. Each stage is centered upon making each customer interaction more intelligent and engaging than the last, regardless of the interaction channel.
“Listening is more than just listening to phone calls or tapping into what is going on in a variety of channels,” Tim Searcy, chief executive officer of ACCENT Marketing Services, told TMCnet in a recent podcast. “We want to see not only what the customers say about the brands but how they feel about them. We find this includes a lot of social networks and community components like Facebook and Twitter and the Blogosphere. You can also listen by requesting feedback from the customers – kind of a more classic market research and customer satisfaction – but capturing those inquires through both direct and indirect channels, creating a singular strain of customer information around each customer and then being able to batch those pieces together to come to some conclusions and draw some ideas around how to do more.”
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Edited by Tammy Wolf