With today’s technology, more and more people are online. This means customers are online and sharing their compliments and complaints with each other. In light of this, savvy businesses are moving from annual and transactional surveys to using Voice of the Customer in real-time across the enterprise from product marketing to sales and research and development. All of this is done in an effort to gain insight into customers needs preferences and expectations.

But most companies are not leveraging the feedback they collect. For customers this can be worse than not asking for their feedback at all. How can companies create actionable insight from voice of the customer feedback? The key is to make that information available to employees at all levels and take action in an effective and profitable manner, but how can they transform that VOC into productivity?

Experts are seeing two types of challenges, those in the marketplace at large and those within organizations. There is a push for proactive experiments, rising risk to poor quality, a growing acceptance of online research, a change in customer engagement models and a need to move and react quickly.

“The bottom line is that there really is an explosion of information sources,” said Jodi Koskella, product manager at MarketTools, Inc., in a webinar, “Listening is No Longer Enough”. “There’s a lot more information out there. People are really scrambling to make sense of it.”

Inside organizations, there’s a lot more pressure, yet the pressure is that companies aren’t sure how to best to capture this information and take advantage of it. At MarketTools there is a growing pressure to capture fresh insights, a push to accountability measurement and proliferation of casual research.

“Here, our main focus is really helping customers understand how to use these insights and make sense of all the information,” says Koskella. “That they can understand what a customer wants.”

Companies continue to ask: How can I design products that get them excited? How can I make sure that I’m continually listening to customers to get feedback on products and services to make sure that they’re happy, satisfied and loyal?

MarketTools is focused in two main areas: market research and enterprise feedback management. Market research is where MarketTools helps companies find that next really big idea, identify opportunities for improvement and really get a sense for what customers want. Enterprise feedback management understands customer needs so companies can improve overall satisfaction and loyalty and ultimately drive profit growth.

Building loyalty is very urgent in today’s marketplace. Loyalty creates a competitive advantage and can increase profits by 25 to 85 percent, according to Forrester Research (News - Alert). Loyal customers spend more and refer more business to companies and it costs less to retain.

“Loyalty has always been important, but there are a lot of pressures in the marketplace that are making it worse,” says Koskella. “Sometimes companies spend so much time and money in the acquisition costs of new customers that they forget about their existing ones.”

Yet customer loyalty is even harder to earn and keep. Nearly 86 percent of customers will leave a company after just one bad experience and 82 percent of others will tell others about it. This is a big jump from the traditional one to 10 people reach customers once had. With today’s social media, however, they have access to share that experience with thousands of people rather quickly.

“It’s more important than ever before to keep customers happy and try to create that loyalty,” says Koskella.

To learn more about the importance of capturing the voice of the customer and leveraging their feedback for improved productivity and efficiency, check out this webinar in full through the link provided above and here.

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