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11. Voice of the Customer Feedback Helps Build Rich, Actionable Customer Profiles. No matter where you’re starting from—whether it is from a sophisticated, profiled list from a CRM system or well-worn stack of customer and prospect business cards—you can add more to the profiles of your targeted customers. You can do this by your own observations or educated guesses of who these people are and what they are like. Better yet, anticipate what you’d like to know at each stage in the customer lifecycle—in Acquisition, Closing, and Retention. Put a process in place like the one in the Religence Framework to ask the questions systemically. Record the answers in the customer profile. We suggest organizing them by company information, product/service information, and customer relationship characteristics. The characteristics include the person’s Relationship Value pattern, influence, potential, worth, and the relationship quality. Add to what you (and your CRM system) think by appending existing customer research; customer feedback tracking research including awareness and satisfaction research, scanning data and clickstream data; and data from purchased lists and other databases for profiles rich with customer demographics and behavior and profit patterns. The lists and the profiles you create will be better than any list you could buy because they draw from your experience with the customer. The customer research you continue to do will give you more insight if you append its results to your customer profiles. Usually, a great deal of effort is put into analyzing the results of the research, but far too often, the results stay in the report and at best may be reduced to an index number to track. It isn’t as actionable as it could be. Pulling key findings from the reports and storing them alongside more direct customer feedback will give staff on the frontline with customers the benefit of the intelligence that management has—and it can be put to use day-to-day for strategy execution and tied to operational results. The reference section Voice of the Customer Research Helps Establish Relationship Status describes the Acquisition, Closing, and Retention stages that a customer goes through during the development of the relationship. The stages and levels within the stages were designed to track with typical categories in awareness and satisfaction research. This allows the correlation of the Relationship Value—built as a result of customer interactions—with existing and future awareness and satisfaction research. We obviously have some passion about making sure our clients build robust profiles of their customers and prospects and make this information available to everyone on the frontline with customers. In fact, it was our frustration with how often valuable information was wasted that led us to formalize our Customer Relationship Intelligence approach in the Religence Framework. It is our contention that deep customer economic and behavioral knowledge, embedded in proprietary relationship metrics, developed over time in an integrated system, are nearly impossible to copy. And that these exclusive customer profitability patterns are the best source of differentiation you can have. |
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