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1. Voice of the Customer Research Helps Establish Relationship Status. With the Religence Framework for Customer Relationship Intelligence we measure sales and marketing and strategy execution by measuring customer relationship development—relationship cause and effect—in a deliberate, systematic process to build profitable customer relationships. The relationship begins as a prospective customer is first being courted and continues throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Voice of the Customer (VoC) research plays an important role.
We advocate a unifying framework to manage customer Acquisition, Closing, and Retention as a continuum. Most companies use a “sales and marketing funnel” for pipeline management, but typically a complementary “retention funnel” operates by default. Yet retention is where the money is. We make customer retention as defined and explicit as sales and marketing and put them together in our Customer Relationship Wings. We use Voice of the Customer research to establish relationship development status—to know where our clients stand with their prospects and customers. How satisfied they are. What they will say to recommend our clients, or not. Whether they consider themselves a business partner, or not. How hot they are, or not, about what our client is suggesting at the moment. How happy they are, or not, with what is happening right then and WHY. To get started we use what awareness and satisfaction research our clients may have with supplemental in-depth one-on-one interviews as necessary, to estimate where their customers are in the customer lifecycle. We establish initial status and then build Voice of the Customer feedback into an ongoing, actionable process that links customer feedback to strategy execution and operational results. With the Religence Framework marketing, sales, and customer service staff is aligned behind a common strategy and collaborates for relationship development, interaction by interaction to move customers seamlessly through the framework. Ongoing next- generation Voice of the Customer feedback at major events becomes part of the interactions between customers and the staff on the frontline with them. The results of the exchange dictate customers’ positions in the Religence Framework levels. The process can operate manually, but better yet interactions are configured in an operational CRI tracking system so that relationship metrics can measure the cost-per-contact in Acquisition, Closing, and Retention and measure the value the interactions have in moving the relationship forward or backward as it develops. We call this metric Relationship Value. This data stream allows us to correlate what people DO as the relationship develops, with profit and satisfaction. In fact, the Relationship Value metric can be a leading indicator for profit and satisfaction. Profit is the way executives have kept score; how they have known if their strategy is working; how they have told if they are getting and keeping enough customers through their sales and marketing efforts. However, strategy execution and profit have been hard to measure except as an end state—when it is too late to do anything to change customer outcomes. The current state is backward looking. With the Religence Framework executives can be forward looking. Executives can be proactive in managing strategy execution for profit in real time with our new leading indicator for profit. Executives have relevant intelligence to optimize customer outcomes. Relationship Status Analysis. What we found was their customers really appreciated them, but that they needed to mend some fences. Because they were selling a component that became part of their customer’s process, they could have several buyers or customers (represented by the circles) in any one company. Unfortunately in some of the biggest companies some of the buyers were not happy and would not recommend them. And there was the danger of the unhappy customers contaminating the happy ones in the same company! What gets lost in typical satisfaction research is that people are different—what bothers one person, won’t another. With our analysis, they could see at a glance where they stood as a starting point and from the in-depth, one-on-one interviews they could see what was really important to their customers and what was worth fixing.
Later in strategy execution, Voice of the Customer feedback continues to define where customers put themselves in the lifecycle. It’s built in at every critical event. It is a systematic way to learn what your customers are thinking and feeling about your company. Happy customers are more likely to be profitable and to evangelize for you. Relationship Status Definitions.
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