What we’re talking about is the need to capture the voice of the customer. When talking to contact center professionals about this, I typically get two reactions.
Reaction 1: "Oh yes, we so desperately need to know and measure what customers think about us." Then they do nothing about it.
Reaction 2: "We have a pretty good general idea about how satisfied our customers are." Oh how wrong you are!
To illustrate what is wrong with both of these reactions to the need to gather and measure the voice of the customer — a.k.a. how satisfied they are with you, your products, and your service, take a look at one of my all-time favorite bar charts. This comes from a study done by Bain & Company (lots of smart guys with impressive degrees). It shows the difference between how satisfied companies THINK their customers are, compared to how satisfied the customers REALLY are.
80% perception vs. 8% reality. So what you can draw from this sample of 362 companies is that for the most part, they (and all of us) don’t know squat about how satisfied or dissatisfied customers are.
So what do you do about it? I’d like to hear your opinions. And in my follow-up, part 2 post, I’ll talk about how you can use technology to capture this important voice of the customer.
Joe Staples — The Blogorator, or in Italian, la blogoria
Joe Staples
I was fortunate enough to join Interactive Intelligence in January of 2005 as senior vice president of worldwide marketing (an overly long title that barely fits on one line of my business card) and since that time have managed our corporate and product marketing/management groups, as well as our public relations efforts. I spend the majority of my time in the world of branding, advertising, lead generation, product strategy, and media/analyst relations. I’ve been at this for more than 25 years with experience in technology and marketing, including assignments in the areas of contact centers, computer telephony, unified messaging, mobile wireless, computer networking, and computer-based education.
-Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
Your post, and the research done by Bain & Co only solidifies the fact that our perception is often the farthest thing from reality, and like Frued states this reality will be "dashed to pieces".