A recent article in ‘Business Insider’, ‘Four Customer Service Lessons from Steve Jobs’ Outbox’, reminded me of one of our posts from June, where we discussed the CEO’s role when it comes to customer engagement. Jobs has a clearly defined strategy for when and how he responds to customer feedback, which he does himself according to this article, and in so doing clearly further bolsters the already massive amount of customer loyalty that Apple enjoys.
In summarising the ‘lessons’ from Jobs’ email replies, Harvard Business Review says, “Put simply, this is another way of crowd-sourcing customer feedback. In an age where the flow of information to large corporations might be overwhelming and noisy, it creates incentives for obtaining higher quality and timely information. For some corporations, a twitter account is playing this role. For Apple, the CEO is an active part of the game.”
One of the key tools in any Voice of the Customer programme worth its salt, is the ability to disseminate information and to identify which customer communications should be dealt with by whom. A specific communication may be promoted to the CEO’s attention for any number of reasons – whether it be because this customer spends the most money, has had specific issues, has the most business growth potential, or merely because their CEO is best friends with your’s.
The point is, a good system filters the right information to the right people. Pattern analysis can also identify relevant information and distribute it to the right internal audience for the appropriate remedial actions to be taken. This is listed as one of the Voice of the Customer trends for 2011 in our post earlier this week.
