Customer Loyalty programs uncover insights about the health of customer relationships, and they can even provide sales leads to generate additional business. Recently a Customer Experience Manager discovered 90% of the leads generated from their VOC program have not been acted on.
Sales has obviously not done anything to convert the opportunities. That’s not logical – ignoring opportunities doesn’t make sense. Or does it?
Pat Gibbons recently blogged here about why customer insights go to waste. This might be a perfect example. Was this simply a process breakdown? Or was it a failure to communicate?
The hierarchy of engagement points to the three elements required for Sales to take action. They need to:
1. Be aware the lead exists.
2. Understand how to act on the opportunity.
3. Believe the opportunity is “good” and worth investing their time in pursuing.
In this case, they identified process issues such as team member transitions, missing information, and inaccurate coding. Those process issues lead to a failure to communicate. Sales was not aware of the leads. That failure to communicate meant nothing happened.
Ultimately the process was completely restructured to improve the process and the communication. Sales is now aware of the leads coming from the VOC program. In turn, the leads are acted on instead of going to waste. What about your customer experience effort – do you have customer insights going to waste?
Kitty Radcliff
Vice President, Consulting Services
I think that one of the reasons that companies don’t make the most of customer feedback is because it’s too slow.
For customer feedback to be valuable it needs to be delivered quickly.
Feedback should reach the right people the moment a person hits send.
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