The ever growing importance of Voice of the Customer programmes is among the eleven key trends identified by Mark Johnson, CEO for Loyalty 360, for 2011.
Johnson quotes a recent IBM study, in which over 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries discovered that “getting closer to the customer” is a top business strategy and area of focus for these CEOs over the next 5 years. 88% of the CEOs surveyed said this was a key area of focus, followed by 76% saying that “insight and intelligence” is also a key area.
Among Johnson’s other key trends for 2011 that was of particular interest to us, is the link between customer and employee engagement, and how these can work together to drive bottom line results. Johnson quotes a 2009 Gallup poll which quantified the impact of customer and employee engagement. They found that those in the upper half on customer engagement and the lower half on employee engagement, or vice versa, get a 70% boost in bottom-line results; those in the upper half on both customer and employee engagement get a 240% boost.
According to Gartner, “Embracing the VoC will make the difference between success and failure for many organizations over the coming years.”
The bottom line is – it’s all about the bottom line, and VoC programmes, when executed with all stakeholders in mind, should always have ‘profiting from customer feedback’ as a main objective.
