Quality Management Relies on Customer Feedback

Listening to customers, providing cost-effective means to gather information rapidly, and taking that input and translating it into effective process change is critical to the success of your business. There is a positive correlation between customer satisfaction scores of individual companies and their stock performance. Companies that listen to their customers and respond with changed offerings, products, or processes can gain an advantage into today's marketplace. Finding ways to gather input from your customers can be expensive and time-consuming. One very cost-effective means for automating this process is to utilize an automated customer feedback tool against your customers' inbound calls. Any incoming call into your enterprise presents an opportunity to gather valuable feedback. Companies that automate surveys over the phone have many different ways to apply that information throughout the company. Customer feedback can be used to streamline customer-facing processes by reducing complexity, eliminating superfluous activities, and shortening process cycle times, thereby reducing costs. Your customer calls can be used successfully for powerful feedback on what works and what doesn't work from the perspective of different segments of customers. For example, new

customers can be routed to a simple survey that determines how they came to use your services. This identifies which of your advertising methods are most effective in reaching potential customers. Customer feedback is a requirement for your company if it is engaged in executing a quality-management system, such as Sigma Six or ISO 9001. Listening to the voice of the customer and gathering the qualitative and quantitative data is a key element to the success of the program. By measuring customer feedback organizations can determine how current technology solutions are performing, and what solutions may be applied to provide better service and/or additional sales to customers. Organizations can also test the performance of newly instituted systems (i.e., new speech applications) and their success by how well it measures up to customer expectations via automated surveys. The use of customer feedback in the speech project life cycle, specifically the tuning phase, can give additional insight into the human-interaction factors of the new system. Surveys from an automated system can also be a critical mechanism for gathering customer feedback on the performance of customer service representatives. Using an automated survey tool on a phone call where service was rendered has the advantage of capturing the customers' impressions at that moment, making them more accurate. Surveys are useful in gathering customer impressions for new services or product ideas. Delivering these services will expand the customer's commitment to your business--customers want to be heard, and surveys can save your organization time and expenses by utilizing your inbound customer calls, while providing you with new perspectives. By listening to the voice of your customers you can better understand their reactions, how well current services/products are meeting their needs, and what should be improved to create new markets, acquire new customers, and retain your current customers. About the Author Darryl Addington is a product manager at Edify Corporation for Edify's Customer Feedback and Analysis product. Darryl has nine years of experience with speech and voice automation in the United States and through Edify's Japanese office in a variety of customer facing roles. Darryl has a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Related articles: The Customer's Voice: A Powerful Boost for CRM Effectiveness A new study shows that listening to customers makes a significant impact on CRM results. Listening to Customers Requires More Than Ears