
Trend 1: Unstructured data will finally yield insight
The customer voice is out there regardless of whether or not businesses have implemented a solution to capture this valuable data. Customer feedback can be found in the transcripts of customer service calls, within online forums and, particularly, within the various social media channels out there. This data can be difficult to monitor and even more challenging to mine. Despite this fact, companies are exploring means of gathering and gaining clarity from big, unstructured data. One key issue for small firms is that often there isn’t enough noise about them to make social mining a worthwhile investment. However, this doesn’t mean social media is off limits; in the near term, medium-sized enterprises will use social data to benchmark themselves against larger competitors. Even a local bank with five branches can gain value by learning how the largest 20 banks are executing on the root causes of what creates Promoters and Detractors amongst their customers.Trend 2: Net Promoter will become accessible to every business
Well, almost every business. If you’re running a small sandwich or coffee shop, your finger is likely to be on the customer pulse already. If you’re part of a Fortune 500 enterprise, you will require sophisticated technology that fulfills your business’s complex requirements. Traditionally it’s been extremely costly to support sophisticated software solutions, requiring consultancy, custom programming and the necessary head count required to run an effective program. What has previously been missing, is support for the middle ground, the medium-sized firms that are perhaps too large to closely monitor customer feedback every day as a small business can, but too small to support intricate and large-scale technology as bigger businesses can.Trend 3: Customers will pick quality as they tire of quantity
As more companies adopt Net Promoter, an increasing number of surveys will be distributed to customers. I’m not sure about you, but I’m already drowning in questionnaires and requests for feedback. There are survey requests on my receipts, website surveys, surveys on the screen at the cash point, pop-up surveys, email surveys, telephone surveys, surveys in my smartphone; the list goes on. Customers, tiring of the barrage, are becoming irritated and selective, showing a bias toward quality surveys, a trend that will pick up in 2014. So, how do you define a quality survey? It comes from a company or brand with whom I have a relationship, or which has a history of responding to my feedback. A good questionnaire respects my time and doesn’t ask for information that the company should already have. Protect response rates: respect their time. To achieve better response rates, companies must respect their customers’ time. Be as quick as you can with individual responses, but don’t focus solely on addressing customer issues. Adapt your company’s processes in response to customer feedback; use your insight to fine-tune both your business model and your customer feedback process.Beyond 2014, there will be an increase in predictive analytics
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