I recently examined Forrester’s data to find out how consumers provide feedback about bad service experiences. (For my full analysis, see: "How Consumers Complain About Poor Service.") The big takeaway is that consumers are much more likely to provide feedback directly to companies through relatively traditional channels (surveys, phone calls, email, surface mail) than provide feedback publicly through social channels (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, review sites). More specifically, 71% of US consumers provided feedback through at least one traditional channel (including email), while only 16% provided feedback through any of the social channels we asked about.

This may not be a huge shocker, but it is hugely important for customer experience leaders building out voice of the customer (VoC) programs. Most companies already use surveys extensively, and social media is now a hotbed of VoC activity. Yet the contact center is still largely untapped. That’s a shame, considering the mountains of valuable unstructured and unsolicited customer feedback buried in calls, emails, and letters.

Customer experience leaders need to step back for a minute to align their VoC efforts with their customers’ feedback behaviors. If there’s customer feedback gold in your contact center — and there probably is — you should mine that resource.

As part of my research on voice of the customer (VoC) programs, I run into a lot of vendors in the enterprise feedback management (EFM) space. In general, these vendors provide the technology to enable feedback collection, analysis, reporting, and action management. Many also provide professional services to help clients build their VoC programs and drive results.

The EFM space is an essential piece of the customer experience puzzle, but it’s still loosely defined. I’m not even sure that the term EFM accurately describes many of the vendors in the space — with all due respect to the term’s creator, Carl Henning.  

My colleague Roxana Strohmenger and I are kicking off some new research to better understand this market — and help you make the most of your vendor relationships.

Roxana will tackle the research from a market research perspective, which means more focus on controlling data quality, increasing efficiency through consolidation, and synthesizing data from multiple sources.

I’ll tackle the research from a customer experience perspective. While the issues mentioned above are still important in this context, I’ll focus on the customer experience applications of the activities. For example, here are two areas where I already see customer experience pros getting significant value from EFM:

Sam Stern from our Customer Experience Council recently sat down with me to talk about one of my favorite topics: voice of the customer (VoC). He must have been recording the conversation, because now it's a podcast.

Our discussion covers lessons learned from firms that participated in Forrester's Voice of the Customer Awards as well as more general best practices like making customer data relevant for employees, tying customer feedback scores to compensation, and measuring business results of VoC activities.

The podcast was originally developed for the Customer Experience Council, Forrester's executive network for customer experience professionals.

If you'd rather get this information in written form, check out my recent report: "Lessons Learned From Three Award-Winning Voice Of The Customer Programs." I'll also have a report on emerging VoC trends out in the next week or so.

Thanks for reading/listening!

I just published a new report describing “Customer Experience Executives’ Top Priorities For 2010.”

The research uncovered a significant shift in focus for established customer experience execs.

In their early days, most customer experience executives focus on building their teams, gaining visibility and momentum, and fixing broken experiences. Now, many execs have survived their early days, and they're starting to think longer-term. This shift is clearly reflected in the two most common areas of focus for this year: defining clear strategies and developing repeatable management processes. Other common efforts include infusing customer experience into standard business processes, aligning employees by tying compensation to customer experience metrics, and taking more action in response to available customer data.

We here at Forrester see this shift as a sign that customer experience is rapidly maturing, largely driven by the emergence of the chief customer officer (CCO) as a key leadership role within many organizations. As existing CCOs gain influence and other firms see the financial and competitive advantages of strong customer experience leadership, we expect this trend to become even stronger.

What do you think: Will CCOs become as common as CMOs?

On a related note: I'll be presenting the findings from this research at Forrester's Customer Experience Forum next week. Hope to see you there!

We’ve seen lots of interest in this year’s Voice of the Customer Awards, from both client and vendor companies.

Adding some fuel to the fire, I’d like to highlight that Ginger Conlon, Editor-in-Chief of 1to1 Media, has kindly agreed to be a guest judge! She’ll be joined by four Forrester judges: Victoria Bough, Moira Dorsey, Harley Manning, and me.

I also want to remind everyone that the deadline for nominations is Friday, June 4^th.

We’ll reach out to the winners on or before June 23^rd and invite them to join Forrester at the Customer Experience Forum in New York on June 29^th. At the event, we’ll call each of the winners up on stage to accept the award. A lot of great press coverage came out of this last year, and we expect even more heat this time around.

Here are the links to help you participate:

Submit your award nomination using the online nomination form.

Send accompanying slides (up to five) to voc@forrester.com.

Get answers to FAQs.