The Voice of the Customers: Discovery, Awareness and Understanding

Listening to what customers are saying is a hot topic today.  Actually, it’s always been “hot”.  It’s just harder to do ever since regular face-to-face communication with customers went the way of the public phone booth.

The advent of social media supporting customer communications offers new possibilities for listening to the voice of the customers.

Customers are listened to over social media channels such as Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, among others.  A real advantage here is that customers really want to be listened to, and to be heard. It is no longer optional for vendors to “listen to their customers”.  It is a necessity.  Failure to listen and respond intelligently will go a long way toward having disappointed and angry customers. The impact of such dissatisfaction will easily be multiplied many times over, thanks to social media. The challenge is no longer “transmitting”.

The challenge lies in “receiving” and, more importantly, “understanding”.

It is not necessarily easy to really listen to your customers. The first hurdle hampering effective leveraging of the voice of the customers in achieving actionable “understanding”, is the information overload that the ease of publishing to the Web today only magnifies. There is some irony here; the very technology that makes it easier for customers to make themselves heard, leads to making it more difficult to effectively hear them.  (And so it goes) It’s a lot of work! Monitoring the sheer volume of information reflecting the voice of the customers and understanding the sentiments and themes being expressed is a huge effort.

The Voice of the Customer: the United Airlines Example

If not done well, it can get pretty ugly. Just ask United Airlines.

While that video has a catchy tune and perhaps darkly entertaining for anyone who flies, it highlights that what one does with information is ultimately more important than actually getting the information.  

One must act, but action, uninformed by understanding, is really of questionable value.

Back to information overload and deriving understanding from all that information. There are numerous tools entering the market that attempt to provide “sentiment analysis” or some other proxy for understanding.  If it were really so easy!  “Artificial Intelligence” has been a quixotic dream for decades.  (“Natural Stupidity” seems to always prevail.) 

Can software really understand the voice of the customers? 

“Understanding” is an intensely personal thing, meaningful only in the context of the individual. 

Real understanding depends upon the innate capabilities of the individual seeking to understand.  The brute-force effort of plowing through the mountain of information available over the Web in order to derive the pre-requisite understanding of what is going on can easily be expected to reside with humans for a long time to come. 

Tools that support the effort of listening to the voice of the customers and are purported to deliver relevance and meaning to their users will fall short in comparison with the value provided by the human brain.  Human cognition encompasses unique and complex capabilities based upon experience, education, context and talent.  It is doubtful that such tools will replace the human brain in understanding the voice of the customers.

So what is the role of technology in supporting "understanding"?

Instead of chasing after an illusive silver bullet, technology today should instead serve to facilitate and improve the use of human capability of securing awareness and understanding. This is in contrast with seeking to eliminate the human component. The understanding of what’s going can be accelerated through the presentation of information in such a way as to visualize the emerging trends occurring over the Web as well as to visualize what are the most important themes (regardless of emergence) over a given period of time.  Facilitating the observation of emergence and relative importance against a temporal background saves the user time needed to “be aware” and consequently, to achieve “understanding”. 

This is critical when it comes to listening to the voice of the customers.  The pace with which a negative customer experience can both spread and evolve suggests that conquering the constraint of time in the search for understanding is essential.

Darwin Awareness Engine embodies the principal that ultimately it is the human user who is best qualified to determine relevance and understanding about what is published over the Web.  Darwin’s technology serves to leverage the power of the human brain by allowing users to save time and effort while being more aware.

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Related articles:

Forrester's Leslie Owens on Harnessing the Voice of the Employee

Driving Business Value Through Enterprise Social Networking 

5 Reasons Content Discovery Tools Need a Human Touch

Content Curation: Why Detecting Emerging Patterns Is Crucial

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