Blog: Jill Dyche

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Shhh! It's the Voice of the Customer!

In which Jill holds a glass up to the wall of customer-focused programs, and hears the melodious sound of Customer Data Integration.

Shhh. Listen. If you’re quiet, you can hear them. They’re the conversations of CRM experts discussing data. And you don’t have to put a glass against the wall anymore to hear them.

I love that CRM analysts and advisors are finally leaving behind the well-worn diatribes about “listening to customer” and “the customer experience” and getting to the nitty-gritty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for listening to the customer—God knows, almost every client we’ve got has a project called “Voice of the Customer”—but that conversation’s been had. Industry analysts and the executives we counsel all “get” that listening to the customer is important. It’s time to get on with it. Fact is, people understand the “what.” What they want now is the “how.”

I wrote a book on CRM a couple years ago that delved in to the “how” and got some flack for the emphasis on the role customer information plays in getting and keeping good customers. Back then, people were focused more on redesigning customer-focused business processes and building customer focused strategies. But now they’re focused on who the customers are, the breadth of their relationships with the company, and how to ensure that the right data about each customer is deployed to the right systems and users. All roads are pointing toward Customer Data Integration (CDI).

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but integrated customer information has to be accurate. This can mean faster business actions, trusted financial forecasts, or customer recognition at the time of interaction. It can make people’s jobs easier, like with the sales person who can access the customer’s most recent interaction—whether it was with him, his colleague, or the company’s Internet—on his Blackberry.

In fact, the Voice of the Customer is frequent and loud. It’s not enough to simply listen. We need to track, record, and monitor what The Voice is saying, reconcile customers’ comments into overarching messages that we can use to improve our businesses, and use the integrated information to enrich our products and services to strategically differentiate ourselves.

So listen, all you “people, process, and technology” folks. That tap, tap, tapping sound is integrated data knocking at the door of our CRM projects. It’s telling us to improve our data accuracy, integrate it operationally, and propagate it consistently. And, like our customer conversations, it’s getting louder.

P.S.: Speaking of CRM, one more thing: If you’d like an evolved blog on CRM, check out Paul Greenberg’s blog. Like Paul, the blog has a sense of humor and it’s straight from the CRM trenches. In other words, Paul can cover the “what” and the “how." Just don't get him started on baseball!

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