By Ken Redekop, director, customer experience management solutions, Telus

With the holidays around the corner, many are looking forward to spreading holiday cheer with families and friends. But, the period leading up to the holidays often brings less than good tidings when a flood of stressed-out shoppers start making their holiday purchases en masse. The crowds. The lines. The staff shortages. All of these experiences prove frustrating to customers and can even impact a company’s bottom line.

As the busy holiday season draws near, companies would be wise to take stock of their customer experience programs. This involves listening to customers in a multifaceted way, including in-person, online, and over the phone, to provide personalized service and educated answers.

[Editor's note: Check out the December issue of CRM magazine for more on the customer experience.]

[Suggestions after the jump...]

Listen for Opportunities

Business executives take note: The holiday season presents a rich opportunity to listen to what customers are saying and, in turn, improve business processes and better your customer experience (CE) . In order to capitalize on this crucial period however, organizations must attempt to gain customer feedback from every channel available. By creating opportunities for customers to comment on their experience at every frontline touch point, managers can reap a bounty of insight with which they can create and execute impactful customer-focused strategies.

Giving credence to the importance of listening and the opportunity that lies therein, Strativity Group, a customer experience management consultancy, reported that shocking 89 percent of organizations do not know the cost of a customer complaint. It is critical that businesses take an introspective look and do whatever it takes to remedy this discrepancy.

Giving Customers What They Want, Begins By Knowing What They Want

A well-designed customer feedback management system engages customers immediately after their interactions with an agent and has the potential to identify issues before they occur. More than just a survey, feedback management systems enable organizations to gather information on products, processes, staff performance, customer loyalty, and satisfaction levels in real time. As a result, businesses can identify and measure the drivers of customer behavior and pinpoint specific areas for improvement.

Traditionally, companies have relied on surveys built around stale interactive voice response (IVR) systems to solicit customer opinions. Many people, however, have grown weary of dealing with computers and yearn for that human touch. A typical IVR system randomly picks customers inviting them to answer a post-call survey using the numbers on their keypad. While this process may seem logical in theory, people often find this intrusive and time-consuming.

Instead, one way businesses can increase customer response rates is to engage with them directly. For example, telling a customer that the company values his or her opinion gives the rep an opening to invite customer feedback. From there, the agent can then refer the customer to the customer feedback system. This approach is much warmer and less intrusive, resulting in more meaningful data that the company can put to use.

Thanks to customer feedback management systems, businesses have access to a plethora of intelligent data that provides a valuable outside-in perspective to better understand what makes customers tick. Moreover, appropriate alerts can be put in place to signal managers of a particular problem that is putting customer satisfaction at risk. If a high-value customer rates a product poorly, the customer feedback system can alert the appropriate product manager through an automated email alert, thereby allowing the manager to take corrective action.

Ignore Social Media at Your Peril

What should I get my dad for Christmas? What have you heard about this product? Your customers are talking to each other and these conversations often take place in online forums and social media sites. According to results from a study conducted by Universal McCann, there are over 272 million social media users worldwide, and with such gargantuan numbers, it comes as no surprise that one or two of them may be talking about your company or product.

Indeed, sites like Facebook and Twitter now serve as virtual clearinghouses for spontaneous feedback. Therefore, CE managers must understand how to participate in these conversations in order to build relationships, provide insight, and address issues. Otherwise, they risk losing customers. An effective way to utilize this powerful new channel, at least initially, is to simply listen. By monitoring the sites where customers chat honestly and freely, businesses will be amazed at the valuable insight that emerges as customers share and influence each other.

The Word “Silent” Contains the Same Letters as “Listen”

You must be silent before you can truly listen. Just listening allows businesses to spot trends and issues, as well as identify influencers and customer advocates. Including social media as part of an overall strategy may seem like venturing into shark-infested waters, but the goal remains the same — gaining direct customer feedback.

But what to do with all the feedback? It’s one thing to be vigilant about collecting hoards of data but without a proper management system all that hard work can be for naught. That said, integrating a customer feedback management solution into an existing back-office, contact center, or CRM systems is critical to building a better CE program.

In doing so, organizations can truly listen to the “voice of the customer” and gain a real-time perspective on issues and drivers impacting sales, service, and customer experience in general. A well-designed customer feedback management system can help businesses retain customers, minimize complaints, modify products and services, and ultimately build loyalty.

As the director of customer experience management solutions at Telus, Ken Redekop (ken.redekop@telus.com) has focused on helping organizations drive positive interactions with customers since 1996. Ken currently leads a business unit that helps organizations maximize customer experience effectiveness at each key interaction point — phone, Web, email, store, chat, and wireless. More than 500 enterprises are currently using Telus’s customer experience solutions (http://www.telus.com/customerexperience).