How important is the Voice of Customer?

My experience on digital marketing started while working with iCrossing, which is ranked as Number 1 digital marketing company in the US by Adage Survey 2007.

Digital marketing goes beyond Internet marketing, as few of the readers might be thinking, as Digital marketing encompassed Internet marketing, and also includes other elements such as mobile phones, SMS/MMS, display/banner ads and digital outdoor.

After working on blog analytics for almost more than a year, I’ve realized the power of voice, or the way we term it “Voice of customer”.

We had a long term contract with the client to prepare reports for Bank of America (BOA), in which we had to study blogs and websites to understand the psyche of the consumer and identify the pain points – and provide recommendations for the same.

After tracking blogs of BOA customers for a year, we identified there were just few concerns that the customers had with BOA, and surprisingly those concerns were occurring week after week - means BOA either never knew about those concerns or they were least bothered. However, the second case doesn’t seem to be true as no bank or for that matter, any company would like to loose its customers.

We had been informing the bank about the pain points of the customers on a weekly basis for one full year – and the bank even worked on our recommendations.

For instance, customers had been complaining about various fees that the bank was posing on its customers, and this concern was quite repetitive in nature. Our recommendation to the bank was to educate its customers about their fee structure. The bank acted upon our recommendation and launched a program called “Little knowledge is a powerful thing” in July 2007 – a very good move by BOA!

However, the bloggers still criticized the bank for this program, as the bank had lost fait of its customers by its various activities over the past 6 months – when we had been monitoring.

It’s amazing to know how news spreads across via the Social Media network. Just one person needs to initiate, and the topic becomes the “talk of the town”. An interesting research – a pleased customer would tell 2 people about his positive experience, whereas a displeased customer would spread it around to not less than 5 people....quite amazing and how true!

That said, BOA should focus more on its customers transacting online – make them happy, and if they happen to be bloggers (quite possible as blogging is the “in thing” in the US), they can act as the brand ambassadors of the bank, and spread positive word about the bank in the blogosphere.

There were few other insights of the report, however would share them in some other blog posts.