Voice of the Customer
Strategy rooms are filled with a discord of multiple voices. The customer’s voice should always be the loudest.
​
As companies grow and find success, it is common to see customer management be relegated to autopilot. Functional excellence and bureaucratic preoccupations take over.
Maintaining proximity with end buyers and empowering frontline heroes to shine in customer interactions remains the surest way to win. Companies that embrace customer closeness and configure their business models and organizations around the unifying purpose of customer delight retain their initial, galvanizing mission – delivering the most possible value to customers – while cultivating enduring relationships and inspiring employees.
To keep the customer voice magnified, companies need to have open lines of communication, while also being attentive to indirect sources of expression. Direct dialogue in the form of customer panels, feedback interviews, satisfaction surveys, loyalty programs, and account planning sessions are paramount in understanding the health of a customer base and emerging opportunities/risks. Indirectly, social listening via sentiment mining of digital footprints can provide additional color to appreciate underlying trends.
Inscribing voice of the customer at the center of growth and marketing strategies can clarify ambiguity around which customer segments are vulnerable and which ones are protected to better allocate resources and design intelligible sales plays. Great customers who stay, refer, and advocate surface easily and allow companies to foster brand champions. Less-than-ideal customers who are high-maintenance, unprofitable, and unhappy can also be identified with quicker ease to inform go-forward plans. Nevertheless, real-time discernment of meaningful differences can be difficult to ascertain and disruptive to normal workflows.
​
How Pointe can help
For over two decades, Pointe has been helping companies know their customers better. Whether you are a corporate seeking to understand customer willingness to pay for new a product development or gauge elements of value for a loyalty program or a private equity investor needing to understand the defensibility of a target’s customer base to underwrite growth, Pointe can support all optimization and validation exercises. We combine sophisticated HUMINT methodology to gather critical intelligence and elevate it to actionable insight through the filters of advanced analytics, tenured industry expertise, and sound business judgment. We work with your team and are highly sensitive to established relationships, conducting all outreach in a discrete and gracious manner. Specifically, we perform:
​
-
Customer satisfaction studies – assessment of customer status (e.g., promoter, neutral, detractor), key experience and economic drivers, and outlook on future spend opportunities
-
Prospective screenings – advanced sales intelligence to properly qualify leads, prospects, and suspects and best position for competitive pursuits and conversions
-
Customer panels – creation of bespoke and multivalent forums for survey launches and qualitative discussion to decipher deep customer learnings
-
Social listening & analytics – scan of digital footprints to determine awareness and advocacy tendencies as well as underlying customer sentiment
Relevant use cases
-
Pointe conducted a customer satisfaction study on behalf of a leading payments company to understand areas of delivery excellence and underperformance relative to buyer expectations and competitor offerings to close gaps, prevent churn, and invest in account champions.
-
Pointe performed a comprehensive digital footprint scan of online marketplaces (e.g., Amazon, Wayfair) for a CPG company to determine overall customer sentiment, notably as relates to awareness of the client’s product portfolio and willingness to promote based on NLP analysis of unstructured review data. The result was an original, clarified view of positioning and growth potential.