white paper | 2011

Creating True Customer Intelligence

Gather more actionable insights using a blend of cloud-based VoC and financial data

Creating True Customer Intelligence

Gather more actionable insights using a blend of cloud-based VoC and financial data

Executive Overview
Is your company maximizing its use of all available customer insights in order to create the best possible product offers or to build the most optimal marketing campaigns? If your organization is like most companies, the answer is probably, No. Most companies learn more about their customers in two primary ways. They gather behavioral insights about their customers through transactional information thats generated by CRM systems. They also rely on customer surveys or other feedback mechanisms to find out what their customers are looking for1. All told, companies are sitting on mountains of customer data. The trouble is, theyre not taking full advantage of it. A big part of the problem is that Voice of the Customer (VoC) and CRM insights are usually separated like oil and water by organizational and functional silos and are rarely synchronized. That makes it difficult for decision-makers to analyze the entirety of each customers interactions with a company in order to develop the most effective product offers, deliver personally tailored marketing campaigns, etc2. In short, the broad spectrum of customer insights available to companies isnt being fully exploited. As a result, the business cases being crafted by executives to support product and marketing strategies arent as on target as they can be. When companies cannot conduct a comprehensive analysis of all customer data, corporate leaders are forced to take a leap of faith on projected business outcomes.

Contents
Executive Overview ________ 2 VoC and CRM Insights: Essential but Incomplete ____ 4 Four Steps for Integrating Disparate Customer Insights _5 Blasting Past Barriers _______ 6 The Benefits of Cloud-based Customer Intelligence ______ 8 Case Study: Nicor __________ 9 Case Study: EMC __________ 10 Conclusion ________________ 11

Developing a Complete View of Customers

This scarcity of holistic insights not only impacts strategic planning; it also hurts a companys competitive positioning. According to a recent customer insight benchmarking study of more than 800 executives across 40 global companies conducted by Boston Consulting Group, only 35 percent of executives felt their companies were best in class in customer insight, while just 41 percent consider their use of customer insights as a source of competitive advantage3. Clearly, something is missing. Information from customer surveys and other types of customer feedbackincluding high-level willingness to recommendis essential, but doesnt provide decision-makers with all of the actionable insights they need to effectively craft and execute retention, support, sales and marketing strategies aimed at producing the best-possible business outcomes. For instance, lets say a major airline discovered that its customer satisfaction scores are down in five cities. That information helps alert executives that there appear to be problems that need to be addressed, but the satisfaction scores on their own dont inform them of what those customer issues might be or whether there are any common trends affecting operations for those locations. However, if decision-makers for the airline were able to draw upon customer feedback and CRM data, theyd be much better positioned to identify the root causes and potential business consequences of customer dissatisfaction. They could then determine what changes could be made to prevent such possible outcomes as customer churn through the use of predictive analytics and probability scoring.

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved.

If I can tell a business executive that for every point they lose on their customer satisfaction scores the company is losing $50 million in quarterly net revenue, thats a compelling business story, says Chris Cottle, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Products at Allegiance.

Benefitting from a Blended Approach

As essential as it is for companies to gather feedback from their customers, all too often the information thats relayed is either incomplete or skewed. Customer feedback is critical, but customers sometimes dont do what they say or tell you what they feel, says Don Peppers, founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group. Its always important to validate customer feedback with real transactional data, in order to ensure that customer behaviors can actually be correlated with customer feedback. Listening to customers has always been vital, but its only one piece of the puzzle. The key to success lies in successfully marrying qualitative customer feedback with more quantitative CRM data, or what Allegiance refers to as Voice of Customer intelligence (VOCi) 4. This is most effectively accomplished through a cloud computing-based architecture that provides decision-makers easy-to-use reporting and analytics tools to develop compelling business plans, inform marketing decisions, and guide service strategies. Readers of this white paper, from Allegiance and Peppers & Rogers Group, will learn how to effectively blend customer feedback and CRM insights to determine the actionable steps needed to improve their business outcomes. Readers will also discover:

Its always important

to validate customer feedback with real transactional data.
Don Peppers, founding partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

The strengths and shortcomings of using Voice of the Customer and CRM insights on
their own. This includes opportunities to identify hidden intelligence and patterns that cant otherwise be detected.

Four steps for marrying cloud-supported VoC and CRM insights to attain customer intelligence that will enable managers and decision-makers to craft compelling strategies and build supporting business cases5.

Recommended approaches for addressing the key cultural and organizational challenges
that prevent executives from integrating the customer feedback and transactional data needed to make the most fact-based decisions and craft actionable business strategies.

Multiple benefits gained by obtaining customer intelligence in the cloud, including

a centralized approach to gathering and acting on customer insights from numerous channels and functions. This can also help companies to cost-effectively leverage vast computing resources rather than invest in additional on-premise hardware, storage technologies, and IT support personnel.

Best practice examples of enterprise companies that are successfully deploying these
models, including lessons learned and quantifiable business outcomes.

An Incomplete Customer View Hampers Customer Retention

A recent study conducted by Aberdeen Group found that an inability among retailers to capture and analyze customer data are among the top challenges they face regarding customer retention15. High customer retention costs Inability to capture customer data Lack of promotion effectiveness Lack of uniform marketing across all channels Inability to analyze customer data 21% 21% Source: Aberdeen Group February 2011 26% 29% 28%

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved.

VoC and CRM Insights: Essential but Incomplete

Clearly, customer feedback and CRM or transactional data provides corporate decision-makers with valuable insight. By using online surveys and other feedback mechanisms, companies can learn more about what their customers want. That information can help companies as they devise product offers and marketing campaigns6. It can also help companies to identify and address customer issues more quickly and effectively7. Still, VoC information only goes so far. VoC data is often composed of scores such as customer satisfaction ratings. These scores might inform business leaders whether customer satisfaction has risen or dropped, but they dont say why. Nor do they provide actionable insights on steps that companies can take to fix problems or to improve customer satisfaction or the customer experience.

A House Divided
There are other reasons VoC information isnt complete enough on its own to provide decisionmakers with prescriptive outcomes. For example, customer surveys are often designed with generalized questions that are intended to capture the interests of most respondents and generate high response rates. But they may miss out on capturing the needs of specific customer segments, thus making it difficult for sales and marketing leaders to develop targeted product offers and marketing campaigns that will resonate with specialized customer groups. Customer surveys also dont capture the nuances of individual customers, such as their behaviors and traits. Customers might be able to verbalize their needs to some degree via feedback channels, but these interaction points dont always inform decision-makers what specific features or functionality customers are looking for in products. Consider that no one knew they needed a portable music system until Apple released the iPod and iTunes. VoC data can be a leading indicator if it has been validated with actual behavioral data, but by itself it might not be as thorough, says Peppers. Additionally, CRM or transactional information can provide decision-makers with useful insights about customer behaviors. But transactional information by itself also has shortcomings in helping managers and executives to develop full-blown business cases for product and marketing strategies8. For example, transactional data doesnt include information about a customers future needs or motivations to purchase. And it may not provide decision-makers with enough information as to why customer churn is increasing in certain markets or sales of a certain product are down9. Both customer feedback and operational insights need to be brought together so business leaders can uncover hidden intelligence and patterns that cant otherwise be detected. For instance, through its analysis of customer metrics and loyalty drivers, EMC discovered that a major pain point for customers was that they had to discard dozens of large cardboard boxes that EMC equipment was shipped in. To make this easier for its customers and more cost-effective for EMC, the firms engineers developed a 12 x 12 Big Blue Cube that collapses to a 2 x 2 container when emptied that customers can then send back to EMC for reuse. Arming decision-makers with powerful insights such as these can help them to take action to address customer issues more quickly and effectively10. Additionally, collecting and analyzing information gleaned from customer feedback, social media, unstructured data, and operational inputs can enable executives to establish better views of emerging customer trends, develop a clearer picture of a customers current and future needs and potential value changes, and track those changes by segment. We can do statistical and correlation analysis on each data type until were blue in the face, but its never going to impact business change unless we can tie those insights together and connect the dots to tell a business story, says Allegiances Cottle.

VoC data can be a leading indicator if it has been validated with actual behavioral data, but by itself it might not be as thorough. Don Peppers,
founding partner, Peppers & Rogers Group

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved.

Ensuring Collective Customer Intelligence

Indeed, the value and competitive advantage for blending VoC and CRM insights was borne out in a recent study conducted by Forrester Research. In a review of its 2010 Voice of the Customer Awards finalists, Forrester uncovered several major trends among best-in-class companies, including a propensity among them to link customer feedback to other business data11. The Forrester study notes, for instance, how USAA was able to help prove the value of customer satisfaction by linking customer reviews with transactional data. By analyzing customers behavior during the year after submitting a review, the firm showed that positive reviews correlate with average incremental revenue of $108 per customer per year, writes Forrester analyst Andrew McInnes. USAAs efforts demonstrate that its management team knows the value of analyzing and acting on a wide range of customer inputs that have been integrated to create a more complete picture. Its a strategy many decision-makers can learn from. C-level executives make million dollar and billion dollar bets based on two things: data and intuition, says Cottle. The intuition part is partly drawn from their experiences and theyre expected to use that as part their decision-making. But the scary part is that theyre making these high-stakes bets with only a percentage of the data they should be considering. Clearly, business leaders cant make informed decisions until they have all of the necessary information. Building a knowledgeable business case is a lot like trying to fly an airplane. Armed only with information about the planes altitude, but lacking vital details such as planes air speed, load factor, etc., the pilot cant make an informed decision about the best flight strategy. Pilots and business leaders alike need a holistic view of the data required to determine the best path forward. In the sections that follow, well explore recommended steps for blending VoC and operational data (CRM, financial, etc.), along with tips for breaking through the cultural and organization barriers that often prevent decision-makers from accessing all the necessary customer information in order to craft relevant and timely product offers and marketing strategies and better respond to issues that will improve the customer experience.

C-level executives are

making high-stakes bets with only a percentage of the data they should be considering.
Chris Cottle, executive vice president, Marketing and Products, Allegiance

Four Steps for Integrating Disparate Customer Insights

Companies need to bring together VoC and CRM insights to attain the holistic customer intelligence thats required for decision-makers to develop a compelling business story. There are four steps to doing so in a way that ensures a smooth transition to a repeatable approach, according to Allegiance and Peppers & Rogers Group:

1. Apply the right balance of resources. Generating a compelling business case requires the right mix
of data and technology, as well as support from IT and customer-facing functions. Successful initiatives have at their core the ability to tell a business story around the merged data. For instance, a company might learn that for every one point decrease in its willingness to recommend, it experiences a loss of $1.5M in net revenue per quarter.

2. Develop business stories that are relevant for each business user. Frontline workers, midlevel
managers, and C-suite executives all have different responsibilities and information needs. Make sure the message is aligned with the recipient.

3. Integrate VoC and CRM data using a cloud-based approach. Cloud-based architectures and tools
can eliminate painful systems integration issues between customer data sets and databases.

4. Obtain rights from data ownership groups to share and blend data. The same business leaders
who approve the use and sharing of this data are also those whose divisions will benefit most from it. Show them early successes and build on those to help win their endorsement.

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved.

Blasting Past Barriers

We can do statistical and correlation analysis on each data type until were blue in the face, but its never going to impact business change unless we can tie those insights together and connect the dots to tell a business story. Chris Cottle, executive vice president, Marketing and Products, Allegiance

One of the primary obstacles that decision-makers face in their efforts to draw upon collective customer intelligence are the cultural and organizational snags that result in different types of customer data being siloed between organizational functions and departments12. Its not that the technology isnt available to integrate and centralize disparate customer data sets across the enterprise; these systems do exist and are helping companies like USAA to gain competitive advantage by examining and acting on the full suite of customer insights. Instead, business leaders and other players are often beset by ownership and control issues where operational landlords are reluctant to share valuable customer information managed by their groups with other parts of the business. In other cases, different departments are tasked with gathering and maintaining these distinct types of information separately from one another. For instance, market research or customer service teams will gather and process VoC data, while CRM analysts and number crunchers in the IT organization handle transactional and behavioral data sets, says Peppers.

If it appears that no one at the C-level cares about customer data sharing, then integration will be viewed as just another project.

A Pathway to Success
Either way, these fiefdoms of customer data prevent operational managers from developing thoughtful business cases. They also block company leaders from gaining a complete view of the companys customer inputs from across the enterprise, thereby hindering their ability to make sound business decisions.

A Remedy for Identifying and Responding to Customer Needs

Even taking the first step of combining different sources of VoC information can have an impact. For example, Allegiance customer Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital is composed of numerous semi-autonomous departments, just like many large healthcare institutions. Patients often interact with many of these departments, such as radiology, lab services, etc. However, the hospital didnt have a smooth process in place for sharing patient feedback between departments. In addition, patient satisfaction surveys and feedback forms were managed via paper forms and email, further complicating the ability to share patient input between departments and to fully understand patient needs and concerns. By creating interdepartmental collaboration and combining patient and employee feedback into an integrated system designed to deliver better customer intelligence, the hospital has been able to increase its patient satisfaction scores from 67 percent from when it first began its patient satisfaction improvement journey to 90 percent currently. Getting people within the organization to share customer data is one of the biggest challenges that many companies face, says Allegiances Cottle. Organizations such as Robert Wood Johnson that are able to bridge those gaps are going to be more successful.

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved.

These challenges are not insignificant, says Cottle. Its one of the biggest difficulties that people who need access to this information are facing. Cottle and Peppers offer recommendations for breaking through the customer data logjam: Gain active C-suite commitment and participation. Obtain C-suite support by clearly articulating the financial benefits and highlight early wins. If it appears that no one at the Clevel cares about customer data sharing, then integration will be viewed as just another project. However, if C-level executives communicate the importance of these efforts and align compensation to support them, then employees across the enterprise will act accordingly13. Acquire and retain vital business champions. Recruit two or three business leaders who recognize and support the benefits of using integrated customer intelligence. Work with them to use that data to uncover insight that helps them build strategies that will deliver measureable business outcomes. Then, take action on that information. Keep the program alive. Actively sell the merits of the program to major stakeholders by continuously sharing results from business improvements achieved and key wins. Tell simple, easily understood business stories that will resonate with listeners based on their role and goals. When decision-makers are able to access all customer inputs from across the organization, theyre able to assemble more compelling business stories and set realistic targets for actionable results. In the pages that follow, well explore the advantages of using a cloud-based approach to assemble and then take action based on customer intelligence. Well also examine how companies such as EMC and Nicor National have been able to gather and act on a wide range of customer inputs using an integrated approach and the successes theyve been able to achieve14.

When decision-makers
are able to access all customer inputs from across the organization, theyre able to assemble more compelling business stories and set realistic targets for actionable results.
Chris Cottle, executive vice president, Marketing and Products, Allegiance

Banking on Integrated Insights

Retailers and other companies struggle with developing effective promotions and marketing campaigns due to incomplete customer intelligence. One Allegiance customer, a midsize financial services company based in Texas, has generated solid returns on its savvy use of unified customer insights. Since the bank began uniting VoC and CRM data using an integrated customer intelligence system beginning in 2008, it has been able to gain deeper insights into the needs of specific customer segments. As a result, the company has been developing more meaningful and effective campaigns and offers for its existing customers. Thats been critical at a time when customer churn has skyrocketed in financial services, thanks in part to consumer mistrust thats accelerated since the credit crisis began in 2007. According to the J.D. Power and Associates 2010 U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction Study, just 34 percent of bank customers say they plan to stick with their existing bank, compared with 46 percent in 200716. As such, financial services companies need to gain deeper insights about their customers preferences and needs in order to do a better job of retaining high-value customers. The Texas bank is doing just that. By blending and analyzing customer feedback and operational insights, the bank has been able to identify and address customer retention issues in its checking division. As a result, since 2008 the bank has been able to retain 6,300 customer checking accounts, which translates to more than $2 million in saved revenue. Meanwhile, the company has been able to retain an additional 840 customers who use other financial services products, resulting in another $400,000-plus in rescued revenue. Looking forward, the company is anticipating even greater financial returns based on its ability to track and respond to customer service issues in real time.

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved.

The Benefits of Cloud-based Customer Intelligence

The emergence of the cloud is reflective of the kind of impact that consumer technology is having within the workplace. Don Peppers, founding partner, Peppers & Rogers Group Theres a lot of buzz these days about cloud computing or, quite simply, the cloud. So what is the cloud and how can companies draw business benefits from using customer intelligence through a cloud-based approach? Simply put, cloud computing is a means of accessing shared resources, software applications, information, and other services through the Internet17. The emergence of the cloud is reflective of the kind of impact that consumer technology is having within the workplace, says Peppers. Just as consumers are demanding easy-to-access, real-time services over the Internet such as online banking, travel updates, and online self-service, corporate customers are also increasingly demanding more accessible Web-based services. There are multiple benefits to accessing and acting on customer intelligence through the cloud including: Generating faster access to information versus waiting on an IT staffer to generate a report, thus providing opportunities for faster time to market. Developing a centralized approach to gathering, analyzing, and acting on all types of customer intelligence, including CRM information, financial and operational data, social media interactions, and VoC insights. Enhancing the ability to have real-time, relevant dialogues with customers thanks to fresh insight. Avoiding unnecessary costs by using Internet-based resources versus adding to your companys internal server or storage footprints. Deploying fewer internal resources needed to support premise-based systems and data. The ability to access customer insights from a plethora of sources (financial, operational, mobile, social, etc.) is convincing cloud computing skeptics to reverse course as theyre seeing the benefits of being able to access and act on customer insights in real time, says Cottle.

At the core of all successful initiatives is the

ability to tell a compelling business story using comprehensive information.
Chris Cottle, executive vice president, Marketing and Products, Allegiance

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved.

CASE STuDY

Nicor National
Powering Up Operational Efficiencies
Business leaders at Nicor National believe that customer experience is a reflection of the environment a company creates for its employees. To help prove that, executives for the provider of energymanagement and warranty products sought a way to quantify the business value of having engaged employees and how that correlates to customer experience. We really wanted to demonstrate the value of this to the business as part of our efforts to improve our financial results, as well as our customer retention, says Barbara Porter, Vice President of Business Development and Customer Service at Nicor National. Porter and her team began by gathering information about employee engagement within Nicor Nationals call center in mid-2009 using Allegiances cloud-based tools. The company integrated that employee engagement data with its customer experience and CRM information and then conducted analyses to help identify the correlations that exist, says Nancy Korman, Senior Manager of Nicor Nationals 200-person call center operation, which fields roughly 1 million customer calls per year.

At a Glance
Calls handled per person increased by 30 percent, leading to 18,000 more sales per year Conversion rates improved by 15 percent thanks to increased employee performance Cost per sale decreased 20 percent in 15 months due to higher employee productivity

For example, the companys marketing organization conducts monthly transaction surveys and reports this information quarterly. Nicor National also conducts quarterly pulse surveys to capture its customers feedback on the value they receive from its products and services. The outcome of the surveys helps us measure the value of our engaged customers and how well we are responding to their needs, says Porter. We use all of that information to help us to determine the amount of business impact we might see if we make an operational change or if we make certain tactical decisions, says Korman. One of the things this has enabled us to do is to better understand who our customers are and the drivers for our most profitable and loyal customers and for specific customer segments, Porter adds.

Pinpointing Opportunities for Operational Improvements

Nicor Nationals use of blended customer insights has enabled it to achieve several business improvements, including operational efficiencies that were identified and incorporated into its customer support activities. For instance, if 20 customers call into the contact center within the span of a few days all complaining about their inability to pay their bills online, the company can spot the problem faster by analyzing its contact center interaction data, resolve the issue quickly, and then communicate the fixes it puts in place to its customers Before, it was harder for us to spot those trends or identify those types of issues, says Porter. Now were able to see those trends pretty quickly. Having the ability to identify customer support issues and address them quickly has enabled Korman and the contact center team to generate $1.8 million in contact center operational efficiencies throughout 2010, in part by pinpointing problematic processes and making necessary changes.
continued

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved. 9

CASE STuDY
One of the great things about the way that the Allegiance platform is built is that not only can we isolate a customer support issue, but we can also quantify the impact of resolving an issue and how having happier customers translates in business terms, Korman says. Nicor Nationals use of the Allegiance cloud-based platform provides other productivity benefits, as well. Because Allegiance manages and stores Nicor Nationals customer feedback and CRM data on its servers, the energy-management services provider doesnt need its IT staffers to provide any server or software support for the platform, including help desk support, which allows our internal IT resources to focus on our core business says Porter. I dont know if we would have made the decision to use these tools if we had to house them internally, adds Korman. We would have had to have examined the impact on our internal IT resources and on our server and storage footprints. All of those things add overhead to an area (IT) thats not our core business and it would have been much tougher to get the buy-in we needed for this.

EMC
EMC Connects Customer Experience with Business Results
In 2004 EMC began a product quality initiative called Total Customer Experience. The goal was to drive improvements in product quality and product interoperability. As the computer storage company got deeper into the effort, it became clear that the TCE initiative could do more to measure other aspects of the customer experience, says Jim Bampos, Vice President of Customer Quality at EMC. It became very clear to us that we werent looking holistically at customer experience, says Bampos. For instance, customer surveys were conducted by individual groups, such as product development, service, support, and sales, who werent sharing the information. In some cases these groups werent acting on the customer feedback. As a result, Bampos and his team now also draw upon more than just customer survey data for customer feedback. The company is using Allegiance cloud software to collect and analyze customer feedback in customer councils, other touchpoints, as well as operational metrics like contact center performance measures. EMC also plans to examine customer feedback through social channels. For example, EMC developed a methodology for correlating customer quality metrics to customer loyalty results. Response time was cited as one of the top loyalty attributes by EMCs customers and was proven to result in low satisfaction scores. We went back to our services organizations and said, Show us how you track response time. What we discovered was that they were tracking queue time, which had nothing to do with customer response time, says Bampos.

The Aha Moment for using Customer Metrics

That aha! moment helped Bampos and his team to determine that the metrics they were tracking internally werent customer-impactful metrics, he says. Out of this, EMC developed a methodology to track metrics that were based on product and service quality characteristics cited by its customers. The company then began correlating that information closely with customer-defined loyalty attributes to help EMC establish a set of goals and targets. In fact, EMC was awarded a patent for its correlation methodology between customer metrics and loyalty drivers. The company has since used this information to create a TCE scorecard for some of its top 20
continued

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved. 10

CASE STuDY
accounts where it can show customers the metrics they track on their behalf and the steps that EMC has taken in response to their feedback. Customers are blown away by this because they consider it very special treatment, says Bampos.

Correlating Loyalty Into Value

By 2010 EMC had evolved the program to the point where it looks at customer quality and customer loyalty metrics across all of its businesses to help identify and then drive improvements to products, services, and customer experiences that are most impactful to customers, says Bampos. In 2011 the company is taking its efforts a step further by investigating how customer loyalty translates into customer value, in part by examining the types of products different customer segments purchase and not only address how valuable those customers are to the company, but also determine the value to the customers in being loyal to EMC. EMC does this by analyzing a mix of customer feedback data, operational data, and financial information. We want to produce a customer value or customer loyalty ROI model so that we can demonstrate to business leaders that if you drive these types of improvements or increase willingness to recommend by X amount, how that will translate into market share or revenue opportunities, Bampos adds. Bampos points to one of the companys business units where his group had offered a set of recommended improvements to act on based on customer metrics and loyalty drivers that were gathered in 2009. Since the business unit has acted on those recommendations, the division has seen a 20-point increase in product loyalty, a double digit percent increase in revenue, and a solid gain in market share. Now were examining whether we reduced our operational costs in any way, says Bampos. EMCs early use of integrated VoC and operational intelligence has already advanced the companys knowledge about its customers and is guiding it with the steps it needs to take to improve their experiences and optimize business outcomes. Were able to show leaders throughout the company the business results they can obtain with this kind of customer intelligence, says Bampos. We are on a journey, have more progress to make, but were now in a position where were able to recommend operational improvements that can be acted on and then show business results that have teeth.

Conclusion
Successful leaders dont merely rely on their gut instincts to make game-changing business decisions. They draw upon the collective wisdom of their most trusted managers and staffers. Great leaders are also effective communicators. In other words, theyre typically great storytellers who can inspire their employees by illustrating the potential impact of their vision or strategies. Similarly, company leaders also need access to a diverse set of customer insights in order to make the best possible business decisions. This includes having a cross-functional view of customer feedback and operational information across all channels, including voice, email, IVR, mobile, online, and social, as well as insights from different business divisions and operational units. At the core of all successful initiatives is the ability to tell a compelling business story using comprehensive information, says Cottle. Without an integrated view customer insight from across the organization, youre telling an incomplete story. n

2011 Peppers & Rogers Group. All rights protected and reserved.

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Allegiance, Inc.
Allegiance helps companies translate customer insights into actionable business intelligence. Using Voice of Customer intelligence (VOCi), Allegiance combines any form of Voice of the Customer (VOC) data with any operational data (CRM, financial, etc.) to create actionable customer intelligence delivered in the cloud. Allegiance multi-channel feedback collection includes ad-hoc, transaction, relationship, and customer experience surveys, solicited feedback through Web sites and phone, and unsolicited, unstructured feedback from social media. Allegiance ranked No. 5 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private software companies in 2009, and was named a Top 10 by Software 500 in 2010. For more information about Allegiance, visit www.allegiance.com.

Peppers & Rogers Group

Peppers & Rogers Group is dedicated to helping its clients improve business performance by acquiring, retaining, and growing profitable customers. As products become commodities and globalization picks up speed, customers have become the scarcest resource in business. They hold the keys to higher profit today and stronger enterprise value tomorrow. We help clients achieve these goals by building the right relationships with the right customers over the right channels. We earn our keep by solving the business problems of our clients. By delivering a superior 1to1 Strategy, we remove the operational and organizational barriers that stand in the way of profitable customer relationships. We show clients where to focus customer-facing resources to improve the performance of their marketing, sales and service initiatives. For more information, visit www.peppersandrogersgroup.com

Endnotes
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1to1 Webinar, Customers Speak Across All Channels: Are You Getting the Full Message? Sponsored by Allegiance. April 22, 2010. 1to1 Webinar, Best Practices From the Frontlines: How companies are using voice of the customer to lock in loyalty and grow their business. Sponsored by Allegiance. April 2, 2009. Tsai, Jessica (2010, Feb. 18). Business Is Calling for the Customer Voice, destinationCRM.com. Edmunds, Adam (2010, Dec. 6). Announcing VOCi; Voice of Customer Intelligence, Allegiance.com. Cottle, Chris (2010, Dec. 13). Wheres VOC Going, Anyway? Answer: VOCi, Allegiance.com. Bowman, Matthew (2011, March 3). The Growing Role of Customer Feedback in Marketing and Sales, Allegiance.com. The Top Ten Voice of the Customer Best Practices (2010, March 30). CRM Daily.com. Fluss, Donna; Rogers, Maureen (2011, February). How to Listen to the Voice of the Customer in a Multichannel World, destinationCRM.com. Hoffman, Tom (2011, March 1). The Coming Convergence of Customer Feedback and Behavioral Insights, 1to1 Magazine. Frost & Sullivan (2011, Jan. 19). Redefining Contact Center Analytics. McInnes, Andrew (2010, Sept. 17). Ten Major Voice Of The Customer Trends, Forrester Research. Berkowitz, Jim (2010, May 4). Use `Customer Intelligence to Drive Business Strategy, CRM Mastery.com. Peppers, Don (2009, July 31). Alignment, Compensation, and Engagement, peppersandrogersgroup.com Allegiance (2010). Case Study: Nicor National. Cunnane, Chris (2011, February). Next Generation Customer Loyalty, Aberdeen Group. J.D. Power and Associates Reports: Customer Loyalty and Brand Image Decline Among Retail Banking Customers For a Fourth Consecutive Year (2010, April 22). J.D. Power and Associates. Cunnane, Chris (2011, March). Next Generation Customer Loyalty, Aberdeen Group.

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