Delvinia’s Customer-Centric Approach to VoC Programs

Voice of the Customer is a term that’s commonly being used to describe the process of using digital technologies across various customer touchpoints to collect, analyze and interpret customer feedback and data.

Sounds straightforward. But in today’s digital world, keeping pace with the changing habits and behaviours of customers has never been so challenging.

Digital and social technologies create new and exciting opportunities to collect market research and connect with digital savvy consumers. But, moving from a method-driven approach to a consumer-centric approach poses challenges when it comes to deriving insights in a timely manner.

Many companies are collecting a lot of data about their customers but they lack the ability to quickly turn that data into insights and action. Furthermore, the number of customer touchpoints are increasing across every organization.

Sales, marketing, customer support, and even market research departments all have direct access to customer touchpoints. But when an organization is looking at finding ways to collect feedback to derive actionable insights, many organizations struggle with the question:  Who owns the voice of the customer?

We believe that effectively capturing the voice of the customer lies at the intersection of marketing, CRM and research. And, adopting a consumer-centric approach (rather than a technology-driven solution) will result in a more effective way to collect data that can be turned into actionable insights.

A Customer-Centric Approach

The essence of a customer-centric voice of the customer program is about the intersection of:

• Asking consumers to provide feedback and have a dialogue with your organization by creating relevant digital experiences that will motivate consumers to share their opinions and participate in market research
• Being able to link an individual’s responses to a profile of their habits and behaviours, in a manner that ensures that their privacy and personal information are protected
• Listening to the dialogue about your brand or organization through the use of social monitoring technologies
• Observing how customers are interacting and transacting with your organization through methods such as web analytics or transactional data
• Utilizing both internal and external data sources that your organization collects from its customers
• Finally, being able to integrate all of this data into a near-real time snapshot that will help your organization quickly derive data-driven insights that result in action.

Delvinia, in partnership with AskingCanadians™, is launching a new service line that builds on the consumer-centric understanding of digital technologies and our ability to leverage digital tools to capture the voice of the customer and provide relevant solutions to derive insight from customer data.

Our Voice of the Customer service line includes programs, platforms and products designed to help companies efficiently and cost-effectively integrate the voice of the customer into any marketing or customer experience program.  It will enable market researchers to derive insights in ways that will help them motivate consumers to want to share their feedback.

Keep watching this space for future posts about our approach to VoC.

COC Launches 2012/13 Season and Delvinia-Designed Digital Brochure

The Canadian Opera Company announced the line-up for its 2012/13 season at a press conference at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts last week. The new season—the company’s 63^rd—is described as a celebration of opera’s greatest masterpieces. The season features seven productions including Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore, Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus and Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

The season launch, held January 18, also marked the launch of the COC’s third annual digital brochure, developed by Delvinia to support online subscription renewals.

While the overall user experience and strategy behind the piece remains the same as last season—to showcase the upcoming season and entice users to subscribe online—our team completed a creative refresh of the design. Rather than building the brochure in Flash, as was the case last year, we designed the brochure in Java to ensure compatibility with smartphones and tablets.

The digital brochure includes a synopsis of each opera, including a link to a sound clip and more information about the performance dates and casting. This year’s brochure also features a stronger call to action to generate subscriptions and a season trailer featuring video clips from General Director Alexander Neef and artists like Ben Heppner, who is returning to the COC for the first time in 17 years.

We hope you’ll visit coc.ca to take a look for yourself and we wish the COC all the best with its exciting new season!

Delvinia in the News: Canadian Government Executive Profiles eDemocracy in Markham

Delvinia’s work around eDemocracy in the Town of Markham is the subject of a feature story in the January issue of Canadian Government Executive, published by IT in Canada.

“Voting digital: Markham connects through tech,” authored by Delvinia CEO Adam Froman and Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti, is based on a presentation delivered by the pair at the GTEC 2011 conference in Ottawa last fall. The article tells the story of Markham’s journey in using digital technologies to engage with citizens.

“Technology has fundamentally changed the way governments and their citizens interact. Governments are realizing that the future of eDemocracy is more than offering citizens a means to transact or obtain public service information; it is about listening to citizens and becoming part of the conversation,” the article states.

“This is something the Town of Markham understands. Through the use of Internet voting and the implementation of multiple interactive online initiatives, Markham has become a leader in eDemocracy.”

With Delvinia’s support, Markham became the first major Canadian municipality to introduce Internet voting in 2003. Since then, Delvinia has conducted three online surveys to gather data on the attitudes and behaviours of Markham residents, the findings of which are outlined in three reports chronicling voter feedback and preferences collected following the 2003, 2006 and 2010 municipal elections.

The Delvinia Report on Internet Voting in the Town of Markham, released in September 2011, can be downloaded here.

To read the Canadian Government Executive article in its entirety, please see the January issue.