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.

Understanding the People Behind the Clicks

Earlier this week, Amy Sullivan, our Vice President, Customer Insights, and Andrew N. Assad, Content and Propositions Marketing Manager with Microsoft Advertising Canada, spoke to attendees at Environics Analytics’ 5^th Annual User Conference about how to integrate data for better digital insights.

During their session, “Understanding the People Behind the Clicks,” Amy and Andrew shared the story of how Microsoft Advertising used a unique combination of custom research with data from Delvinia’s AskingCanadians™ online community and Environics Analytics PRIZM_C2 segmentation system to develop key target segments and deepen insights into their own brand.

With products like Bing, Xbox, MSN and Windows Live, Microsoft Advertising had access to a range of metrics and visitor imagery. But the company wanted a deeper understanding of the human behind the machine.

“We share Andrew’s goal of really understanding the person behind the click,” Amy said. “We want to know not only what make makes them click, but what makes them tick. We want to really hear their story, so we can tell ours – or so Microsoft can tell its story – more effectively, in a way that ensures more people listen.”

The solution they came up with is one that worked by leveraging the strengths of all three collaborators together: Delvinia, Environics Analytics and Microsoft, Amy explained.

Microsoft contributed its own data to the mix and Delvinia crafted a custom survey about Microsoft and its suite of products, digging into the attitudes and behaviours of Microsoft consumers. The next step involved leveraging Environics’ strengths to marry the brand insights with the vast data about media and product usage that EA is able to knit together through the PRIZM_C2 segmentation system, which brings the added layer of social values, attitudes and lifestyle data.

“By following this process of layering existing Microsoft data with Delvinia’s custom brand research and Environics’ rich profiling of the Canadian population, we were able to enjoy a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts,” said Amy, who described PRIZM as the glue that enables all of the pieces to fit together to really understand the people behind the clicks.

Amy said that in the most immediate, practical sense the team can now:

• Describe Microsoft consumers more holistically and in ways that meet the diverse needs of Microsoft Advertising’s partners.
• Reach more consumers and reach them more accurately across a greater range of media and devices.
• Better understand how to leverage integrated media in our efforts to connect with consumers.
• Be more effective and more resonant in our messaging to consumers.
• Quantify consumers and locate them on the ground by referring back to our postal codes and projecting them to households for the purposes of direct marketing, for example.

“These are outcomes that any brand that follows this process can enjoy. Anyone here can adopt this template to deepen insights into their own brand,” Amy told the audience. “If you are already a PRIZM subscriber, you’re halfway there.”

Ensuring the Integrity of Online Data

I recently sat down with Raj Manocha, VP of AskingCanadians™, and Craig Tothill, Director of IT & Panel Technology, to talk about our experience in ensuring panel integrity. Here’s what they had to say about our approach to ensuring data integrity at AskingCanadians™.

How do you define data integrity? What does it really mean?

“You can look at it a couple of ways. Because we have relationships with Aeroplan and Hbc Rewards and are loyalty-program based that means all of our people have point cards and we can verify them. You’re getting people who actually are who they are, which gives a secondary level of validity to the data. Combine that with TrueSample and you have something that no one else in Canada really has and that’s a very active community of people who are validated on multiple levels. But even though our members are validated, we also have to ensure their data is good,” said Raj.

“That’s really the second level of data integrity; looking at the data people have provided to us. And to some degree, for some of the information, that’s where TrueSample comes in. Beyond that, we’re constantly looking at the data and doing our best to update or refresh that data that doesn’t seem right,” said Craig.

What are the biggest challenges in ensuring data integrity?

“One of the over-arching issues in Canada is the fact that most panel companies don’t collect a lot of private information from their panellists. Trying to balance the validity of a panellist versus what you collect is always an issue because you’re trying to make sure you don’t infringe on their privacy while still verifying that they are who they say they are.”

“The goal for us is to act as the representative of the client. From a panel level, realistically there isn’t a great end-all-be-all tool that can say the panel is valid. So, we’re trying to test all of these different tools to make sure we have the deepest understanding of what our panellists are like,” Raj said.

How would you describe our approach? What safeguards do we have in place?

“At the survey level we’re doing things now that other companies aren’t doing, such as checks of open ends and flagging those in the data file so companies can decide whether they want to use them or not. On a survey level we also put in dummy questions to make sure people are answering properly. We’ve even gone so far as to call people to validate their answers off line. It just gives that extra level of confidence in the fact you can trust online data,” Raj said.

“We also do things like checking the panel for variations of the same person and that’s where the loyalty card base helps us out. That type of base helps us to continually comb through our panel to ensure we have unique people in the panel,” Craig said.

“The other thing we’re doing which is new in the industry is over communicating with panellists. A lot of times we treat the panel as this kind of robotic thing where we’re just getting data from it. But if we don’t explain to panellists, for example, the importance of open ends, then they don’t understand the value of it. So that two-way dialogue is really very important,” Raj added.

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