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.

In the News: Vue Magazine Profiles Delvinia’s Work with the Town of Markham

In the December issue of Vue Magazine, published by the Market Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA), our CEO Adam Froman shares the story of our work with the Town of Markham.

Adam’s feature article, “How Marketing Research is Helping Canada Gain Recognition as a Global Leader in eDemocracy,” illustrates how the municipality has successfully used digital technologies, including Internet voting, as a means to engage the public with local government. The article also speaks to the role of our research initiatives in helping the Town gain an understanding of its citizens.

Delvinia has worked with the Town of Markham since 2003, when the municipality chose to introduce Internet voting. Markham engaged our firm to help the Town communicate this new and innovative voting option to its residents.

In developing and implementing the voter outreach campaigns for the 2003, 2006 and 2010 municipal elections, our role has been that of a participant in the process as well as an observer. In 2003, we began collecting surveys and publishing reports about the attitudes and behaviours of Markham residents as they experienced Internet voting.

“The research has been fundamental in helping Markham understand the habits and behaviours of residents – in the ways they use technology in their lives and in the ways they interact with government. It has also been instrumental in validating Markham’s decision to continue to offer Internet voting in future elections,” Adam writes.

To read Adam’s full article, please see the December issue of Vue magazine.

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.”

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