HKSQ Seminar on Listening to the Voice of the Customer

The seminar entitled “Listening to the Voice of Customer” was organized by Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) and co-organized with Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE), PolyU on 13th Nov 2015. The seminar aimed to focus on discussing how VoC programs could collect and unify customer feedback across multiple sources, channels, and touch points (such as product reviews posted to 3rd party websites, unsolicited comments on social media sites, and calls to customer support) so as to improve the quality of products and processes, lower costs, and enhance customer loyalty. In the beginning, Mr. Peter Fung (Chairman, HKSQ) introduced the guest speaker’s background.

Our guest speaker was Mr. CY Kan (Practice Leader, Analytics Solutions, PCCW Solutions). In the beginning, Mr. Kan briefed his talk including “Voice of the Customer”, “WeChat”, “Absolute Value” and “Technology Enabler”.

Firstly, Mr. Kan quoted Aberdeen Group report on Voice of the Customer that Big Data as a Strategic Advantage. In the report, there were four highlight below:
1. 99% of companies use two or more channels to listen to and engage with their customers (Cosistent)
2. VoC program users decrease customer costs by 6.3% year-over-year
3. Using VoC within proactive social customer care programs boots the benefits of social media
4. The Best-in-Class are 46% more likely to encourage customers to share feedback across multiple touch points
Then he shared the 3 challenges with changes in customer behavior that impacting VoC programs:
1. Customers have easier access to a wealth of information on many competitive products / services (49%)
2. Customer expect similar (consistent) experience across multiple touch-points (33%)
3. Customers expect faster issue resolution, whether through self-service or through an agent (32%)

In addition, Mr. Kan briefed Best-in-Class companies KPIs including “Customer retention rate (89%)”, “Year-over-year (YoY) change in annual company revenue (24.8)”, “YoY change in customer satisfaction (22.5%)” and “YoY improvement in (reduction of ) average response time to customer requests (29.1%)”.

After that Mr. Kan summarized the benefits of VoC including “Delight clients”, “Improve operational efficiencies”, “Increase revenue” and “Reduce costs”. He also mentioned Data Management, VoC Process Execution and Customer-centricity; he then gave four recommendations.
1. Encourage interaction with the customer
2. Make sure customer feedback data is standardized, whether structured or unstructured
3. Gain visibility into the customer as an individual, not just a dollar sign
4. Learn from customer feedback and use this insight to innovate

In the second part, Mr. Kan stated WeChat’s statistics and there were huge data to be analysis and identified useful customer behaviors information such as sales pattern per day.

The last topic was “Absolute Value”. Mr. Kan told us it came from a book “Absolute Value” by Itamar Simonson & Emanuel Rosen. Absolute Value is equal to “Experienced Quality of a Product”.

In the past, Marketers (M) was the most powerful to influence on customer’s decision and the second was Other people (O) and least was Prior preferences (P). But today was different. Other people (O) was the most influence factor on customer decision. He said a shift from Relative to Absolute as follow:
- When consumers could predict the absolute value of products, relative quality proxies and the ability of marketers to control things lose.
- Less measurement of Prior Preferences (P), Satisfaction, and Loyalty
- More systematic tracking of Other People (O)

The last part of presentation was Technology Enabler. Mr. Kan introduced the Listening Process from Collecting Customer Feedback to Analyzing (To gain insight) and then Act on customer experience.

Mr. Kan also explained the Social Media Analytics, Text Analytics and Data Visualization. Finally he recapped the following points as conclusion.
- Customers are empowered
- Keep every door open (all channels)
- No news is not necessarily good news
- Sources of VoC data not necessarily from the customer
- Create a unified picture
- Social media offers a new world of valuable insights
- Technology is critical to VoC

Q&A

After that our chairman Mr. Peter Fung briefed HKSQ activities in the World Quality Month.

At end of the seminar, Mr. Peter Fung (Chairman, HKSQ) presented a souvenir to Mr. CY Kan.

Reference:
HKSQ - www.hksq.org
HKSQ World Quality Month - http://www.hksq.org/world_quality_month.htm