Wonderflow participated in the prestigious Forrester Report focused on the best tools for CX Managers to really catch the voice of the customer and measure customer satisfaction.
But what is the value for customers and why it is so elusive? What are the best strategies to analyze it and why Wonderflow happens to be so good at it?
Let’s see it together.
The Value for Customers is as mysterious as love
Some people start a love story with a clear picture in their mind. They know what they are looking for and that this is the right partner for them. Some are in for caring and affection, other because sex is great, still others for the desire to raise a family.
The story goes on and they realize something is missing. The one who chose their partner upon a great intellectual connection can discover that sexual compatibility is more important than they thought or vice-versa.
In other words, they didn’t know what they wanted.
If people can be so confused about something so crucial as love, imagine how they are when purchasing something!
Listening to the voice of the customer is important but it means nothing if we didn’t know how to listen. People can be deceiving and mysterious even to themselves.
Value for the customers is a complex multi-faceted phenomenon. Some of the things we value can be rational, perfectly understood and lead us since the beginning of the transaction. Others can emerge only later or stay unconscious during the whole process.
And, just like a love story, we realise “something is missing”.
Luckily, the new Forrester Report took a scientific look at the matter.
The most common mistakes in measuring Value for Customers
The renowned Forrester Research Inc, which help businesses to understand new trends since the late 80s, came out with a new report last September, focused on How To Measure Value for Customers.
Assessing the current situation in the industry, the Forrester researchers discovered that managers couldn’t find answers because were asking the wrong questions.
Brands know that customers satisfaction is important, but they look the wrong way when measuring it. This is because they do not understand properly what value for customers really is.
And this is the very first mistake everyone makes in the business: assuming that value for customers is a single, simple metric. As we will see in the following paragraph, it is a complex thing we can split into at least four key dimensions.
The second most common mistake, which is a direct consequence of the first, is using flawed proxies to measure it. We can elaborate really well on a cluster of statistics, but their meaning will remain obscure or even deceiving if we don’t know how to contextualize them.
The last mistake is being unable to collect all the meaningful data scattered around the web or assuming that they are unimportant and therefore skippable.
The four dimensions of Value for Customers and why they matter
Taking up the romantic analogy we made before, we see that a love story is an alchemy of things and desires such as the need for affection, the company of a likeminded partner, the possibility to raise a family, the sexual tension, and so on. A successful love story is good alchemy of everything and it is more than the mere sum of its parts. But if one of them lack completely we will feel it.
A good transaction is also composed of different parts, often so tight together in the mind of the customer that he couldn’t tell them apart. It’s important we do it for them, to analyze what goes well and whatnot.
We can isolate four key dimensions that drive customer satisfaction: the economic value, the functional value, the experiential value and the symbolic value.
Let’s see them in detail:
- Economic Value: the most straightforward one, it measures if the customer feels to have gained or wasted money in the process.
- Functional Value: this metric measures if the customer’s effort felt appropriate to the task, while taking into account all the eventual obstacles through the transaction.
- Experiential Value: often underrated by traditional methods of analysis, this metric investigate how pleasant has been the whole experience for the customer.
- Symbolic Value: the most abstract value perceived is the symbolic one. It refers to how much the customer feels in touch with the core values of the brand after the transaction ends.
Can we measure all at once? The organization problem
The aforementioned dimensions aren’t unknown to the marketing departments, of course. But they are usually analyzed by different divisions, in separated moments and rarely applied together to measure customer satisfaction. For instance, brand awareness is how we traditionally take on the symbolic value while the sales team deal with the economic one and the CX managers are focused on the experiential value.
In other words, we work on value dimensions in diverse parts of the organization, at different cadences, and using various tools.
This is the reason why it’s difficult to assemble a complete picture of the value for customers and translate it into actionable insights.
The challenge is to develop a comprehensive, holistic approach to the voice of the customers and analyse the dimensions of value for customers all at once.
The first step is to find the richest kind of data to work with, in order to extract precise information on what drives customers during the transaction.
From unstructured feedback to actionable insight: the Wonderflow’s way.
As you may know, there are several sources of information to measure customer behavior. We can do field surveys or look into operational and financial data in order to recognise meaningful patterns.
These methods can measure very well some of the dimensions we mentioned early but miss the others.
There is a source that can cover all the dimensions at the same time and it is the unstructured feedback. Texts such as online reviews, social media comments and so on, are the place where the customer explains in detail how the interaction with our business went.
It’s easy to understand why these data are so valuable; without any solicitation or interference, customers speak about what they care about, in natural language, using their own words.
The problem has always been finding the way to collect this data scattered all around the web and analyze them efficiently because they are unstructured, written in natural language. And here is where Wonderflow shines.
Wonderflow kills two birds with one stone: first, the software gathers all the feedback spread across many platforms, then, our powerful A.I. process the meaning without any human assistance.
CX Managers will access a user-friendly interface able to investigate deeply the voice of the customers and find out what they really value.
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