Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format. With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

VOC initiatives need better customer data

While most marketers would say they want to make the measurement of customer satisfaction and loyalty a top priority, there are still many who either don't know how to do so effectively, or who don't even have the necessary data available, Allegiance found.

The white paper, entitled 'Customer data: The essential element of your enterprise Voice of the Customer programme', suggests that customer data should be gathered through both structured and unstructured feedback:

1. Structured feedback
   Structured feedback is solicited primarily through surveys. For example, relationship surveys are conducted to get a point-in-time read on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement. Transactional surveys, also known as post-event surveys, are performed after some event or interaction has occurred. Other types of structured feedback include competitive surveys, vendor surveys, marketing surveys, advisory boards and listening labs.

   "Until recently, structured feedback was the main way that companies could hear from their customers about their experiences," explained author Annette Gleneicki, senior director of customer success for Allegiance. "Customer emails or letters were mostly 'cosmetic' because companies rarely responded to that feedback or changed processes because of it. However, today customers have new ways to communicate, and companies need to incorporate unstructured feedback to get a complete picture of customer loyalty and engagement."

2. Unstructured feedback
   Unstructured feedback is unsolicited and comes in many forms, including social media, online forums and communities, blogs, "Contact Us" pages, and letters or emails to the company. The main challenges are to find ways to harness all of this data, and to put someone in charge of analysing/gleaning insights from it - and of course acting on it in conjunction with structured feedback.

Incorporating both structured and unstructured data into a VOC strategy allows companies to get the full picture of individual customers, target customer segments, or even an entire customer population.

The full white paper has been made available for free download from Allegiance's web site - click here (free registration required).

Have you seen How To SELL Anything?

This incredible sales handbook distils an expert's lifetime of sales and marketing experience and hands it to you on a platter, in a simple, easy-to-follow format.

With existing customers being the most valuable source of income for any business, this book will teach you how to increase your return business and make more profit from your most loyal customers - and even how to reduce the costs of dealing with your least profitable customers.

You'll learn to sell yourself, sell your products, and sell your brand on the internet, writing high-conversion landing pages, social media posts, and more. You'll start attracting customers you didn’t even know existed, and learn the top trade secrets for customer retention.

You'll become a lean, mean selling machine. See how the experts do it and learn to adapt what they've done for your own profit. You'll learn to write strong, powerful, effective sales copy, whether it's for a sales script, sales letter, flyer, insert, advert or just about anything else.

You'll learn how to sell whether you're selling by telephone, by mail, or even meeting prospects face-to-face. You'll find out how to size them up, present yourself, nail down their true needs, close the sale, and learn to tackle the tricky ones.

You'll discover the biggest secrets of successful direct mail sellers, sales letter writers, and how to segment and choose the right prospects for each campaign.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)