As business managers or owners, we’re constantly faced with opportunities to widen the range of programs that we run — so how does the go/no go decision get made? Sometimes it’s something that is externally driven by a customer or competitive situation. Other times, it’s more about widening capabilities and generating operational gains.

Focusing on mobile as a platform for feedback and VoC, we thought we’d explore things from that angle, since it  helps the decision making process for managers and owners of businesses.

How can a new platform impact your VoC programs?

Well, we can identify two key areas of impact that you should care about:

1. Increasing the situations in which you can extract feedback from customers
2. Widening the number of feedback of feedback that can be received

Each represents a significant leap in the value and ultimately, the actionability, of the feedback you get from your VoC efforts.

Lets explore the impact on feedback situations first:

The saying goes ‘timing is everything’ and it doesn’t apply more anywhere than in VoC programs. The journey your customers go through, both before and after they become customers can be broken down into distinct steps. Each represents a potential breaking point where the potential of the relationship can be diminished or enhanced.

The mobile platform opens up many of those stages of that journey to a ‘real-time’ connection with customers. Companies can gain access to highly actionable and motivating data points including in-the-moment feedback from shoppers as they go through the buying process (not hours, days or weeks later).  That same connection opens up the possibility of mapping your customers’ journey through the pre and post buying process. Lastly, there are specific situations — such as during a product launch or webinar — where real-time insights into customer sentiments are invaluable.

Second, mobile expands the options for HOW customers and others provide feedback

Think about it for a minute: a customer has a bad experience that can’t easily be described in words alone. What impact would a video or photograph have on your company’s understanding and engagement with the problem? The actionability is dramatically higher and empowers businesses to better understand their customers’ experiences. The advent of smart phones and mobile applications gives companies numerous options for enhancing the type of feedback that customers can provide, and it all points back to the key for all VoC efforts — ACTIONABILITY.