Confirmit Community Conference series highlights key challenges and opportunities for development in VoC and MR

London, UK and Oslo, Norway and New York, NY: 19 June 2014: Social media, text analytics and mobile are key drivers for development within Voice of the Customer (VoC) and Market Research (MR) programmes, but the value of combining them with existing methods of capturing feedback must not be ignored. This is one of the main conclusions of Confirmit’s Community Conference (CCC) series, the latest event of which took place in London 2 weeks ago.

To date, three successful CCC’14 events have taken place in Orlando, Oslo and London. The fourth is to be held in San Francisco on 25th September. The series has brought together hundreds of VoC, MR and Voice of the Employee (VoE) professionals from 12 countries, who gathered to discuss the successes and challenges faced by organisations running feedback programmes to enhance business performance.

CCC’14 London speaker John Buglass, global phone studio director at RONIN Corporation, explained the continuing importance of telephone customer insight research as part of a multichannel approach to insight.

While mobile surveys and social media analysis are widely considered the best channels for capturing ‘in-the-moment’ feedback, Buglass argues: “There is simply no substitute for actively listening and probing appropriately to gain deeper insight. Not only does it allow you to gather data, but also urges the customer to give further information or explanations where necessary,” he said.

Miguel Ramos, mobile practice lead at Confirmit echoed these comments. While highlighting the many ways that mobile surveys can be used to capture feedback, he explained that: “The integration of mobile with other feedback sources delivers the richest insight. This is because mobile can improve the value of feedback by providing real-time evidence such as photos, location-based information and video footage.”

Meanwhile, Alain Thys, managing partner of Futurelab and CC-i3, highlighted some of the key non-technical challenges to customer centricity. He explained that to implement a truly successful VoC programme, businesses must overcome three main hurdles: aligning VoC to financial business success; managing every customer and employee touchpoint; and ensuring business leaders set the example of championing customers.

Other London and Oslo speakers focused on the technology trends that are driving VoC and MR and the successes their businesses have gained from implementing best practices. Speakers included representatives from Forrester Research, Inc., ITV, Kobra, Safmarine, and Virgin Holidays.

Henning Hansen, president and CEO at Confirmit, said: “The Confirmit Community Conference always addresses a global audience, but we’re delighted to have been able to offer our customers and partners events in more locations this year.

“The CCC’14 series has shown that there are key challenges dominating the minds of those running VoC and MR programmes, regardless of their sector or location. The examples presented during the conference have shown that forward-thinking businesses around the world are embracing new technologies to address many of these challenges, as well as closely assessing the methodologies they use to conduct their programmes. With so much development and change in the industry, it’s more important than ever that we come together to share our stories.”

For more information about CCC’14 San Francisco, the CCC’14 series and all of Confirmit’s upcoming events visit www.confirmit.com/community/conference.aspx.