Turning customer data to gold, i.e. the ingredients leadership needs to make smart strategic and operational decisions, isn't as far-fetched an idea as it may sound. Take the following steps at your company-and get ready to see alchemy in action.

Getting Beyond the Select & Connect Study:
Next Steps for Enterprise Marketing Pros Setting Sights on Voice of the Customer

1. Take an enterprise- or division-wide approach to voice of the customer efforts. Before you conduct any customer study, or engage a company to do it for you, understand who inside your company needs VOC data, and include them in the process of determining how, when and what to measure. For instance, touch base with engineering to see what customer insight might be important to them. See what's on the near-term agenda of executives with the power to sway the overall corporate-think customer data or insight might add pizzazz to any of their upcoming presentations? Let pertinent execs know you're getting ready to touch base with important customers-and see what the execs want to know and might be able to use. If you gain high and broad interest in the outcome of any one survey, you'll necessarily gain high and broad support for your overall survey efforts as well.
2. Link your survey to customer lifecycle milestones or other events; or know something about where the customer is at the time of response. Doing both will help you better understand the resulting data. If you ask 100 people the same question on May 28th, and if all those people are at different stages in the customer lifecycle, then are their responses really comparable? A newly-signed-on customer still might be feeling that new-customer high…and his answers might differ dramatically from that curmudgeon who's been around forever. It's kind of like asking five 10-year-olds and five 50-year-olds the same question without respect to age. You'll get data all right-but what kind of sense will it make? How will it be able to inform strategic and operational decisions?
3. Finally, know what you'll do with the answer to a question before you ask it. Customers have only limited time and so will be willing to answer only a limited number of questions. Make sure each question you ask your company's customers are 1) mapped to the objectives of the VOC initiative and 2) linked to post-survey actions. I've seen it too many times where people keep running out and asking unmapped and unlinked questions…which is just a waste of everyone's time and a sure-fire way to burn out customers. Get what you really need to know to help shape decisions at your company-and to connect with customers, positively influence sales and earning your marketing organization the respect and budget it deserves.