In the business world a lot of people read things in black and white. Are profits higher than ever? Are sales figures rising on a monthly basis? Are new clients and customers signing up each day or week? They’re all common questions linked to the perceived success or failure of a company, so much so that future plans are often based on this kind of information. When monthly reports go out to employees, clients and shareholders, it’s often the graphs and statistics that they look at to analyse performance, make decisions on where the company should be heading and decide where investments or cutbacks are needed.
While the graphs and statistics look great on paper or up on a screen, they don’t always tell the whole story. It’s only when you incorporate systems like voice of the customer analytics into your reporting processes that you can truly appreciate the success of the business in terms of customer feedback and market trends. You might be doing very well with sales of one particular product, but if the market is struggling and you’re not aware of that, you might decide to invest in that area only to see it crash and burn in the months ahead.
However, with this kind of detailed analytics software in place, you’re able to make instant and real-time decisions on what to do and what to avoid, helping prevent potential disasters and enable you to react quickly to risks. This feedback can be recorded in a number of ways ranging from direct voice information collected in surveys by social media, for example; or indirect voice collected from phone conversations and interaction with the customers themselves.
With this kind of feedback, businesses are much more capable of making the correct decisions going forwards. There are a lot of misconceptions in the business world, usually due to someone reading inaccurate information about trends from out of date graphs and reports. Some supposedly ‘accurate’ statistics are based on information from the previous financial quarter while others are made using only half the information required leaving gaps and uncertainty surrounding the data.
For instance, if the reports don’t incorporate information recorded from social media regarding the popularity of a certain product or service, you could be missing out on vital insight from real time customer opinions that could lead to you investing in what you think your audience want rather than what they’re actually telling you they want. Just because they wanted it last year, doesn’t mean they want it this year and social media is ideal for this type of instant market research.
With such amazing technological advances out there ensure you have all the information before making snap decisions based on what is often guesswork.