Customer's New Voice: Extreme Relevancy and Experience through Volunteered Customer Information

CHAPTER 8 Practical Guide: How to Leverage the Customer’s New Voice Today

With Dr. David Schrader

Previous chapters have outlined various trends and provided examples that significant boosts in relevancy through directly volunteered personal information not only are possible but are being executed today by leading innovators. Most industries will be significantly impacted by this trend over the next 10 years. In this chapter, the focus is on how a business can interpret these trends so that the business is, at minimum, ready to react, and, it is hoped, is proactive about exploiting the business opportunities that shared consumer information enables.

Two scenarios will set the stage for the discussion in this chapter.

Scenario 1: Jeff’s Shopping Trip

It’s Wednesday morning. A consumer named Jeff is on his mobile device, before coffee, planning his Saturday morning shopping trip. He needs three items:

1. Some new jeans, because he’s been dieting and working out.
2. A new cell phone and cell phone plan, because he’s coming up to the end-of-contract date, and he is not happy with the number of dropped calls and billing errors by his current provider.
3. A new refrigerator, because he can hear the motor constantly running on his 22-year-old model, plus the electric bill has been going up.

In his case, he has his personal data store in the cloud, and while at the kitchen table puts out some personal requests for information (RFIs) for these three purchases. For each, he fills out a form ...