Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

Chapter 8

Voice-of-the-Customer Analytics and Insights

By Abhilasha Mehta, PhD

“The customer is always right.”

—Marshall Fields and Harry Gordon Selfridges, early twentieth century

Abhilasha (Abby) Mehta is the director of global customer insights for Staples, the world’s largest office products and solutions company operating in 26 countries. Abby conducts both qualitative and quantitative research among Staples’ business (B2B) and personal (B2C) customers to guide customer-centric decisions across all business units. She was the head of marketing research and customer insights at Monster Worldwide, the leading Internet career website, and the director of research at Gallup & Robinson, a marketing research company. She has been published widely and speaks at various industry and academic venues. Abby has twice been the recipient of the Advertising Research Foundation’s David Ogilvy Award for Excellence in Research.

The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter was coined almost 100 years ago, but the emotion behind it, which showed a company’s keenness to put the customer first, is still just as relevant. Today, almost a century later, the customer is more in charge than ever before. Whether “right” or not, customers today are certainly much more sophisticated, analytical, demanding, savvy at comparative shopping, and also talking openly and loudly about the products and the services they use. Businesses that are not listening hard to what customers are saying and are not appropriately ...