Listening to Customers

Just walked through our break-room and heard a news anchor say that the FBI has 400,000 names on the terrorism watch-list.  She stated adamantly (and as though it wasn’t already obvious to everyone listening): “we should be able to do a better job with list management and creating a clean list of names” to use regarding national security matters.

List management seems to be a universal problem, doesn’t it?  It makes sense that it would be, too, considering how much change goes on around us everyday. 

In our realm of customer listening programs, we experience the same types of problems with contact list management quite regularly.  (Although, in comparison to the FBI list, it certainly seems like a whole lot less to groan about all of the sudden, doesn’t it?)  It is difficult to cleanly and efficiently maintain an accurate and timely record of customer contacts, especially considering the variety of potential sources at our disposal. 

Recently, we’ve seen an encouraging trend, though.  Multiple clients I work with are planning to tap into a new, more centralized source of customer contact names in 2010.  With these clients, we are planning SalesForce.com integrations.  Leveraging a new Walker app available on the SalesForce.com app exchange, we can now integrate customer listening programs into the mix.  For my clients, our mission is to rid ourselves of collecting lists in Excel, cleaning them, and dealing with rounds and rounds of updates.  But, more importantly, it also means that customer information will be made available in real-time within the SalesForce system that account teams already rely upon on a daily basis.  They won’t have to learn another tool, and they won’t have to go searching for feedback provided by their customers – it will all be right there in one centralized system.

We’re just at the beginning stages of these integrations now.  I’ll be sure to keep you posted on our progress in future entries. 

Krista Roseberry
Senior Analyst, Walker Information