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While most practitioners are familiar with traditional customer satisfaction surveys, research findings suggest that best practice companies use multiple tools to bring the voice of the customer inside the organization. The purpose of this study is to examine how best practice companies use various tools to listen to customers. The primary contribution of this article is in discussing a variety of different customer listening tools used by practitioners, along with introducing new customer listening tools to the literature. Furthermore, this article puts forth a framework that captures essential characteristics of each tool, depicting when their use is most appropriate. Finally, this article depicts how customer listening tools are linked together and synthesized into a customer performance model.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of listening tools by several large companies to obtain information about customers' needs, preferences, and perceptions of their performance in order to facilitate customer relationship management (CRM), and identify some best practices, which are salient activities for managing customer perception and satisfaction.

In‐depth case studies of two multi‐national corporations and two other large companies in the UK were conducted. Semi‐structured personal interviews were carried out with key executives in these organisations. An analysis was undertaken of the current situation within these firms in relation to identifying customer needs and requirements. The range of customer listening tools was not definitive at the outset.

Large companies in the UK constantly use multiple customer listening tools to glean feedback from customers. These companies use their extensive understanding of customers to build products and services that meet customers' needs and expectations. They are also able to monitor competition and innovation to improve their operations and customer satisfaction management. However, as one would imagine there is no universal use of a particular set of tools.

It would have been perhaps more beneficial to the research if more firms had been included in the study.

Practical initiatives that can be considered as guarantees or promises for successfully managing customer perception and satisfaction are provided. This includes a set of listening tools that can be used as a basis for interventions in other large organisations. The findings from this research should be useful in the design of future CRM software.

The primary contribution of this research is its discussion of a variety of different customer listening tools used by firms, along with introducing potentially new customer listening tools to the literature, and indicating why and how the sub‐set of tools are administered by best‐practice companies. This research has created two overall frameworks that capture essential characteristics of each tool and its administration by the companies as the basis to facilitate CRM.

To use customer value and satisfaction data effectively, the company culture must embrace, support, and encourage customer value and satisfaction initiatives. The purpose of this article is to discuss the nature of a customer value and satisfaction culture and to model how best practice companies transform their cultures. The research results make a contribution to the literature by revealing unique insights into the nature of a customer value and satisfaction culture and by offering practitioners a model of how to manage such a culture.

The paper aims to examine existing information flows formally and informally within a customer complaint handling process, and to identify possible improvement areas to strengthen the effectiveness of this process in the workplace. These objectives are derived from the fact more than 80 percent of complaints have taken longer than the targeted timeframe during the past two years at the plant under study. The study is part of the plant's overall efforts in improving quality and customer satisfaction.

The methodology involves document reviews (i.e. a customer complaint handling procedure), discussion groups and interviews, and the use of the UCInet software for the social network analysis or SNA formulation. Key features such as connection strength, point connectivity, and degree centrality are examined.

The SNA shows that everybody associated with this process is connected. For a potential downside, customer service and quality assurance engineers appear to be critical. Their roles and responsibilities imply that, in addition to becoming technical experts, they have to be responsive and active in disseminating information to other staffs. Furthermore, if an engineer in charge of process engineering is absent or does not pass along information, at least four staffs will be disconnected from the network. Process engineering leader is also viewed as critical. He should actively participate and constantly engage in resolving a customer complaint.

The SNA can compliment process improvement by focusing on the roles and the importance of key persons within a process. The reason is that an improvement should focus on both a procedure (i.e. step‐by‐step activities and tasks) and persons (e.g. connectivity, interaction, and information bottleneck position). In other words, the paper underlines potential applications of the SNA on strengthening a quality management system (i.e. ISO 9001:2008). Therefore, the SNA, given its flexible applications, can emerge as an important management tool in the areas of quality management.

All top executives from the quality and reliability, and manufacturing functions view the SNA positively. The findings help them visualize the current practices at all levels when dealing with a customer complaint and identify the areas in which more attentions have to be made for a more effective process on complaint handling. For example, customer service engineer should be in the contact with all persons dealing with the complaint handling process. Process engineer leader needs to become more proactive in sharing a complaint and in checking its status more constantly.

The case study highlights the importance of the SNA when attempting to improve an operational process that requires two or more functions working together.

Comparatively, while the voice of customers, employees, and other stakeholders have been identified as key components of corporate and marketing communication, little attention has been paid to how organizations listen to, make sense of, and use the information provided. The research reported in this article examined how a multinational corporation and its subsidiaries listen to their customers, employees, and other stakeholders and explored how corporate listening can be improved for mutual benefits.

This article reports participatory action research within a multinational corporation operating in Europe, Canada and Australia, which set out to become a “listening organization” to improve its relationships and performance. The research was informed by interviews, observation, content analysis of relevant documents, and critical reflection.

This analysis illustrates the need for and benefits of looking beyond statistical data to analyze textual, aural and visual data available from call centers, open-end survey comments, complaints, correspondence, social media and other sources, and it identifies methods, tools and technologies for ethical insightful corporate listening.

This article advocates a “turn” from a focus on voice to focus on listening, noting that expression of the voice of customers, employees and other stakeholders has no value to them or organizations without active listening.

This paper reports an in-depth study of corporate listening to multiple stakeholders and identifies opportunities for increased insights and understanding that can lead to tangible benefits for both organizations and their stakeholders.

The present research aimed to identify the motivations, needs, wants, preferences and limitations of corporate professionals with regard to business social analytics.

Online interviews were conducted with 26 professionals the majority of whom work at the management level at 20 reputable corporations in Turkey. Both qualitative and quantitative data was collected during these interviews, which lasted an average of one hour.

The findings shed light on the motivations of corporate professionals for monitoring social media and other digital media, their perceived capability and limitations in doing so, the media that they monitor and wanted to monitor if possible, their criteria and processes for working with service providers in the field of business social analytics, their needs which are not fully met by service providers, their suggestions on service improvement and their reflections on how internal and external customer data can be analyzed with an integrated approach.

This research is an attempt to bridge the gap between the priorities of engineers who generate artificial intelligence for the purposes of social listening and analytics and the end users, e.g. corporate communication professionals. Only by doing so, this field, which is getting more and more important as people spend more time online, will reach its full potential and benefit corporations by providing fruitful insight upon which strategic steps can be taken.

The main purpose of the study is to examine the relationships between e-listening and customers’ perceptions of interpersonal service quality and utilitarian value during e-contact center interactions.

Participants completed an online survey about their service experiences with e-contact centers. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

This study found that e-listening is highly related to interpersonal service quality and utilitarian value. Interpersonal service quality is positively related to e-satisfaction and e-loyalty, both with e-contact centers and e-retailers.

The study utilizes general active empathetic listening (AEL) constructs identified in previous research. Although these constructs provide a way to differentiate the cognitive aspects of AEL, and therefore, a mechanism for discerning utilitarian value, further qualitative studies on nonverbal cues in online communications would develop insights into more granular, behavioral dimensions and effects of e-listening. In addition, the study is based on general e-retailing processes, and is not focused on a specific business or sector. The magnitude of the effects of e-listening on the different factors related to customer relationships may vary with different sectors.

E-contact centers should provide interpersonal interactions that emphasize utilitarian value. The centers should be staffed by employees who are well trained in AEL and who are provided with appropriate resources. The interactions of these e-contact centers can provide significant input to e-retailers about the improvement of service quality and resulting customer e-loyalty.

The research provides an original view of service quality in e-contact center contexts and makes a valuable contribution to understanding the evolving service offerings of multi-channel e-retailing. The study provides support for the argument that value and quality in interpersonal interactions with e-contact centers lead to satisfaction and consequently to customer loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detail review of the social selling literature and to offer future research needs. Social selling has gained the attention of sales researchers. Rather than merely a new tool, social selling redefines the traditional sales process. However, the literature is spread across topics of social media and sales, social customer relationship management, salesforce automation and social selling, and does not provide an agreed-upon definition or tested construct for implementation.

The paper presents a comprehensive literature review of social selling and all related terminology.

The authors propose a social selling framework that includes personal branding, information exchange, networking and social listening to define and outline the construct while suggesting the antecedents and outcomes to guide future research. Findings from a literature review include outlining key theories used in social selling research.

This review offers a conceptual framework of social selling, including both antecedents and outcomes, to inform future research and guide academics and practitioners.

Customer experience management is the managing of customer interactions, feelings and emotions at every touchpoint. These interactions and feelings define the customer's future behaviour and perceptions about the offering. Companies can use these touchpoint interactions as a source of competitive advantage. Companies can embark on a journey of experience management by understanding needs and insights about customer's behaviour. These are gathered through interactions, observations and structured surveys. Such feedback from customers is called Voice of Customer (VoC). Another source of understanding customers is employees who are involved in these interactions and also product and service delivery. Understanding employees is equally important. Companies need to even collate their feedback regarding problems in delivery and servicing, customers' expectations versus perceptions. Organisations committed to creating superior customer experience invest in tools like surveys, employee interactions both in formal and informal context to gather voice of the employee (VoE). Finally, both VoC and VoE have to be evaluated in a business context to define processes and measure the effectiveness of these processes. The voice of the process or VoP helps to understand the difference between customer perceptions and process performance. It gives an estimate of error and suggests methods for improving process efficiency.

This chapter explains the three essential ingredients that go into experience management, the tools used to collect information and how can these be used to design a superior and fulfilling experience for customers.