Voice of the Customer - (VOC) - Glossary

Below are some common terms that can be associated with Voice of the Customer programs or other Direct Feedback and Social Media Analysis initiatives.

• Brand Monitoring
  Monitoring the far, medium and near horizon in internet content as may relate to your brand, your customers brand or your partners, suppliers or general market network.

• Consumer Generated Media (CGM)
  Refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end users.

• Continuous Listening
  Is the process of actively engaging your customers and listening to comments in real time. It involves continuously collecting, analyzing and reporting on customer sentiment and social media analytics from the channels including: social media, email, SMS, forms, surveys and any other consumer generated media.

• Customer Experience Management (CEM)
  Is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company's interactions with customers and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new customers, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former customers back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and customer service.

• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  Is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)*
  Net Promoter® is both a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to fuel profitable growth in your business. Developed by Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld, the concept was first popularized through Reichheld's book The Ultimate Question, and has since been embraced by leading companies worldwide as the standard for measuring and improving customer loyalty.

• Social Media Analysis/Analytics
  Analyzing and interpreting qualitative and quantitative data from interactions between brands and consumers and/or businesses across social media channels

• Social Media Monitoring Tools
  Generally software, hosted or installed, that enables brands, products, and other topics to be identified in social media content, especially textual user generated content.

• Text Analytics
  Describes a set of linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques that model and structure the information content of textual sources for business intelligence, exploratory data analysis, research, or investigation.

• Text Mining
  Sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, refers to the process of deriving high-quality information from text. High-quality information is typically derived through the identifying patterns and trends in text through means such as statistical pattern learning.

• User Generated Content (UGC)
  See Consumer Generated Media.

• Voice of the Customer (VOC)
  (VOC) is a term used in business and Information Technology to describe the in-depth process of capturing a customer's expectations, preferences and aversions. Specifically, the Voice of the Customer is a market research technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives.

*Some data was obtained from Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License