Continuous Listening and the Street Voice

Quantifying qualitative feedback from actual customers in actual situations on a continuous basis is opening the door to analyzing other voices. The patterns found in focused feeds, like the webValidator, provide the building blocks for the natural language algorithms required to analyze the less focused feeds like blogs and 3rd party web sites in a meaningful way. The interaction between actual customer feedback, let’s call it Voice of the Customer, and less focused but powerful feeds like blogs, let's call it the Street Voice, should provide a new level of understanding to continuous listening.

Where are issues first detected? Do they appear first in focused customer feedback and then get circulated loudly by the street voice, or do customer issues gain momentum only after the street has made them heard. It should be interesting to see, using real data, how the theories put forward by Malcolm Gladwell in the The Tipping Point apply. The potential implications related to managing brand perception are huge. This added intelligence should provide organizations with powerful decision support, helping them decide which and when customer issues need urgent attention.