How do world-class banks generate customer insight that enables them to enhance customer experiences? Bryan Foss, Global Customer Insight Solutions Executive for IBM Banking Industry, Financial Services Sector, offers a few "best practices" that might apply to all industries. Among them:

==> Ensuring executives and non customer facing departments are in touch with the customers' perceptions: One Financial Services company provides executives with a taped summary of recent service calls to play in their car on the way to the office, a general manager elsewhere participated in a "listening-in" call center audit.

==> Use, evaluate and comment on your own company’s services, "seed" your own employees into mail, phone and other campaigns for an experience shared with your customers

==> "Close the loop" using analytics, to understand and improve the acceptance of new offers and services, supported by specific customer and employee feedback

==> Implement "touch point" research, to understand the customers perception of different offer and channel combinations – one offer may work through the branch but not on the web, at least in its current form

These respresent a few practical steps that companies can take to build customer insight and derive value from it. They certainly offer an interesting way of ensuring we are hearing the voice of the customer -- and, to a somewhat greater extent, seeing the world through the customer's eyes.