Yet while most organizations understand the importance and value of customer feedback, many haven’t worked through how this customer data turns into customer understanding.
Even more concerning is that, on average, Fortune 1000 marketers depend on data for just 11% of all customer-related decisions; the reason? The “right” data is often in the “wrong” places. For any company wishing to improve customer experience or become more customer-centric, this is a significant problem. The answer? Listening to your customers in a strategic, consistent manner.
This is where a structured Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) program comes into play. By planning for customer feedback to flow into and through your company in ways that inform and drive action, you’ll have a lens through which to see progress against business goals or improvements in customer experience.
By transforming data into relevant information for stakeholders across the company, you’ll glean insights into customer needs, attitudes, and behaviors that produce actionable insights. As a result of a formal VoC program, companies like yours gain the ability to align with customers in ways everyone understands, while focusing on opportunities rather than simply solving problems.
The primary objective of your VoC program is to provide the customer-driven, “outside-in” insights which are at the heart of any organizations’ ability to deliver on its business, brand and customer experience strategies.
While at heart a research-driven capability, customer research alone is not a VoC program: in addition to gathering insights, a VoC program gives you what you need to systematically analyze and take action on what you learn.
Program design is important for many reasons, not least of which because it sets a framework for and drives deployment of the tactics which monitor the quality of customer interactions, and it stipulates what is done with the data once collected.
The fact is, many organizations already have multiple “customer listening posts” in place, from customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys in one division or group to Net Promoter Score (NPS), brand awareness or social listening in another. The data that comes from listening posts like these often isn’t available to be interpreted – much less acted on – in ways that inform organization-wide, strategic decision making.
This is why a successful VoC program will gather customer insights at key interactions across the customer journey regardless of group or channel, then integrate the use of these insights into the “rhythm of the business”, systematically and sustainably incorporating outside-in, customer feedback into the established decision-making processes to more predictably deliver better customer experiences, drive greater loyalty, and deliver specific business results.
There’s no denying that VoC software is a great tool to underpin the data gathering and distribution process – especially if you’re collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources and in various formats. But don’t allow yourself to be sold the software without understanding how it fits in the broader context of your VoC Program. A few of the questions to ask include:
Though the undertaking does require some effort, the results are well worth it. A formalized VoC program will help your company systematically gather, interpret, react to and monitor what you hear from your customers – and do so in ways that drive measurable business value.
Remember – while software is very useful in the management of your VoC program, it’s only one component; others include cultural alignment and program governance to help guide adoption, allowing you to truly turn customer insights into action. The result? A radically increased understanding of your customers. And, the institutional capability to use customer understanding to more effectively drive customer-related decisions, employee behaviors and actions, to design and deliver the experiences that drive customer loyalty.