Friday, May 26, 2017

Get the Most From the Actual Voice of the Customer

Source: Jason Rosewell, Unsplash.com
Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs collect direct, indirect and inferred data about your customers so you can better understand your product, services, and experiences from the customers' perspective. This is what makes VoC data so different (and so valuable) from most, if not all, of the other data your organization collects--this data isn't about your campaigns, your sites, your apps, and your transactions but about the customer's feelings, sentiment, and perceptions.

Analyzed appropriately, VoC data illuminates what customers care about, how they make decisions, how they feel about your products and services, their level of satisfaction and loyalty, what drives dissatisfaction with your brand, and other attributes that describe your brand's relationship with its customers. This information can be distributed widely around the organization to help drive tactical decisions, can inform your personas and journey maps to support strategic initiatives, and can help your firm identify promoters for advocacy programs and detractors for recovery and retention efforts.

But one of the most powerful (and simple) uses of VoC data is simply to let the actual voice of the customer be heard throughout the organization. I'm not talking about aggregate, quantitative data that provides logical support for decisions but instead the individual and qualitative feedback shared by your customers--their actual words and sentiment.

The real voice of the customer may come to your company in a variety of ways, including comments contained in open-ended survey questions, tweets and posts in social media, complaint emails and letters sent to your business and the call recordings or text transcripts of customer care interactions. Collecting and sharing customer verbatims can enhance your customer experience and customer-centricity efforts.  Charts and tables of NPS and sentiment data have their place, but they cannot capture the attention, compassion, and emotions of your leaders and employees in the same way as the gratitude, anger, frustration and desire contained within your customers' feedback.

One of my clients spent a year trying to secure approval from leadership for the budget to correct a particular customer experience issue. None of her data, diagrams, and spreadsheets created enough attention or care to drive action--until she played a two-minute clip of a customer service call. That call, brimming with the customer's rage and frustration and employee's inability to resolve the issue, made the difference. "That two minutes felt like two hours as our leaders heard the failings of our process," she told me, "but that two-minute call did more to gain the approval I needed than a hundred pages of data."

To learn more about the value of the genuine voice of the customer, the business language issues that prevent our companies from being more customer centric and examples of ways to disseminate customer verbatims to employees and leaders, please read the complete post on my Gartner blog.