Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs
There's a new term in town doing the rounds, Voice of the Customer or VoC. It's what we at Dub use to describe what we do for our clients, and it is also a language that clients themselves are adopting as they seek to deliver Voice of the Customer Programs and 'listening' strategies.
Bruce Temkin neatly defines VoC in a blog post as 'a systematic approach for incorporating the needs of customers into the design of customer experiences'. He also outlines the five key levels of activities in a client's VoC program as being:
1. Relationship tracking. Organizations need to track the health of customer relationships over time. That's why companies often ask customers to fill out surveys — typically quarterly or annually — about their perception of the firm. Using this feedback, companies can create metrics that are simple to understand and easy to trend. Why is this important? Because an easy-to-grasp report card helps align everyone in the organization around a common purpose.(Note: I won't get into the debate between 'satisfaction' and 'NetPromoter' metrics in this post, but I'll definitely be touching on that in the future)
2. Interaction monitoring. Every customer interaction — from an online transaction to a call into the call center — is important. Firms need a way to monitor how effectively they handle these customer touches. That's why many companies do post-interaction surveys — asking customers for feedback on recent interactions.
3. Continuous listening. Structured feedback through customer surveys provides enormous opportunities for analysis. But one of the strengths of these approaches — providing data — is also a limitation. To avoid this data-only view of customer relationships, companies put in place processes for executives to regularly listen to customers. There are many opportunities to hear what customers are saying, such as listening to calls in the call center, reading blogs, reading inbound emails, and visiting retail outlets.
4. Project infusion. The following statement is probably not too controversial: Projects that affect customers should incorporate insights about customers. Despite the clear need for this type of effort, many companies lack a formalized approach for infusing customer insights into projects. To make sure that this doesn't happen, some firms are incorporating customer insight steps in the front-end of their Sigma processes.
5. Periodic immersion. Every so often, it's valuable for all employees — especially executives — to spend a significant amount of time interacting directly with customers or working alongside front-line employees. These experiences, which should be at least a half day, provide an excellent opportunity for the company to question the status quo.
In order to help deliver such VoC program, Bruce the following activities:
Relationship tracking. Survey customers at regular intervals on how they feel about the company. Use simple metrics such as likelihood to recommend, repurchase or switch companies etc
Interaction monitoring. Survey customers after key interactions to determine how satisfied they are both with the results and the processes
Continuous sampling. Sample front-line customer interactions in a regular basis by listening to call center conversations, reading emails, chat logs, or blog, or by visiting stores and branches.
Project infusion. Systematically include definitions of target customers' needs within project plans for tools like design personas and requirements documents
Periodic immersion. Periodically get executives to spend significant time interacting with customers and front-line employees
Dub's online customer communities are one method by which to listen to and engage your customers in conversation in order to gain a clearer picture of their shifting sentiment and attitudes. Social media technology allows large scale engagement to happen quickly and cost-effectively, and can be used to help extract insight, though there is never a replacement for our skilled human eyeballs!
Contact Stephen Cribbett if you'd like to know more about how Dub can help your business become more customer-centric.