“Even though you can’t see them or hear them at all, a person’s a person, no matter how small.”
Theodor Seuss Geisel did not pen those words 70 years ago for a marketing webinar but for his children’s book, “Horton Hears a Who,” whose protagonist understood Voice of Customer (VoC) doctrine: Everyone matters. We have to listen.
Listening is hard, however. Interpreting and prioritizing is tricky. Acting on what we learn is fraught with obstacles as “Horton” the elephant discovered when everyone resisted his good intents. In the end, consensus and teamwork won the day.
The power of customer voice
The allegory was fiction but the promise of VoC is not. Imagine a scenario where details and sentiments of every customer interaction are captured and provide valuable insights that can transform your business. That's the promise of a well-executed VoC program. It provides a 360-degree view of your brand through the eyes of your customers — in their own words — helping you identify pain points, celebrate successes, and make data-driven decisions to improve the overall customer experience.
Successful strategies provide a big picture of the customer journey and allow you to optimize the experience across all channels.
A speedy, responsive VoC builds good will and customer loyalty, according to Harvard Business Review research. HBR’s study of 400,000 tweets to airlines found that customers who received a response within 5 minutes were willing to pay $20 more for a flight on that carrier in the future. If a full hour elapsed before the airline responded to a tweet, good will plummeted and a customer would be willing to pay only $2 more for a ticket on a future flight.
The experience matters. According to Salesforce's 2023 State of the Connected Customer report, 80% of customers consider the experience a company provides to be as important as its products or services. This statistic underscores the critical role that contact centers play in shaping customer perceptions and loyalty.
The challenge of building and maintaining VoC
While the benefits of VoC are clear, implementing and maintaining an effective program is no small feat. Contact center operators face several hurdles in the form of:
- Data repositories: Customer feedback often resides in numerous, disparate systems, making it a challenge to build a holistic view of the customer journey. Exceptional customer experiences don’t happen in silos.
- Resource constraints: Collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback requires dedicated time and personnel.
- Technology integration: Seamlessly integrating VoC tools with existing contact center systems can be complex.
- Organizational alignment: Ensuring that insights lead to action across different departments requires strong leadership and communication.
To maximize effectiveness of your VoC program, there are five goals to go after:
Goal 1: Establish scope
One of the most common pitfalls in VoC initiatives is a lack of clear objectives. To avoid this, contact center operators must define their strategic focus from the outset. This involves identifying specific experiences or touchpoints to analyze and determining which channels play crucial roles in shaping customer perceptions.
By setting a clear scope, you can ensure that your VoC program targets the most impactful areas of the customer journey, making the best use of your resources and delivering actionable insights.
Use qualitative research to gain deep insights into customer values, pain points, and the current
journey, which will inform and enhance your quantitative VoC program, ensuring it is aligned with your strategic objectives.
Goal 2: Secure buy-in
For a VoC program to thrive, it needs support at all levels of the organization. This means appointing an executive sponsor to champion the program and engage everyone at all levels of the organization, including front-line workers. Expect to design new internal communications and training to boost understanding of VoC goals and objectives across the organization.
Building a listening program is pretty straightforward; however, it’s much more difficult to ensure that the program is connected across all functional and channel groups. Customer key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be measured along with financial KPIs. With buy-in from the top, you can make sure all these elements are connected and engaged — and that they’ll get the resources needed to make an impact.
Goal 3: Put customers at the center
To ensure your VoC program integrates seamlessly into the customer experience, it’s critical
that the program is user-friendly. Implement listening strategies such as surveys, data mining,
and social media monitoring, tailored to your customers’ preferred communication channels — like using social media for younger audiences and email surveys for older ones.
When designing your program, balance overall customer satisfaction measurements with feedback
on specific interactions. Additionally, determine the right mix of automation and human input to
ensure efficiency while maintaining a personal touch where it matters most for optimal results.
Keep surveys concise. Are the questions worded correctly? Responses to open-ended questions demand more time and thought than multiple-choice and rating-scale questions. Think about the customer mindset at any given touchpoint to ensure the feedback mechanism is appropriate for each stage of the journey.
Goal 4: Plan to act on the feedback
Collecting customer feedback is only half the battle.
The real value of a VoC program lies in the actions taken based on those insights. Yet many organizations fail to implement changes, wasting their investment and frustrating customers. To ensure meaningful change, establish clear responsibilities for acting on feedback, set measurable goals, and regularly review progress.
Focus on amplifying strengths by replicating successful practices and addressing weaknesses by targeting a limited number of specific improvements, just two or three, with each measurement wave.
Conduct a driver analysis to identify key factors impacting metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and focus on these drivers to prioritize actions that make the most significant improvements to the customer experience.
Ask the hard questions:
- Who will implement changes and be accountable for results?
- What are our specific measurable goals?
- How will we systematically address strengths and weaknesses surfaced by customer feedback?
Goal 5: Coordinate technology partnerships
A successful VoC program requires navigating a complex technology landscape. Consider partnering with an expert who can integrate various systems — such as contact centers, CRM platforms, and AI tools — seamlessly with your existing infrastructure. This integration helps to break down channel silos, ensuring a consistent and unified customer experience across all touchpoints.
Prioritize partners with the expertise to assess your systems, design impactful programs, and
handle ongoing maintenance. This ensures your program remains adaptable to evolving business
needs and continues to operate smoothly without increasing your operational burden.
While implementing an effective Voice of Customer program in your contact center may be challenging, the benefits far outweigh the difficulties. By establishing a clear scope, securing stakeholder buy-in, maintaining strong communication, acting on feedback, and leveraging the right technology partnerships, you can create a VoC program that not only improves customer satisfaction but also drives business growth and competitive advantage.
In the world of customer experience, listening is just the beginning. It’s what you do with what you hear that truly makes the difference.
If we follow the lead of Dr. Seuss’ empathetic elephant who overcame obstacles and persevered for a happy ending in “Horton Hears a Who,” we’ll achieve superior CX and all be shouting “Yopp!” from the mountaintop.
