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Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Nov 11, 2009
 Jeremy Whyte, director of customer feedback and reporting with Oracle Corporation, presented details of Oracle's extensive Voice of the Customer research program to the American Marketing Association in a research webinar on October 20. Surveys form the foundation of Oracle's Voice of the Customer program: listening to customer input through Vovici surveys provides "comprehensive feedback across the Oracle ecosystem and customer ownership lifecycle". Oracle conducts hundreds of surveys, grouped into relationship surveys, transactional surveys and targeted surveys.
- Relationship surveys with customers, partners and employees are the most strategic surveys, highlighting customer experience and loyalty drivers across cumulative contacts. Why survey employees in a Voice of the Customer program? Because Oracle has identified a correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction and prioritizes investments to improve employee satisfaction based on how that will drive increased customer loyalty.
- Transactional surveys measure the quality of each service response by organization. Short term these surveys trigger immediate action on a customer-by-customer basis, and long term these drive operational improvements to improve service quality. Transactional surveys are conducted for technical support, customer service, consulting services, education services, sales win/losses, implementations and even M&A impact on customers.
- Targeted surveys are used primarily for qualitative research to supplement relationship and transactional surveys. Sample applications include competitive intelligence, product and service planning, marketing, referencing, user group satisfaction and general market research.
All of these survey results are combined with operational measures and financial outcomes in a customer satisfaction linkage analysis. As a foundational platform, taken together these surveys empower Oracle's wider Voice of the Customer program, which reaches beyond surveys for other additional types of feedback.
How effective has this been? Oracle has improved customer satisfaction each fiscal year for five years running and its customers now demonstrate the greatest propensity to recommend that they ever have. If you talk to a large Oracle client, you will hear firsthand how they have seen Oracle adapt and improve to serve them better. To achieve similar results for your own organization, make surveys the foundation of your efforts.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Nov 03, 2009
 Six weeks ago, as an experiment, I set up a new Twitter account (my main Twitter account is @jhenning) to tweet my personal experiences with products, services and establishments. Since about a third of my tweets would be about local establishments, I sought out and followed about 100 other Twitter users near me; about 20 followed me back.
That done, I then tried to make at least one comment each business day. Each tweet reflected an authentic experience: some were positive comments, some negative, some mixed. I wrote about 30 local, regional and national brands.
My expectation was to do an analysis of brand response by scale of brand and by type of tweet (positive, negative, mixed). Unfortunately, only one brand - a regional brand - ever replied to me. So this makes for a rather boring statistical analysis!
The results shocked me - I rarely tweet about personal brand experiences from @jhenning but the one time I did, the retailer responded to me right away. I had expected a fifth to a third of the brands to respond to me and had hypothesized that regional brands would have the greatest participation rate, as they are big enough to monitor social media and small enough to be early adopters of new technology.
So, if your organization is out there listening on Twitter, it is time to speak up as well. The inaugural survey of the Global Web Index (a syndicated research offering from TrendStream) reported that 22% of its 16,000 panelists said that their perception of a brand is improved if the organization responds to comments in online communities and forums. Sometimes listening to the voice of the customer isn't enough, sometimes acting on the voice of the customer isn't enough: sometimes you have to reply to the voice of the customer.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Oct 16, 2009
 Whenever someone discusses Voice of the Customer, they almost always use the phrase "listen to the Voice of the Customer". We need to speak Voice of the Customer as well.
Too often, the typical questionnaire is written in the language of the employee, not the customer. It is written from the sponsoring organization's perspective, uses industry jargon and makes subtle distinctions that the average customer is oblivious too (see Multiple Choice Lists Only a Product Manager Could Love).
All of this is bad news for a survey: the respondent gives less accurate answers, because they don't interpret questions the way they were intended. Respondents' frustration with the survey grows, prompting them to skip questions that aren't required, or - when running into required questions - to abandon the survey altogether.
To me, an important goal of qualitative research is to learn how customers speak: the language they use and the words they select to describe what's important to them. In fact, VOC research can be a Rosetta Stone for questionnaire authors, helping them translate between EmployeeSpeak and CustomerSpeak. For instance, here's a question as it might have been written by an engineer, compared to that same question written for the customer:
The engineers in the audience are probably already alarmed that we are equating 2MB per MP3 file (e.g., per song). We're not; we're just using useful units. When it comes time to translate those into specs, the engineers will need to transform those requirements into gigabyte requirements using a rule of thumb for average song size. A pain, yes, for the engineers, but the survey data will be more accurate by embracing the customer viewpoint. Many customers - and here I am going to lose the engineers altogether - can't tell you how many KB or MB are in a GB; a gigabyte is too abstract a measurement for them.
Speaking of abstract, we did consider using the question "How many hours of music do you want to keep on your music player?" but found that "songs" was a more natural unit of measurement than "hours".
So, as you curl up to read thousands of verbatim comments or transcripts from your MROC or focus group, try to absorb the language and word choice, not just the opinions and attitudes. Your surveys will be the better for it.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Aug 31, 2009
People initiate satisfaction and loyalty tracking programs for one simple reason – they want to know what their customers think. Maybe about their company, their products, their services or their perceived value being delivered to customers. But, while they may suspect the answers, they are uncertain and therefore they seek the Voice of their Customer. This represents real progress.
Once they decide to kick-off a survey program, they frequently begin to immediately craft the questions. This is where I get very concerned. The process owners acknowledge that they don’t know what their customers are thinking, but they consciously or unconsciously believe they know what’s important to the customer base. Sounds to me like a case of not knowing what you don’t know!
In my opinion, creating a survey program is a five-step process with the first step often skipped.
Step 1 – Identify your target customer’s most important interactions with your business.
Here are two ways to identify the main areas of interest (touch-points): - The cheap and cheerful way – Identify a reasonable number of customers that you believe represent a broad spectrum of your target audience. Talk with them, either face-to-face or by telephone, explain what your company is going to do, and why, and gather their opinion of the most important touch-points that shape their relationship with your company. Make sure to discuss every interaction between the company and the customer.
- The rigorous and more expensive approach – Commission an external organization to conduct a series of focus groups with representatives of your target. The primary advantages of this approach are:
- Unbiased results
- “Better” answers
- All areas will be probed (the knowledge of what to question is a big part of what you are paying for)
- You show customers and employees how serious your business is about this initiative.
On the other hand, of course, it will take longer, and cost more, that doing it internally.
Step 2 – Identify the key drivers of customer loyalty.
Plan a survey program to obtain a statistically valid analysis of the “key drivers” of customer loyalty by doing it yourself or with a company that specializes in satisfaction and loyalty surveys. Based on knowledge resident within your company, preferably at the operational level, identify the elements of each touch-point that your customers responded were important to their relationship with your business. And question the overall level of satisfaction and loyalty and likelihood of additional purchases (the real reason for the whole program).
Survey a statistically valid sample of your target segment or audience. When all results are obtained, perform a regression analysis to identify the key drivers of satisfaction, loyalty and additional purchases. Make certain that the results are valid by looking at the R-squared. From this analysis, the company will have a very good idea about what is important for each key touch-point your customers identified. And it will be able can see which variable, if any, impacts more that one key parameter.
Step 3 – Identify the key drivers of satisfaction for touch-points identified in the previous step.
The objective is to identify the attributes of the selected touch-points that most strongly influence how your customers feel about their experiences with your business’ most influential interactions. Use the same techniques and rigor as in Step 2 since the results will be driving investments and actions. Do not let individual bias guide which attributes you include. Be as sweeping as possible since, once again, you may not know what you don’t know.
Then the fun begins!
Using the results of Step 3, plan a survey program that focuses on those areas with the greatest bang for the buck. As progress is made, begin tackling the lower impact items on the list. Remember to make sure you get enough completed surveys so that the results are statistically representative of your whole target audience.
Step 5 – Re-verify the key drivers identified in Steps 2 and 3.
Unless there are dramatic changes in the companies’ business environment it is unlikely that the key drivers will change drastically in a year. Yes, your company should periodically revalidate its key driver list but you have time to implement improvements first.
And remember, if it isn’t important then why spend the time and money to find out how the customers perceive your performance? So focus your ongoing survey efforts on the items your customers say are most important to their ongoing relationship with your business. Now, at last, you know what you didn't know when you jumped headfirst into the survey pool!
Posted by Brian Koma on Fri, Aug 21, 2009
According to the CE IQ study, organizations with the most loyal customers not only measure and monitor employee interactions with customers but then share that feedback with employees (a strong correlation of 0.54 to the study’s loyalty index). This creates a closed feedback loop that allows customer-facing staff members to understand the impact of their interactions on customers and enables the creation of programs that allow employees to improve those interactions over time.  In addition, companies with the most loyal customers also periodically share VOC ( Voice of the Customer) information with employees across the organization, ensuring widespread understanding of the customer’s point of view. Taken a step further, these organizations also engage customers in two-way dialogues through online communities. As Jeffrey wrote in The Top Ten Reasons for Building an Online Community in 2009, “This allows a wide variety of individuals within the business to interact and engage with customers. Dell has 40 employees participate in a team called Communities & Conversations. CEOs always talk about making their organizations ‘customer centric’: by talking to customers and evangelizing their viewpoints across the company, as these Dell team members do, the organization truly becomes centered on the customer.”
Finally, organizations with the most loyal customers also recognize the link between satisfied employees and loyal customers by measuring employee satisfaction on a regular basis. Satisfied and loyal employees reflect their positive attitudes and good behaviors to customers, who in turn increase their loyalty to the business. Averaging these four best practices together, the resulting index has a 0.65 correlation to customer loyalty, highest of any of the six practice areas examined. Clearly, employee-customer engagement is a key to unlocking greater customer loyalty.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jul 06, 2009
 At the Forrester Customer Experience Forum last month, Forrester announced the winners of its first-ever Voice of the Customer Award: Experian, Progressive and Vanguard. Unlike the other two winners, Vanguard in its award application quantified the financial benefits of acting on the Voice of the Customer in detail. Vanguard’s attention to voice of the customer significantly affects our business results. In the past two years alone, issues identified through listening to both our clients and our crew [employees] have resulted in approximately $6.9 million in cost reduction or avoidance in our Retail business:
- $2.6 million from process efficiencies
- $1.1 million from improving the asset transfer process
- $1.0 million from improving fulfillment of literature
- $0.9 million from improving our problem resolution efforts
- $0.9 million from document management improvements
- $0.4 million from improving transaction processing quality and efficiency
In our Institutional Retirement Plan Services (IRPS) business: Client identified issues with interactions including plan contributions, loan repayment and beneficiary designations led to a multi-year initiative to overhaul and improve workflow. While the project is not yet complete, it has already resulted in cost savings of approximately $1.3 million. Anticipated savings in 2009 exceed five times that amount [$6.5+ million].
A separate project in our IRPS business focused on e-delivery: Clients told us they wanted less mailbox clutter, more information available online and for Vanguard to decrease their impact on the environment. Vanguard began providing electronic statements, confirmations, notices, and newsletters as well as multi-media learning. As a result, we saw both a decrease in customer complaints and reduced or avoided approximately $6.5 million in costs.
So from acting on the Voice of the Customer that’s a total savings of $14.7 million in 2007 and 2008, growing to at least another $21.2 million in 2009. While bottom-line savings are important, top-line growth is even better: Since 2005, the voice of the customer program has identified numerous opportunities for our phone representatives to better meet the needs of both clients and prospects. Acting on voice of the customer data, one retail business unit developed new training programs to focus on client identified opportunities for our representatives to improve, revised the quality measures that are part of representatives’ performance evaluations to reflect client-critical factors, and adjusted monitoring processes so that supervisors could review the entire client experience, not simply one call. Due to these and other changes made in this business area, client conversion rates have improved by 32% since 2005. This translates into a 94% increase in new assets from these clients. Obviously, for competitive reasons, Vanguard does not release all the details on its spending on Voice of the Customer or what the top-line impact was of its near-doubling of new assets. While this makes it impossible to generate a true ROI for Vanguard VOC efforts, it presents as full a public picture of the sound economic reasons for investigating in Voice of the Customer initiatives as we’ve seen. Congratulations to Vanguard for this well-deserved award, as well as a special thanks to them for highlighting Vovici as one of the technology vendors “critical to their success”.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jun 15, 2009
 voice of the customer (abbreviation VOC) – noun - The wants and needs of customers expressed with the customer’s own language. “Let’s get rid of ‘opinioneering’ and start building cars that meet the voice of the customer!” - Neil Eldin and Verda Hikle, 1987.
- The perspective of the customer. “Ms MacFarlane is responsible for representing the voice of the customer and providing leadership on customer communication and support.” - Infomedia Annual Report, 2009.
- Text or speech collected from customers through information systems including email, forums, surveys and call-center systems. “Develop the data collection and mining methodologies, statistical analysis tools, and analytics reporting package for voice of the customer inputs.” – job posting [now offline], 2009
I used the phrase “voice of the customer” last week in passing with a new colleague, who asked me for a definition. I rattled off something similar to the first definition, then went searching for a good web page to point him to. The few pages that I found had prescriptive definitions, defining the term how they want people to use it. No one actually seemed to consider how people really used it.
One of my favorite blogs is Language Log, where linguists write for a general audience about various and sundry linguistic issues (one of the contributors is the author of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). Inspired by their coverage of how words change, and indulging my own inner lexicographer for the first time since I defined firmographic, let's look at how the jargon phrase “voice of the customer” has evolved. Google News indicates that the phrase originally grew out of the Quality Function Deployment method of translating customer inputs into products and processes. Consider the following supporting quotes to be the voice of the customer of users of the phrase “voice of the customer”! - 1986
- “QFD—A Structured Approach to Understanding the Voice of the Customer” [PA Davis, IEEE Conference Proceedings, 1986 – the first occurrence I could find that didn’t literally mean a human voice]
- 1987
- “Included among seven philosophical goals sought by the new program are that ‘the voice of the customer is understood and drives the whole process’ and that education and training will be continued ‘and will support the quality improvement process.’”
- 1989
- “QFD, popularly called ‘the voice of the customer,’ is a team approach to product design involving representatives from the customer's organization, the manufacturer's organization, and the manufacturer's supplier's organization.”
- “Specification limits or tolerances represent the ‘voice of the engineer,’ which frequently conflicts with the ‘voice of the customer.’”
- 1990
- “Stempel has to create a corporate culture that turns catchy phrases like ‘listening to the voice of the customer’ into reality.”
- 1991
- “The aim of TQE is to maintain employees' focus on the voice of the customer and to promote quality performance in every corporate task.”
- “One of the reasons Taurus has been so successful is that its design has been guided by the voice of the customer throughout its product history.”
- “Total quality brings the voice of the customer into the organization and transmits it to each link in the chain of operations.”
And some quotes from this year that show a greater diversity of meaning: - “Chief Marketing Officers are the voice of the customer and define a vision for future organizational growth and vitality within a company.”
- “My goal is to be the voice of the customer within InteliCloud. We can have the greatest product in our minds, but it's the customer that dictates the product path.”
- “The Clarabridge Content Mining Platform provides Global 1000 enterprises an analytical view of text-based verbatims found in voice of the customer feedback channels such as call center notes, qualitative survey feedback, Web 2.0 content, online forums, reviews and customer warranty forms.”
- “The quantitative stuff is taking the temperature twice a year with the voice of the customer. Both those surveys come in to that scorecard.”
- “VOC: Voice of the customer, market research programs designed to uncover customer requirement and needs. While VOC is often considered a synonym for CEM, it is less oriented to improving day-to-day customer experiences as it is concerned with the longer view of business improvement.” [For the record, VOC as the abbreviation for “voice of the customer” outnumbers VOTC as the abbreviation by 15:1, according to Google.]
- “We feel that with the three voices, you can find on Citysearch, the voice of the customer, the voice of the business owner and editor, we have restored a balance to city guides that has been lost.”
Finally, I wonder how many words for “customer” those exceptional salespeople who can sell ice to Eskimos have?
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, May 27, 2009
 One of the factors that distinguishes Six Sigma from TQM (Total Quality Management) and earlier quality movements is its reliance on measurable data. Jiju Antony, in "Pros and cons of Six Sigma: an academic perspective", describes this difference like this:
Six Sigma emphasises the importance of decision making based on facts and data rather than assumptions and hunches. Six Sigma forces people to put measurements in place. Measurement must be considered as a part of the culture change.
Surveys are a key tool for transforming hypotheses and hunches about customer attitudes and outlooks into numbers and metrics. As a result, surveys are useful throughout Six Sigma work. - Early in its own deployment of Six Sigma, Caterpillar conducted a Six Sigma Supplier Survey with its partners to understand how they had deployed Six Sigma and what lessons they had learned (see Lean Six Sigma: Combining Six Sigma Quality with Lean Production Speed by Michael George).
- When General Electric began its own use of Six Sigma, each GE division conducted detailed customer surveys, asking customers to rate GE products and services on CTQ (Critical To Quality) issues and to rate best-in-class performance. This evolved into a quarterly customer-satisfaction process for many divisions, with low-scoring items in the quarterly updates becoming candidates for subsequent Six Sigma projects (see Managing Six Sigma: A Practical Guide to Understanding, Assessing, and Implementing the Strategy That Yields Bottom-Line Success by Forrest Breyfogle III, James Cupello and Becki Meadow).
- Voice-of-the-Customer research is often conducted as an input to QFD (Quality Function Deployment), with QFD transforming customer needs into engineering and quality assurance methods for developing new, high-quality products and services.
- One Six Sigma approach to web design involves an ongoing study of web-site effectiveness, which surveys visitors about their goals at the site and tracks the success rate of achieving those goals over time. Regular incremental improvements to the web site are evaluated by their effect on improving goal completion rates.
- Another organization uses an employee survey to identify bottlenecks and excessive bureaucracy that reduce employee productivity, to highlight and prioritize areas for internal process improvement.
- The book Managing Six Sigma is noteworthy among Six Sigma books because it actually practices what it preaches and includes within itself a readership satisfaction survey! The authors assert the results of this survey will help them prepare the next edition of the book.
How have you used surveys in your Six Sigma projects?
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Apr 06, 2009
 Bruce Temkin, a principal analyst at Forrester, defines "voice of the customer" as "a systematic approach for incorporating the needs of customers into the design of customer experiences." His blog post "Are you listening to the voice of the customer?" outlines five levels of activities in a VOC program:
- Relationship tracking. Organizations need to track the health of customer relationships over time...
- 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...
- Continuous listening. ...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.
- Project infusion. 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...
- 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 frontline employees...
Surveys, online communities and text analytics can help you listen to the voice of the customer at each of the five levels that Bruce describes: - Relationship tracking. Periodic surveys are an excellent way to keep your finger on the pulse of customers. Many of our users conduct a full census of customers annually or biannually, but to truly listen to the voice of the customer we advocate monthly or quarterly surveys of a random sample of customers. That way you always have a fresh perspective on current customer attitudes.
- Interaction monitoring. Automated surveys can follow up each purchase, customer-service interaction and renewal. By integrating your CRM system with your enterprise feedback platform, you can constantly listen for the voice of the customer. Coupling this interaction with survey alerts/email triggers is a great way to act on the voice of the customer, too.
- Continuous listening. Text analytics enable you to eavesdrop on thousands of customers as they comment on your surveys, email your organization and blog and tweet about you.
- Project infusion. Qualitative and quantitative research into the voice of customer needs to be infused throughout the product lifecycle: integrate such research into the planning, development, implementation and marketing of each product or service.
- Periodic immersion. Online communities can immerse your employees in the thoughts and attitudes of your customers. To truly become a customer-driven organization, make sure that employee participation in your customer community is broad and deep.
Modern technologies make it easier than ever to listen to customers. Make sure your organization is evaluating such tools, and be sure to check out Vovici's new Voice of the Customer Success Package that can help your organization better listen to customers.
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