Voice of the Customer Best Practices for Customer Experience Management
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Jan 06, 2010
The Vovici CE IQ study identified some of the VOC (Voice of the Customer) and research best practices used by organizations with highly loyal customers.
The VOC best practice with the highest positive correlation to the customer loyalty index (0.52) was sharing VOC feedback across organizational boundaries. This approach greatly increases knowledge of the customer viewpoint in all aspects of the organization, including those functional areas that are not traditionally customer-facing, such as finance and operations. Sharing VOC data injects customer feedback into the firm's DNA.
Organizations with the most loyal customer don't stop there. Consumer brands are drowning in VOC data, with extensive records written by their customers, in their contact center's email logs, their support forum and on third-party ecommerce web sites. With this abundance of information, organizations with highly loyal customers are adopting advanced text analytics tools from vendors such as Attensity and Clarabridge to help them categorize and make sense of this open-ended data (0.43 correlation).
Many managers make business decisions on gut instinct. Managers at organizations with highly loyal customers make sure that the voice and attitudes of the customer are heard by decision makers, and that their viewpoint is given due consideration in the decision-making process (0.43 correlation). Then they take it a step further and actively solicit and use qualitative comments from customers in order to surface ideas and issues that were not asked directly in quantitative surveys.
Surprisingly, conducting primary research to understand customers is the worst of the best practices, with the lowest correlation to customer loyalty of the 24 best practices studied (0.33). It's not enough to do a survey. Too many survey reports linger unread in managers' inboxes. To translate feedback into customer loyalty, engage employees with the feedback, so that they internalize it and use it to make data-guided decisions.
Follow these best practices and you will be well on your way to building superior customer experiences through Voice-of-the-Customer research.