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Best of the Best Practices for Voice of the Customer Programs

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In November, Bruce Temkin wrote a Forrester independent report, Sixteen Voice of the Customer Recommendations, derived from 40 nomination applications for the 2009 Forrester Voice of the Customer Award. Bruce summarized the VOC recommendations on his personal blog. Last summer Brian Koma and I developed and tested 24 best practices in our CE IQ study. I thought the intersection of our 24 practices and Bruce's 16 recommendations would make for an interesting list of the "best of the best practices":

1. Create strategic commitment - VOC programs will not succeed as tactical, ad-hoc initiatives. Out of all 24 of the best practices that we studied, having a formal customer-experience strategy in place had the highest positive correlation (0.59) to the customer loyalty index. You need an overarching strategy to be successful.
2. Lead from the top - With a strategy designed, you need customer experience leadership to oversee it and champion it throughout the organization.
3. Track common metrics - Too many departments and divisions are tracking different measures or aren't tracking any at all. The value of a standard customer satisfaction, loyalty or experience measure is that it helps your organization focus on improvement.
4. Manage the feedback process - Few organizations coordinate feedback across the larger organization, missing opportunities to improve the quality and actionability of research. Feedback is an asset, but isn't typically treated as such.
5. Include text analysis - In the digital world, unstructured feedback is abundant. Harvest it from many listening posts for a richer understanding of the Voice of the Customer.
6. Share VOC data widely - Everyone in your organization should be within earshot of the Voice of the Customer. Make sure they can hear it. Employees want to listen in.
7. Personalize VOC data to make it actionable - "Think globally, act locally." Hierarchical reports let you tailor feedback for literally thousands of different roles in your organization, so that the data is made local to those who are closest to the customer.
8. Incorporate VOC data in decision making - Make sure planning processes incorporate feedback. Everyone wants to make customer-driven decisions, and that requires customer feedback.