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Putting the Voice of the Customer to Work: Why Most Companies Fail

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Dr. D. Randall Brandt, vice president of customer experience and loyalty, discussed organizational VOC programs at the AMA Marketing Research Conference in Atlanta, based on a survey of 350 managers in blue-chip companies. “There is more to success to putting the Voice of the Customer to work than just capturing and sharing customer feedback, yet this appears to be as far as many organizations have gotten in their efforts to integrate and deploy such research.”

Maritz surveyed 350 managers about their VOC programs, with about a third of the sample responsible for market research and 13% responsible for customer service; 30% of respondents were from finance, and 15% from automotive. Respondents were asked about integrating multiple sources of VOC (Voice of the Customer) data, linking VOC to business results and how they take action based on VOC-driven priorities. Respondents rated 30 specific challenges and discussed their priorities.

Organizations have been successful in these areas: establishing the importance of VOC, selecting and capturing VOC, using survey metrics “to keep score” and using survey results to identify priorities for improvement. They struggle at harvesting and integrating multiple sources of Voice of the Custom data, linking it to operational data and taking action.

• For dealing with multiple sources, the need is to analyze and mine text data, monitor and integrate consumer-generated and social media in the VOC mix, and add other channels of VOC data besides surveys.
• Linking VOC data to internal business processes and other metrics remains difficult.
• When it comes to taking action, a challenge is engaging corporate and front-line managers and employees in customer-driven improvement efforts. As is clarifying survey-based action items so that owners know what to do or fix.

People who do a good job putting the Voice of the Customer to work have mastered the leading challenges. There is a continuum of maturity and effectiveness of VOC programs: most organizations have the basics down of establishing the importance of VOC and collecting VOC data, but only about 20% of organizations have linked it to financial measures and take action based on the feedback.

The firms that do it well put the following best practices in place:

• To integrate multiple sources of VOC data, leading firms “develop a uniform set of customer experience categories and apply it consistently to all VOC data.” For many organizations, each source of VOC data uses different categorization or coding schemes, limiting the ability to make direct comparisons and identify convergent insights. For instance, an airline has different categories in its satisfaction survey, its textual analysis of customer contacts and its coding of social media comments. For one firm that corrects for this, “the application of these consistent categories to ever-increasing volumes of client feedback is finally paying dividends in terms of convincing management to customer perceptions.”
• The best practice for linking VOC data to business processes requires designing the VOC approach “so that linkages are explicitly defined in advance of gathering and assembling data”, then performing analyses that determine the strength of that relationship. “We have been able to illustrate the connection between differing levels of loyalty and revenue growth at the account level,” one respondent said. The simpler you keep the linkage, the better: for instance, overall satisfaction with dealership drives the likelihood to repurchase from the dealership which affects dealership revenue and profitability. From one study, Maritz found that if you could move each customer up one level of satisfaction, you could increase gross profit per car by $1,470.
• The best practice for getting people to act on VOC-driven issues is to identify who is responsible, ensure they have sufficient understanding of customer wants and then identify the enablers that will address the issue. “You have to clarify issues so that owners know what to do and pinpoint processes and performance changes.” The typical mistake is a lack of clarity about what needs to be done. As a best practice, one respondent said, “We ‘mine’ existing research as much as possible to create clarity on action items and where needed, engage in supplemental ‘drill-down’ research to provide required level of clarity for action.”

By rising to these three challenges, organizations can develop more mature Voice of the Customer programs.