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How a Voice of the Customer Program Saved the Business

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Deborah Wall, customer insights leader of GE Capital Americas, presented “Customer Insights Integration: How to Achieve High Impact with Low Cost and Deep Adoption” at the AMA Marketing Research Conference. She shared three high-impact insights:

1.  “The most important thing in driving high impact VOC is to gain the trust and partnership of key stakeholders.”
2.  “Develop both internal and external talent as a team.” You need a hybrid team: a virtual team with a strong internal technical leader who understands research methodologies, with a strong business manager who leads projects and implements actions, and with two to three key strategic partner research providers.
3. “Make sure you have a process that directs where and how you spend your time.” GE surveyed 400 of its marketers, and most were spending 60% of their time on technical issues, 20% on fielding, with 10% on “business and budget” and 10% on activation. “For high impact, we now have marketers spend 40% of their time on activation and 30% of business issues.”

“At GE, we are very process driven,” Deborah said, “with 28 substeps as a guide. The wing-to-wing project time is 6 month.” When marketers don’t follow it, they don’t get the impact they were looking for. “It’s a proven process.”

At a high level, GE’s Go-To-Market Voice of the Customer segmentation process includes:

1. Project kickoff and objective setting: “This is the most important thing.” Miss this, and your report will sit on a shelf somewhere rather than be acted on, yet this step is often ignored. “You need to get buy in from the people who will need to create the action plan. They won’t do it if they weren’t part of the plan.” Get the CEO to buy in, because then the teams will buy in.
2. Survey development, fielding and analysis: Make sure the survey is customer friendly to get the maximum insight. “In B2B, getting the right audience is always a challenge, especially when you need to include CFOs.”
3. Segment selection and profiling: Too often a team makes a set of segments that the business leaders don’t believe in. Find a segmentation that works for the business leaders, then develop profiles of segments’ functional and emotional needs, crafting value propositions. Then test the value propositions. Sales staff want to target all segments, but you need to focus on the segments that work the best for your market.
4. Develop and execute the go-to-market plan: “Where the rubber meets the road to drive the impact,” you need to build a go-to-market plan across critical customer touch points, each of which are owned by different groups within the cross functional team (e.g., IT, Legal, Financial). Develop and prioritize action items for the value proposition for the targeted segments, then review the action plan with the CEO and other senior leaders.
5. Measure and refine: “We create a dashboard for ongoing monitoring and put in place a communications plan to share the success and effect on key constituents.”

People are critical; “align your team so that everyone understands their role and what they are accountable for.” We use a responsibility matrix for managing a cross functional team of Sales, Risk, Cap. Markets, Ops, Legal, IT, Finance, HR and Marketing. As part of this, it is critical to give people regular updates with a status grid.

As a case study, the Transportation Finance Services division was literally saved by this process. “The TFS team was experienced, open minded, asked for help, had a customer-focused culture and a strong business need.” Financing trucking and transportation, this division was serving a hard-hit market: highly competitive industry, profitability issues, sales inefficiency and a lack of targeting. GE conducted a survey of 304 interviews with fleet decision makers, offering $150 to each for a 30-minute survey. Key concerns were fuel cost, the recession and a reduction in drivers’ hours of service.

To address concerns, GE developed four segments: Leaders, Streamliners, Aspirerers and the GI Generation. GE reviewed the customer needs, functional and emotional drivers around financing: “Yes, people in B2B settings do have emotions!” The largest market segments did not produce the biggest opportunity for TFS; GE profiled each segment by financial performance. GE hosted a series of focus groups to validate findings and inform the Go-To-Market plan, combining segment needs with value propositions.

The entire process took a year, but refocusing the salesforce on these segments resulted in profitable growth and saved the business. “The team at TFS trusts my team at Capital implicitly with all their questions about customers, giving us a steady supply of work. Nothing could feel better than saving a business!”