Voice of the Customer Programs from Scratch
Posted by Vovici Blog on Thu, Feb 17, 2011
Many companies are started by founders with a passionate idea of how to meet an unmet customer need. Those founders who were wrong soon fail and get a job. Those founders who were right see their company grow steadily over the years or take off rapidly, and they attribute their success to their intuitive understanding of the customer!
As a result, you get quite large companies that have never had a customer insight department or market research group. Their founder knew best. Southwest’s MR department is only a few years old, for instance; Microsoft didn’t have a central research department for its first 30 years in business. In recent weeks, we’ve been talking to major brands who ran Super Bowl commercials but are only now thinking of running Voice of the Customer programs.
So don’t be embarrassed if today your customer feedback program consists of an annual relationship survey that you don’t act on. You’re in good company. And you’re in a good company that wants to be better.
Where to start?
- Begin by analyzing that relationship survey to find themes for where you need to serve customers better. Apply a number of different loyalty segmentations to see which best reflects your customers.
- Reach out to other customer listening posts, including social media comments, to supplement the survey and learn about issues you didn’t ask about.
- Once you’ve built an understanding of key customer problems, identify those touch points that need to be monitored and improved. Rollout transactional surveys to assist in monitoring these. Set up alerts so that you can attempt service recovery with dissatisfied customers.
- Over time, expand your customer listening efforts to give you “surround sound” listening.
- Cycle back: listen, interpret, react and monitor to power up the continuous effort that will enable your organization to truly act on Voice of the Customer programs.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of practices to consider – to learn more, download our white paper, “The Best Practices of Customer Loyalty Leaders” or attend our free afternoon session, “The Voice of the Customer Best Practices Workshop” in Waltham, Massachusetts on March 10. A few weeks ago I ran the same workshop in the United Kingdom, and we had people fly in from Germany and Italy just to attend; some of the comments included “gave me a new way to think about our customers”, “helped me figure out what we need to do next” and “did you notice Jeffrey bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. X?” Ahem.
Where to start? The important thing, of course, is to start.