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Customers Rule! The Vovici Customer Experience Wheel

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Cato the Elder, a great Roman leader, was born into royalty but never felt that being a pampered noble was his true calling. Instead he became a victorious leader in the Roman Senate. Cato was known for his focus on the end goal and used to punctuate every speech to the ancient Roman Senate with the battle cry: "Carthage must be destroyed!"

Following unrelenting focus and communication, his injunctions became policy and the Roman legions successfully marched on Carthage.

Cato "won" because he did 5 simple things:

1. He decided upon a concrete objective.
2. He formulated a crystal clear communication to share his message.
3. He aimed his crystal clear communication at folks that could do exactly that for which he was calling.
4. He appended this crystal clear communication to every larger message he conveyed, to all of his speeches, and I presume, conversations.
5. He repeated his crystal clear communication, without fail, never questioning its merit.

Unfortunately I was not born into royalty, but consider my career in customer experience a true calling.  My end goal may be a bit more humble than that of Cato the Elder but it is no less passionate! I intend to improve life for customers everywhere by helping organizations create effective Voice of the Customer programs.  While my immediate mandate was to create the Vovici Voice of the Customer program, it was designed in a way that could be deployed in many other settings and organizations.

As part of a larger process, it became critical to create a visual image that would explain a complex customer ecosystem in a relatively short, compelling manner. Customer experience mapping comes in different forms, but the characteristics are similar. The customer experience map is a graphical representation of the customer journey. It turns the organization “outside in” and shows the customer perspective from the beginning, middle and end as they engage with a company to achieve their business goals. The range of tangible and quantitative interactions, triggers and touch points are shown in sequence. Some mapping extends the experience to include the intangible and qualitative motivations, frustrations and meanings.

As we developed the tool for our Voice of the Customer program we added a few more requirements. It needed to be flexible enough to use for different customer segments, representing the flow of customer interactions and indicating which were the most important to our customers. The final product would indicate how we were receiving customer feedback and where we were placing our “listening posts”. And, of course, the tool would show our progress to becoming a customer-centric organization.

Ultimately, the Vovici Customer Experience Wheel was born and became a great tool to present our Voice of the Customer program to various audiences. It has been valuable to describe how we built our program and the progress we are making towards customer-centricity. It is also helpful to describe the methodology that can be used for creating a Voice of the Customer program for other businesses. The 5 steps used in developing our program and the Vovici Customer Experience wheel include:

1. Segmentation of customer groups
2. Understanding customer life cycle of experiences
3. Creating listening posts
4. Identifying “Moments of Truth”
5. Monitoring progress towards customer-centricity  

With each article, blog and tweet (follow me at http://twitter.com/nporte) I will be examining each of these steps and sharing our approach and outcome. My hope is that by sharing the challenges we face and the victories we celebrate, we will help you achieve the end goal of creating the best Voice of the Customer program for your company. Remember to keep focused on the end goal and live and breathe the battle cry: "Customers Rule!"