Customer feedback provides a rich opportunity to transform comments into improved business processes and a better overall customer experience. Listening to, understanding, and acting on the VOC is critical to operational and organizational improvement. To that end, Forrester Research Customer Experience Analyst Adele Sage has assembled a top ten list of advice and best practices from VOC leaders to help guarantee your program’s success.
Executive support helps CX pros put key building blocks in place, such as adequate tools to collect and analyze data and processes to systematically act on it. How do you build support? Prove the value of the program by demonstrating tangible business value. Track the results of service recovery efforts to save unhappy customers and aggregate the results of improvement projects initiated by VOC-collected data.
Before you get overwhelmed with piles of data, develop a long-term approach for your VOC program that fits with your overall customer experience strategy. Design the program up front to scale as it grows. And don’t forget those execs who are supporting you; involve them in defining the strategy.
Getting the basics right has two meanings: First, set a solid foundation for your program based on the strategy you’ve articulated. Don’t rush to do anything fancy or cutting edge just because it’s exciting. Second, you need fix the basics first. Identify and fix the basic problems that are getting in customers’ ways before going above and beyond. If you do not fix your most pressing problems, more will just follow!
How you organize can set you up for success. A central, integrated team responsible for all the listening, analysis, reporting, and tracking can leverage a single set of tools and create process efficiencies.
Put your data and analysis in creative hands to produce results. In order to effectively communicate the voice of the customer broadly, make insights come to life via storytelling techniques (narratives, real customer examples, etc.). To really make your point, recruit leaders to kick off presentations as a show of top-down support.
It’s unlikely that a single person or single functional group can stand on its own. Anytime you’re tackling a problem, bring together folks from the line of business, customer experience experts, data analysts, and skilled communicators who can share the message effectively.
Employees have great ideas for customer experience improvements, like how to fix broken processes. At the same time, frontline employees are hearing feedback directly from customers and need a mechanism to share those stories with the VOC folks. You need to collect both types of employee insights to augment what you’re hearing from customers. Consider one-on-one meetings, suggestion boxes, or proposals for improvements to collect this information from employees.
Nominees are talking speed on three fronts: 1) Delivering quick insights to the right stakeholders for smarter decisions, 2) Following up quickly with unhappy customers, and 3) Recognizing employees quickly for customer-centric behavior. But of course, speed can’t trump quality.
Data is simultaneously powerful and dangerous. That’s why you need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your data and make sure that your sample reflects the larger customer population. It’s all about striking the right balance between data that’s accurate enough and what you need for program execution.
Don’t be afraid to make changes to processes or tools or to experiment with several prototypes. Push yourself and your colleagues to go outside your comfort zones. You may fail miserably — but, more likely, you may be pleasantly surprised by the results.
Remember that best practices are just a guideline of what works for the majority of individuals. As a VOC Executive, you know how your organization and employees conduct their work, so you may have to tailor these practices to suit your needs (or forego some entirely). Understand the VOC technology for call centers is always changing. If you’re not sure on the next step, contact KOVA Corp’s team of experts.
