Keep your fingers on the customer's pulse and react accordingly
C-CHANGE GROWTH DRIVERS
- Organisations should put in place a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme to find out what their customers really think about their brand, products and services. This is often the starting point when it comes to driving customer-led growth.
- Embed your VoC programme into your company's culture. The VoC programme is not a one-off, single-strand activity. Instead, it should be considered as a continuous customer listening channel. VoC programmes take on board feedback from multiple data and knowledge sources, multiple customer segment groups and personas, and across many regions (national or international).
- Companies should avoid the classic VoC pitfalls â for example, by only running a net promoter system (NPS) survey once a year and calling it âVoCâ or just doing it to tick the box of listening to customers. This can produce completely skewed results. Often in such a scenario, the NPS survey delivers invalid responses that ultimately lead to, or simply just validate, poor business decisions. Instead, the VoC programme should be authentic and probe for deeper meaning and root causes.
- Create an outcome-oriented VoC team. Once the continuous customer listening channel has been firmly established, organisations should be prepared to drive actions and improvements on a regular and constant business. Some improvements can be executed quickly and have an immediate positive impact on Customer Experience (CX). Other changes are cross-functional and more medium term â nevertheless, they must be planned and actioned over time.
THE ULTIMATE GOAL: A CULTURE OF CONTINUOUS CUSTOMER FEEDBACK AND APPROPRIATE ACTION
It is often said that the key to a successful marriage, a successful business partnership, or indeed any successful work relationship, is communication. And how many times have we heard employee feedback saying, âwe need to communicate betterâ? It is like a broken record. The key point is that successful communication generally entails two-way dialogue between interlocutors and comprises both verbal and non-verbal forms. The value of listening cannot be overemphasised. Many companies spend so much time and effort telling the world about themselves that they forget how important it is to listen to their customers and, most importantly, to act upon it. However, there are caveats to this concept. First, companies should listen to their customers in the right way â that is, with the intent to both truly understand (and not to gloss over or trivialise) the customer's feedback and to correctly represent it when articulating the consequent actions. Second, everything the customer says should be acknowledged, but not necessarily acted upon. It really depends on who you ask in the customer's organisation, when you ask the person and how you ask it. Hence, it is important to discern and prioritise feedback from customers. Finally, listening to customers should be an integral part of the culture of any organisation. Customer feedback, from any relevant source, should be constantly digested, prioritised and turned into appropriate actions.
Although the C-change growth engine does not prescribe addressing each component in a sequential, step-by-step fashion, one could argue that all good decisions start by listening to what the customer says, and acting accordingly. This is a good, old-fashioned principle that has always helped great companies deliver on their promise of retaining, delighting and growing their customer base. When Finastra, one of the world's largest fintechs, launched its award-winning customer engagement programme, âFinastra Connectâ, it analysed customer feedback from a plethora of sources to bucket customers' concerns into key areas of company improvement. All of the improvement areas could be addressed by involving its customers in the Finastra Connect programme offerings.
CX leader Claire Sporton sums up the value of VoC information as follows: âThe Voice of the Customer is core to customer experience efforts and one of the best sources of business intelligence. However, it cannot be the only voice. Employees, suppliers, partners and others all have important perspectives on the experience you offer. Also, other data from, for example, operational and financial sources add colour and context.â
This last point links in very well to the other aspects of the C-change growth engine â in other words, VoC is an essential part of driving transformation in the Customer Economy. It becomes potent when combined with intelligence from other sources such as employees (see the Culture chapter) and operational data (see the Technology and Success chapters).
WHAT IS VOC?
The VoC C-change driver is the essential fuel to power all customer-led decisions of a company. Also, it helps inform the company culture and employee experience. We all know that happy employees mean happy customers, but customer feedback is key to understanding what the problems and issues are in the first place.
According to Confirmit, the VoC and CX platform provider: âVoice of the Customer refers to the way an organisation collects customer feedback, analyzes the data, distributes it to the right people and takes action on these insights in order to generate financial benefits. Voice of the Customer programmes aim to gather and analyse customer insights, and enable you to take action in order to improve customer experience and deliver positive business outcomes to your organisation.â
The insightsâactionsâresults flow is a clear and simple way of understanding the principle of VoC. Jeanne Bliss, author of the Chief Customer Officer book series, builds on this theme in the chapter âBuild a Customer Listening Pathâ. She suggests that customer feedback comes from multiple sources, throughout the customer journey.
A FREQUENT REALITY: AN ANNUAL NET PROMOTER SYSTEM (NPS) SURVEY THAT MERELY TICKS THE âCUSTOMER FEEDBACKâ BOX
When Fred Reichheld, Satmetrix and Bain launched the NPS in 2003, it quickly became the industry standard tool for measuring customer satisfaction and customer feedback. Today, NPS is deployed universally, in some shape or form, across all industries, and often, is heralded as proof that the company is indeed listening to the voice of its customers. However, rarely are companies using NPS as it was intended. For example, organisations may celebrate their high NPS scores or score improvements without truly understanding what the scores mean. Alternatively, they might solely rely on the âUltimate Questionâ, that is, âwhat is your likelihood to recommend?â as sufficient, without any attempt to understand the true meaning or context behind the customer scores. They might even be summarising customer feedback from the limited (often statistically insignificant) subset of customer contacts that bothered to respond to the survey. Worse case, no actions are taken as a result of customer feedback, or the wrong decisions are made.
The debate still rages on today â is NPS really fit for purpose in the Customer Economy? Suffice it to say, NPS only receives the level of attention it does because there is no other measure of customer satisfaction that is as universally accepted across all industry sectors and geographies. Also, NPS is easy to calculate by simply subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters (those who rate 0â6 from those who rate 9â10). Companies with an NPS score of 0 or less generally need improvement; scores between 0 and 30 are good, with some room for improvement, scores between 30 and 70 are great; and anything over 70 is outstanding.
NPS data can be useful, for example, when looking at customer satisfaction trends over time, or even when comparing one company's NPS scores against its competitors. However, it is highly subjective, and can be very time sensitive (e.g. people are much happier with their laptop when it works than when it breaks down). Also, in the worst case, NPS can be easily gamed by inte...
