Voice of the Customer Program: Empower your employees and improve your business.

Some time ago you implemented a Voice of the Customer program. The customer feedback started coming in, and each month the score goes onto the dashboard which gets reported to management. The analysts within the Customer Experience team analyse the data and create a list of things that need fixing, you prioritise the list and develop a range of initiatives. A month later, you go through the process again.

It’s great that your scores are getting management visibility and that you’re improving the organisation’s CX by basing it on explicit customer needs, but if your VOC data stays within the CX team, I’m sorry to say you’re doing CX management wrong for at least a couple of reasons.

Firstly, everyone knows intuitively that customer feedback should be a concern for everybody in the entire organisation but practically involving the entire business in CX and VOC can be very difficult to do at scale.

In the past, I’ve held brainstorming sessions where I invited key internal stakeholders into a room, played them the feedback, and then as a group we tried to understand the feedback and come up with ideas to address the issues. More heads are always better than one in these situations and the diversity of thought always led to better solutions being developed.

But while these brainstorming sessions were valuable, because I was taking a large amount of time from peoples’ calendars, they only happened a couple of times a year. In my work with CentraCX I’ve found that using a capable VOC platform means that these sessions can take place virtually every single day. They key benefit of CentraCX is that it brings people together to collaborate around customer feedback turning customer feedback management into an everyday operational process.

Once engaging with customer feedback is embedded in your organisation you will find another unexpected benefit: your improvement initiatives will be more successful as your employee’s ability to adopt to change will significantly improve.?The more your employees understand the organisation’s need to respond to customer feedback and the more they are engaged in creating the solutions, and the easier and faster you will find it to institute change.

The second reason you’re doing CX management wrong is: customer feedback can be used for so much more than just development of CX improvement initiatives. It’s like buying a smartphone and only using it to make calls. There’s so much value you’re missing out on!

Beyond business reporting and process/product improvement, there are other use cases for customer feedback across a business that increase its value to organisation incrementally.

Employee Engagement

The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer so it follows that everybody within a business is there to contribute to customer outcomes. Whether they work on the frontline or not, everybody within your organisation wants feedback to understand how their areas of responsibility are affecting customers; they want to hear what customers are thinking and feeling.

By regularly communicating relevant customer feedback verbatims, you’ll engage the organisation and help to make the company more customer centric - a strategic goal of every good CX manager and one of the reasons your role was created in the first place. And driving change off the back of customer feedback is incredibly empowering!

Where the feedback is positive about an employee, publish that person’s name. Let them bathe in the warm glow of the recognition that they’ve done a good job. If the feedback is negative and uses employee names, I’d strongly advise not sharing it organisation-wide unless you can remove the reference to individual employees for fear of shaming them which does nothing to advance your cause.

Retention, Complaints & Compliance

We often think about surveys as providing customer insights to large groups of people internally, but the survey process can provide a very powerful mechanism for actively soliciting and managing individual customer complaints.?In today’s digital age, each individual customer has the power to set off an avalanche of negativity about a brand simply because of one poor experience. Whether it’s running off to regulators, ombudsmen or even social media it only takes one unhappy customer, who hasn’t had an opportunity to have their complaint addressed, to start a series of events that can have very serious consequences. Using surveys as an integral part of your complaint management process simply makes sense.

If customer feedback never leaves the CX department and all you’re using it for is business reporting and/or to drive product or process improvements, you’re only getting a fraction of the value it offers. Let the customer’s voice ring out within the four walls of your organisation to engage and empower your fellow employees and improve your business.

?