Voice of the Customer (or “VOC”) is an umbrella term used to describe the process businesses use to capture feedback from customers on their experiences, expectations, and preferences. Our Voice of the Customer solution is a combination of our current-state assessment (or "Wows and Woes Study") and our CustomerMetrics solution (for ongoing customer feedback management).
For a primer on Voice of the Customer, you can also watch our video here.
A closed-loop feedback program gives companies the tools and guidance they need to follow up on each piece of customer feedback.
There are little and big feedback loops.
A little loop involves following up with an individual customer based upon his or her feedback and taking a specific action in response to that feedback.
A big loop involves looking across customer feedback in aggregate and identifying a common issue or opportunity to improve the customer experience. The closed loop, in this instance, is the identification of the issue, followed by a change or initiative to address that issue and improve the experience.
Generally speaking, quality CEM (Customer Experience Management) is an ongoing exercise in managing feedback as it comes in, addressing it, and closing loops.
A touchpoint is any point of contact between a customer and a company during which an exchange of information, service, or transaction occurs.
Some touchpoints are more crucial than others. A moment of truth is a touchpoint that could make or break the relationship between a customer and a business. It’s a touchpoint that leaves a lasting impression (positive or negative) on the customer’s opinion of the company.
Net Promoter Score is a popular measure of customer advocacy. Many organizations are adopting this overall metric to assess the health of their customer experience and relationships. The metric or score relies on customers' responses to a single survey item: “How likely is it that you would recommend [Company Name] to a friend or colleague?” The response scale is from “0,” not at all likely, to “10,” extremely likely. Customers are grouped into three different segments based upon their answers:
To get to the Net Promoter Score, one takes the % of Promoters and subtracts the % of Detractors.
Customer Satisfaction (or “CSAT”) is one of the earlier constructs used in customer opinion surveying. It usually relies on a single question such as, “Overall, how satisfied are you with the company’s products and services?”
Unfortunately, this metric is harder to tie to business results than some of the other metrics available. A customer may be satisfied but that does not mean that they will consider your business over the alternatives, spend more with you, or tell their friends and family about the experience.
Customer engagement is a measure of how much a customer is engaged with a company. PeopleMetrics independent research has demonstrated that organizations with higher levels of customer engagement have superior business performance, making it a much stronger metric than customer satisfaction.
Our Customer Engagement Index measures a customer’s behaviors and attitudes toward an organization using four key dimensions: Retention, Effort, Advocacy, and Passion.
In 2010, a new metric emerged from the desire for businesses to reduce complexity and difficulty in their customer relationships. The focus for many companies was making it easy for customers to do business with them. The customer effort question is: "How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?" The 5-point response scale goes from 1 (much less effort than expected) to 5 (much more effort than expected).
Voice of the Customer differs from market research in several important ways:
Text analytics is a technology that enables analysis of, and discovery of trends within, large volumes of qualitative or open-ended feedback. Text analytics software is good at reviewing text in large quantities (i.e., text mining) and assigning basic meaning or a positive/negative emotional tone (i.e., sentiment analysis).
Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a common element of any customer experience improvement program. Here are some benefits associated with VOC:
Not having a VOC program in place can leave you blind to the needs of your customers and any issues they’re having while interacting with your company. One of our clients, Karl Baker, SVP of Sales & Marketing at American Hotel Register said it best:
"As I look forward, it's increasingly important for any organization to seek a Voice of the Customer solution. The reality is, in the world we live in, information is power. And without adequate information about what is working, and potentially what isn't working, within each organization, it's putting the organization at risk. It's putting the organization at a real disadvantage."
The biggest risk is not getting started. Failure to listen to your customers, understand their needs, and drive relevant actions are huge risks to any organization. But once you decide to implement a program to improve customer experience, other risks include:
Simply put, it’s difficult to design a program that performs better than those offered by Voice of the Customer providers. Partnering with a customer experience consultant means:
Survey Monkey and similar surveying platforms work great if you know the questions to ask and want to gather data across customers or within a segment of customers. You can learn about who your customers are and what their preferences are, in aggregate, through such platforms.
The challenge is getting the information on individual customers to the right people to take action at the right time. Surveying platforms like Survey Monkey provide the ability to survey audiences, but they lack the customer experience management capabilities of formal Voice of the Customer software. They don't easily support closing the loop on customer feedback, and they rely on internal expertise in crafting the right questions and analyzing the responses.
It is wise to begin with a current-state assessment (like our Wows and Woes study) to determine the most impactful moments in your customers' journey or lifecycle with you./p>
If a primary study is not feasible, you can learn a lot from talking to frontline employees and managers about where they see the greatest pain points, based upon what they hear from customers. You can also search for insights in industry publications and other publicly available sources to help you prioritize. And finally, you can also consider Customer Journey Mapping as an initial step.
To determine where to focus your customer experience strategy, you should consider the following questions:
The answer depends upon the size of your company and the volume of customer feedback you expect. At the very least, you need the following:
The short answer is that the metric you choose should reflect the goals you have set for your business. Are you trying to improve customer satisfaction? Shooting for customer retention? Looking to deliver an effortless experience? Or are you residing firmly in the customer loyalty camp? Your chosen metric should be an indicator of your success toward stated goals.
The methods you use to capture customer feedback depend upon the type of business you are in and the quality and depth of customer contact information available.
We get this question from many of our clients. Perhaps a more relevant question is: “Are the customers who complete surveys representative of the customers we are trying to attract and retain?”
What we do know is that across clients, when one compares demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, geographic location (or in the B2B world, sector, company size, services used, etc.), the survey sample invariably looks like the actual population. Typically, the percentage of people who respond to the customer experience survey in a given category is within a margin of error of the proportion of this same category in the total customer population.
What we do not know is whether survey takers have different perceptions or experiences, as we cannot compare their responses to those who do not participate.
Over time, however, we have been able to examine spend and buying behavior among survey takers and non-survey takers across clients. In general, we have found that prospects and customers who take the time to give feedback tend to be more positive, more engaged, and more likely to be loyal over time than those who do not. Thus, there is much to be learned from non-responders and actions that can be taken to try to engage them.
For transactional surveys, we recommend inviting feedback from customers as close to the event as possible. Some of our clients send survey invitations "in moment" or minutes after a visit to a retail establishment. Others send daily. Others, for whom an experience extends into days or weeks, collect feedback at the point when the experience should have been complete.
For Wows and Woes or other deep-dive, current-state studies, we recommend an annual assessment from a random sample of customers or clients.
The response rate you should anticipate depends on your industry, the chosen methodology, and the quality of your customer information. In specialized, high-value transactions such as business-to-business or luxury experiences, you can expect response rates in the 30-60% range. In high-volume, low-value, more-commoditized businesses you may be looking at anywhere from 1% to 10%.
As noted previously, non-response can be indicative of a customer feeling less engaged or invested in your company and its services.
Initially, many of our clients use reminder emails to re-invite non-responders to participate. If they still do not reply, the customer or prospect is typically flagged as such. Sometimes special actions are taken, including personal outreach from an executive at the company—assuming the customer is of high enough value—or a special offer or other mechanism to try to re-engage the customer.
Analyzing non-responders in aggregate and over time is a key piece of information that can deliver extra insights and even predictive power.
At the very least, organizations should follow up on problems that remain unresolved. Any customer who notes an issue in a customer feedback survey that is not getting sufficient attention deserves a call or email from a company representative.
However, our recommendation is that every piece of feedback should drive a specific action related to its type. For example, a customer expressing a need for additional services should be contacted to discuss additional opportunities to support and help them. A customer expressing an exceptional experience and outstanding support from a company representative should be thanked for their feedback, and the individual receiving the kudos should be told. A customer with a suggestion for improvement should be acknowledged, and then that suggestion should be considered with others when priorities for improving customer experience or channel design are considered.
A transactional survey typically includes 6-12 questions.
Our in-depth, current-state assessment, called the "Wows and Woes study," typically includes 40-60 survey questions.
At the very minimum, we need the customer name and email address (or other contact information). However, common additional information includes demographic and spend/purchase behavior.
Both. We are believers in the power of qualitative, text-based feedback to help our clients uncover trends, understand what their customers really mean, and take targeted and specific action. Most of our surveys include at least one open-ended, comment-based question, although many have up to four different questions presented to customers depending upon their prior survey responses.
The exception to this is among our pharmaceutical clients, who for legal and compliance reasons, tend to prefer not to include open-ended, text-based questions.
Our system has a built in feature to automatically check the last date that a given customer received a survey invitation. We establish, with our clients, agreed rules for frequency of surveying. Best practice guidelines are to survey any given customer no more than once every three months.
They can, but they do not have to.
We can expire any customer feedback or customer engagement survey based on a specified time period since initiation was issued (as in number weeks or months). Or they can remain active for the term of our contract. We have clients using both methods.
Since an old experience can be stale and feedback less relevant, our preference is to expire survey invitations after a defined period of time. That said, many of clients do not take this approach, believing that any response they receive is valid, and a customer deserves to be heard no matter the timing.
Our surveys are not anonymous. That allows the right representative in the organization the opportunity to take action on the feedback at the individual customer or account level. Sometimes, we offer customers a choice, and they can select to have their feedback be shared anonymously.
Here are some high-level examples of client actions based on customer feedback:
You can also learn more about actions our clients have taken by watching these videos:
Our clients are benefiting from:
Yes. We are able to incorporate social customer feedback shared on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Open Table, Trip Advisor, and others.
Yes. We can talk specifics if you want them. just contact us.
Yes. And we're continously working on improving our mobile design.
Our goal is to guide our clients on their journey to customer centricity. We see our CustomerMetrics customer experience improvement program (our Voice of the Customer platform) as an essential part of that journey. The other services that we offer to help build customer-centric cultures can be found on Our Solutions page.
While we have proprietary technology to help our clients capture and act on feedback, we also have a team of data scientists who are able to take data you may already have from your key constituents and derive insights and direction from it. Their goal is to provide you with the One Thing you need to focus on next for the greatest return on your customer centricity goals.
Our purpose is to help companies on their journey to customer centricity. Companies that put customers at the heart of their business are more successful, and their employees and customers also win. We care deeply about the relationships between employees, organizations, customers, and business results—and we’ve focused on these relationships since our inception in 2001.
You can learn more about us by jumping to our Why We’re Different page.
Programs range from a minimum of $30,000 per annum up to $1,000,000+ for our largest, most-customized partnerships.
The typical ongoing Voice of the Customer program for a mid-sized business is $90,000 per annum. This includes the design and administration of ongoing transactional surveys, real-time alerts, access to your online PeopleMetrics dashboards and data analysis tools. It also includes regular push reports of key metrics and insights, text analytics on all open-ended data (assuming sufficient volume), a dedicated CX Manager, and the support of an analyst who will help you identify hidden insights in your customer feedback.
