Taking strategic action on Voice of the Customer survey results is integral to achieving customer experience transformation. Whether or not you choose to outsource this work, there are six steps you should follow to develop clear actions resulting from your customer feedback insights.
1. Gather the Team
Taking strategic actions requires the assistance of decision makers. Getting all of these people in one room can be challenging, but will be integral to successfully making changes based on the insights you have. Selecting team members that are engaged and passionate about the customer experience is key.
2. Review Feedback Results
Begin your meeting with an overview of customer feedback results including an introduction to the recommended areas for focus and improvement. It is important to limit the team to no more than three focus areas, as too many priorities will lead to diluted focus. Preparing an infographic with this core information can be a powerful tool in guiding the discussion and keeping everyone focused
3. Define Three Focus Areas
Get your team’s reaction to the focus areas. Spend time understanding what the team thinks these mean to your customers and explain why focusing on these areas is a strategic priority. Use touchpoint mapping to identify what aspects of the customer journey affect the three focus areas most.
4. Visualize Your Success
A simple exercise to help your team focus on what success will look like is to have everyone think about the words, adjectives, and phrases that the customers who love you most would use to describe the experience you deliver. Focusing on these words can be a valuable tool in understanding what a great experience is from the perspective of your customer.
5. Generate Solutions & Priorities
Now that everyone is clear on where you want to end up it’s time to start talking about how to get there. Mind-mapping exercises can be used to uncover existing barriers that are preventing success. Following this, brainstorming exercises to generate solutions to overcome the barriers are a useful next step. Once a complete list of ideas has been created, work with your team to categorize all of the suggestions on a 2x2 grid showing Ease of Implementation vs. Impact on the Customer Experience. The output of this exercise will clearly highlight what actions will bring the greatest results.
6. Build the Plan
Now that everyone is clear on what is most important you can begin building an customer experience improvement strategy. Using the 2x2 grid select the most important, impactful activities – either those that are “quick wins” or those that may take longer to implement. List all of the steps required to achieve your goal and assign ownership for each step to a named person. Supporting resources should also be identified (i.e., people, technology, etc.). Set clear milestones and completion dates. Finally, defining success metrics for each activity will be your last step in ensuring that when the team reconvenes everyone can provide updates on progress.
~Janessa Lantz
