A Voice of the Customer program can be a powerful tool for your businesses—assuming you choose one that provides you with the information we list in this article. By way of providing a basic definition, a Voice of the Customer program gathers customer feedback and provides a system for feedback management across an organization. Different Voice of the Customer programs may measure customer satisfaction, retention, or recommendation rates, but we suggest that companies should measure and track customer engagement. PeopleMetrics’ research shows that customer engagement is the metric most closely tied to overall business success.
Customer feedback management is another major consideration when choosing a Voice of the Customer solution. As you can imagine, any statistically reliable Voice of the Customer program will return reams of data—far too much information for most companies to process, distribute, and use without additional help. An effective Voice of the Customer program should therefore include dashboards that your managers will be able to use to quickly assess and respond to customer feedback.
Below, we’ve listed a few more items you should expect to receive from a good Voice of the Customer program:
1) Baseline measurement of Customer Engagement.
A first step in any feedback management process is establishing current customer engagement levels. A Voice of the Customer program should begin with surveying your customer base to understand how engaged your customers are currently.
2) Ideas on how to improve customer processes.
Your Voice of the Customer program should give you a better understanding of what’s not working well for your customers. Whether you receive regular reports from your Voice of the Customer provider, or your vendor sets up an online dashboard where you can dig into customer feedback yourself, your VOC program should use customer feedback management to help you improve company processes to improve customer experience.
3) Better understanding of what customers want, for product development.
Along the same lines, your Voice of the Customer program should equip you with a better understanding of what your customers are looking for in new products.
4) Increase in Customer Engagement over time.
Any worthwhile Voice of the Customer program should improve your customer engagement scores over time.
5) Clear evidence of its Return on Investment.
We have seen how powerful well-managed, timely customer feedback can be in driving business results, and leaders in charge of the customer experience should never have to fake business results. Our own stories include:
- A B2B Telecommunications provider that unearthed 260 new business leads in 6 months of using the PeopleMetrics VOC Solution.
- A professional Services company that landed $100,000 of new business revenue when a VOC alert identified an untapped client need.
- A casual dining chain that found that each Recognition alert generated by the VOC technology was tied to an additional $9 in revenue, a focus on improving service and recognizing good employee work equated to $1 Million in additional revenue.
These are the basic outcomes of a Voice of the Customer program. Buyers looking for a VOC solution should expect their vendor to provide details for how each of these five results will be delivered. For an even more powerful enterprise feedback management system, look for manager action planning tools, real-time alerts to empower employees, and integration with CRM programs.
