7 Practical Tactics to Improve your Voice of the Customer Program

Today’s customer-centric environment does not suffer poor performers.  With millions of people just a tweet away, any one of your customers can draw attention on a massive scale to your business – for better or worse – in a matter of hours.

Several years ago, I was the president of a retail consumer electronics chain in the San Francisco Bay Area.  At the time, Yelp was the dominant social media platform for online customer reviews. While it was easy to feel victimized by customers who “didn’t get it” or were just “unreasonable,” when we were honest with ourselves it was clear that we were given plenty of chances to get it right before the customer took to social media.

The greatest challenge wasn’t fixing the problem, it was discovering that the problem existed in the first place.  All too often, we’d fail to identify and address the problem in a timely manner and the customer would become too frustrated to do anything but vent in public.  We had made the initial mistake and then compound it many times over by not fixing the problem, even when we were given the chance.

You may be wondering why this post delivers 7 Practical Tactics instead of a more conventional  number, like 5. The answer is that the first two are prerequisites for any Voice of the Customer program and focus on culture.  As they say, culture eats strategy for lunch, and without the right culture to support them, most initiatives fail.

Empower Your Team With Customer Satisfaction Autonomy

Allow your front-line agents to do what it takes to make your customers happy…without approval.  I can remember only a handful of times when one of our team members over-corrected and took care of a customer “too well.”  And even in those cases, we took a bad situation and turned it into something really good, at times creating an evangelist for our brand.

Reward Team Members for Customer Saves

Set up a program that incentivizes your team to retain customers.  This helps on a number of levels. First, it results in customer saves.  Those are good for business. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it establishes a culture of “mistakes are okay” and shifts focus towards listening to the customer and reacting to their feedback.

Now we’re on our way to creating culture around customer service, how about some clear directives?

Get Involved in the Customer Experience Community

Join an organization dedicated to customer experience, such as CXPA. These communities are filled with members who are passionate about improving customer experience and possess a wealth of great ideas.

Proactive vs. Reactive Voice of the Customer Programs

Decide whether your VoC program is proactive, reactive, or both.  What the heck does that mean? That’s why it’s in the article; many businesses don’t know.  Proactive VoC programs identify a need, target population, and data gathering method (surveys are common) and solicit or search for specific responses.  While these methods, when properly executed, have their place, they often miss customer segments and / or ask the wrong questions. And it can be prohibitively time and resource intensive to gather information in this manner.

Reactive solutions, on the other hand, gain insight from the totality of what customers are already saying, whenever and wherever they communicate with your business.  At SupporTrends, we relentlessly pursue this method, as we believe that the fastest, most accurate VoC data available comes directly from, well, the voice of the customer.

Meet Your Customers Where they Are

How many different ways do your customers communicate with you?  Do they call, chat, email, or all three? New data suggests they also want to text.  Make sure you know their preferred channels, and work with a Voice of the Customer suite that can monitor the most important ones.  The title of this post mentions “practical” ways to improve your VoC program, so it’s important to choose a solution that’s easy and fast to implement.

Look at the Whole Picture

Resist the temptation to solicit easy-to-process-but-limited feedback, such as “yes or no” questions.  Even dropdowns that permit a variety of answers to be chosen restrict the respondent to only what the person asking the question has thought of.  Unstructured, qualitative feedback gets your customers out of the box and invites feedback that your team would have never asked for.

Measure Your Results

It sounds obvious, but I’ve seen businesses that technically have a VoC program, but don’t do anything with the information gathered by it.  Don’t just check the box. Identify what matters to your business, be it CSAT, NPS, Yelp ratings, survey results, or almost anything else. Measure the results, hold people accountable, and evolve.

Oliver Rowen is the founder and CEO of SupporTrends, a VoC platform that uses AI to gain insights from customer feedback in all its forms. To learn more about how SupporTrends can support your Voice of the Customer program, please reach out to him at oliver.rowen@supportrends.com.