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The Voice of the Customer guide

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guides The Voice of the Customer Guide Foreword

1. Voice of the Customer overview – critical but confusing? 2. How to build a VoC strategy 3. How to design a VoC programme 4. How to build an IT architecture to support VoC 5. How to capture the Voice of the Customer through your staff 6.

Proving VoC’s value

The Voice of the Customer Guide

Foreword.

Michelle de Haaff, Vice President of Marketing, Medallia

Welcome to MyCustomer.com’s dedicated guide to the field of the Voice of the Customer. This piece brings together insight, expertise and advice from extensive interviews with some of the world’s thought-leaders in customer experience management. The practice of capturing and acting on the Voice of the Customer is a topic that represents the very life-blood of customer relationship management and can create competitive advantage and drive innovation. Providing the data and insights to organisations that facilitate customer-centricity and ultimately customer loyalty can transform businesses. With the proliferation of interaction channels, and the emergence of social media, there is more customer feedback at our disposal than ever before. Yet this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the more data at our disposal, the better for steering business decisions and improving customer experience. But on the other hand, the soaring volumes of data makes it increasingly difficult to identify the most important data and steer it to the most appropriate parts of organisations in a timely and effective manner. For this reason, we hope this guide will provide you and your business with some valuable clarity, exploring the strategies, technologies and processes The Voice of the Customer Guide

that will enable you to get a grasp on customer feedback and ensure you are turning it to your full advantage. In the following chapters, we’ll walk you through the world of the Voice of the Customer, step by step – from building a strategy to designing a programme and closed-loop processes through to building the IT infrastructure required. We’ll also examine real world examples from some of the world’s biggest retailers. But first up, we’re going to examine the Voice of the Customer marketplace, providing an overview of the main pain points that organisations can face. I hope you’ll find this guide to be the perfect starting point for your Voice of the Customer journey.

The Voice of the Customer Guide

Chapter 1.

Voice of the Customer overview – critical but confusing? Neil Davey, editor, MyCustomer.com Take a moment to breathe a big sigh, because we’ve arguably reached a pivotal moment in customer experience management – interest in listening to the customer is peaking at precisely the time that we are witnessing an unprecedented explosion in the volume of feedback data available to us. OK, breathe again - because while the battle has been won, the war is far from over.

The likes of Gartner are forecasting that Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs will be one of the most significant strategic investments over the next five years, and the VoC market is set for annual growth rate of over 30%. But while this may indeed come to pass, it is also accepted that VoC remains an immature market. In short – a lot of money could be wasted in the coming years. “VoC is now being viewed as a must-have strategy,” says Jim Davies, research director at Gartner. “From a corporate perspective, the focus on understanding customers by listening to them and using that understanding to market differently, sell differently, support differently, redesign processes and change the product, is becoming more and more important. It is a key part of customer experience management and a lot of companies are now realising they can’t The Voice of the Customer Guide

really differentiate by traditional means, but really understanding the customer can help them to do that.” But he agrees there is a problem. “What businesses would really like is a nice out-of-the-box mature market that they can go and pick the technology from. But it is not there. So this puts organisations in a difficult situation because they see the value of VoC, but it is not an easy market to go out and buy the software from. And they are still going out and investing regardless, which is why most vendors in this space are growing quite rapidly.”

Into the wilderness

So what do businesses need to know about the VoC marketplace before they venture out into the wilderness? Well, from a vendor landscape point of view it is very “disjointed and fragmented,” says Davies. When you look at VoC, you are not just looking at the classic survey vendors, you are looking at social media monitoring, speech analytics, web analytics, and all sorts of different vendors that fall under the umbrella of Voice of the Customer. And while there is growing understanding about VoC from the buyer side, the vendors themselves are not always making things easier for businesses. Davies continues: “There is standardisation in terms of what the acronym means whereas in the past people used it many different ways. If you say to someone ‘Have you got a VoC programme’, they know you are asking ‘Are you doing cross-channel feedback

The Voice of the Customer Guide

consolidation’ rather than just surveys. So this awareness around what VoC is all about is good. But the vendors are still labelling themselves VoC, even if they can’t necessarily deliver against it.” He adds: “It’s one of those acronyms that people try to latch onto – it is a cool acronym, like CEM [customer experience management], and because of that, a lot of vendors are jumping on the bandwagon.” And there’s a further reason to be wary. A cursory glance at last year’s Gartner Hype Cycle reveals the immaturity of some of the solutions. As noted by Mike McMaster in a post on MyCustomer.com at the time of the Hype Cycle launch last year, a lot of the exciting technologies that are part of VoC programmes are “firmly on the early stages of their Hype Cycle – moving briskly towards their Trough of Disillusionment.” Indeed, while speech recognition is on the edge of the Plateau of Profitability and most mobile communications (text, voice, etc) are so well established that they’re not even part of the Hype any more, audio mining, speech analytics and social analytics are all on their way down into the Trough, and crowdsourcing and automatic content recognition haven’t even hit the first peak yet. “There’s a lot of concern that the buzz associated with these technologies is just hype,” agrees Davies. “In particular speech analytics, where there’s a lot of buzz about how it can uncover all sorts of great insights and provide value. The reality is that yes it does, but it isn’t necessarily going to be as massive as we’re led to believe. And it’s also one of those The Voice of the Customer Guide

technologies that isn’t plug-and-play – it needs a lot of care and ongoing effort to get the most out of it.” However, he adds: “But the thing about VoC is that if you’re taking all of them together, you pick the best bits from each. Speech is maybe only 50% accurate in terms of what it uncovers, but if you combine that with a survey and a tweet then you start to uncover those insights.”

Getting a joined-up view

This is a crucial point. For businesses to get a joined-up view of the customer voice, they need to incorporate feedback not just from a single source, but from a range of channels. But with no single out-of-the-box product that supports all channels, businesses are forced to deploy several solutions and attempt to integrate the different feeds and formats of data.

For businesses to get a joined-up view of the customer voice, they need to incorporate feedback not just from a single source, but from a range of channels. Traditionally, this has not been straightforward. But the good news is that the vendors are acknowledging the need to integrate with data sets

The Voice of the Customer Guide

from other solutions, and are working to support these efforts.

“Lots of different vendors capture a perspective of the customer voice, whether that’s speech analytics or social media monitoring or a traditional survey. But there is great awareness that this isn’t a holistic view” “Lots of different vendors capture a perspective of the customer voice, whether that’s speech analytics or social media monitoring or a traditional survey. But there is great awareness that this isn’t a holistic view,” says Davies. “Businesses have been asking the vendors if they can combine data with other data sets, feeding it into their system to put the two together. So vendors have been working for the last couple of years to try and change their data architectures so that it is more suitable for having other data. And it has also made the vendors think a bit about whether they can be more strategically positioned, maybe capturing other types of data. “Ultimately, if they started life as a survey vendor, they’re still a survey vendor; if they started life as a speech analytics vendor, they’re still that. But the way that they’re architected now, they are much more The Voice of the Customer Guide

suitable for importing other sets of data. They have still got a long way to go, but they are starting to view themselves as master data management (MDM) vendors, but obviously more associated with pure feedback data than the broader CRM type data.” Forrester analyst Adele Sage also emphasises the role of enterprise feedback management (EFM) platforms – also known as customer feedback management (CFM) – which aim to provide a central way to organise all the feedback that comes in, and integrate it with other internal data. “Often the customer feedback management platforms are the central enabler, as well as providing reporting and action management around service recovery, complaint management and things like that,” she explains. “The platform enables you to bring together all these different kinds of data, organising the stuff that’s coming from other vendors – although sometimes they do have their own text analytics or speech analytics or social media monitoring, and other times they will partner with vendors that offer those things.”

“The ideal of the CFM vendor playing nicely with everything that you already have” is the stuff of fantasy.” But even then, Sage warns that the “ideal of the CFM vendor playing nicely with everything that you already

The Voice of the Customer Guide

have” is the stuff of fantasy. “The reality is that the programme technologies are very messy, especially when you are coming from siloed VoC teams into a centralised team. The digital team may be using one set of vendors and the call centre is using another set of vendors and to get it all to actually fall into a single vendor space perfectly is not so easy. And so the reality in most companies is much messier than the idea of putting in a CFM platform and everything being perfect.”

Getting your house in order

Indeed, tackling the challenges of creating a joined- up solution from the vendor side is ultimately irrelevant if feedback silos exist within your business. And this remains a very common problem. There are usually any number of VoC technologies already within an organisation with different departments each deploying a solution and collecting data that is relevant to them from a particular channel for analysis. And in most cases these technologies – and departments – are siloed, so that while individual value is being accrued from these projects, the joined-up view is going begging. It represents yet another layer of fragmentation for the already confusing VoC market.

The Voice of the Customer Guide

“A lot of times the messiness comes from the combination of the ways in which the data is organised internally versus the capability of the vendor” “A lot of times the messiness comes from the combination of the ways in which the data is organised internally versus the capability of the vendor,” continues Sage. “The CFM vendors are very capable of bringing together the data sources and providing a centralised hub, it is just messy to actually get the data from the different parts and keep track of it and work out who owns what and actually tying it in.” Both Sage and Davies say the first thing they recommend is for companies to do an audit of all the different data sources that they have – “What are the vendors that we’re using; what kind of data are we getting from those vendors; how do those vendors communicate; have they got the potential to communicate with our centralised data hub,” says Sage. Davies adds: “It is not just a case of auditing what they are but also can you access the data – because in some big corporations there is quite a reluctance in some departments to share their data with other departments, which you have to overcome. But taking stock of where you are now is the starting point.” The Voice of the Customer Guide

Given the fact that VoC is becoming such a priority, it is unsurprising that Davies expects the issue of tackling the tricky VoC marketplace to become more pressing as the year progresses. He has the following advice for organisations, once they have got their own house in order.

“So it’s important to have a sense of where a vendor is going – just as important as knowing where it is at now – because at the moment it is like betting on a horse.” “Once you’ve done the foundation work, you need to choose between the dozens of vendors out there who say they can do it. The problem is there isn’t really anybody who is 100% perfect in every aspect, so it is really going to be a case of most companies needing to have a hybrid approach where they need more than one VoC vendor. Therefore, it is a case of working out integration and data architecture and really understanding the roadmaps as well, because they are all changing rapidly with acquisitions and so on. So it’s important to have a sense of where a vendor is going – just as important as knowing where it is at now – because at the moment it is like betting on a horse.”

The Voice of the Customer Guide

Chapter 2.

How to build a VoC strategy Neil Davey, editor, MyCustomer.com The chances are that your business has a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme in place. In fact, it is likely that you have several. Many organisations these days have multiple teams around the business capturing feedback across different channels to support their separate departmental goals. But more often than not, this valuable insight never leaves the department so that while the individual teams benefit, the joined-up view of the customer voice that could be so important to the organisation as a whole goes begging. This is the difference between having a series of siloed tactical VoC programmes, and having an overarching VoC strategy. And those organisations that act fast to tie their disparate programmes together into a broad strategy can enjoy considerable benefit. “A well-planned, strategic VoC programme drives change across the organisation – a tactical approach will not,” explains Karine Del Moro, VP of marketing at Confirmit. “For example, a programme that gathers feedback from customers at a single touchpoint, will enable a business to resolve some customer issues; e.g. resolve customer dissatisfaction at an individual level, or help to generate referrals. But those benefits will be limited to a very narrow part of the business. The Voice of the Customer Guide

Ultimately, tactical programmes tend to plateau quite quickly, which means that interest wanes and it becomes another legacy operation that achieves much less than promised. “Building a strategic VoC programme with goals and measures ensures that businesses can define what success looks like. Without this, it’s very hard to build a long-term outlook and the programme is likely to be abandoned after the initial quick wins are over. A strategic programme will allow companies to gain a single view of the customer, use root-cause analysis to re-engineer processes and drive change across the board. All the tactical benefits are there too, but the programme is much more ingrained within the business and is ultimately helping to create a customer-centric culture that fosters strong customer experiences and drives change.”

“It is fundamental that the VoC programme has a clear, focused strategy that is directly aligned to the organisation’s commercial goals” Keith Schorah, founder of Syngro, adds: “It is fundamental that the VoC programme has a clear, focused strategy that is directly aligned to the organisation’s commercial goals and is designed to permeate all aspects of the business; every business unit, every function, segment and every management

The Voice of the Customer Guide

level. If it doesn’t, the VoC programme’s success will be limited and most likely temporary.” Whether building a VoC programme from the ground up, or connecting a series of pre-existing disparate programmes into a strategic framework, there are a number of initial tasks that organisations need to execute to have the foundations in place for the Voice of the Customer strategy.

Perform a VoC audit

With any number of VoC programmes already in place within the organisation, gathering feedback across multiple channels using any number of different VoC systems, it is important to first get a grasp of exactly what the state of play is across the entire business. “The very first thing that I recommend to companies is to do an audit of all the data sources that they have, the vendors that they’re using, the kinds of data that they are getting from those vendors, and how those vendors communicate,” says Forrester analyst Adele Sage. Jim Davies, research director at Gartner, adds: “The chances are you have got some great tools already in play, so you’re capturing some great feedback but you’re just not aware of it. However, it’s not just a case of auditing what they are but also whether you can access that data because you often find in big corporations that there is quite a reluctance in some departments to share their data with other departments. So taking stock of where you are now is definitely the starting point.”

The Voice of the Customer Guide

Get buy-in from the executive team

This is crucial to ensure not only budget but also involvement from stakeholders across the business. “There is no point collating VoC data if no one knows it or believes in it and there is no cross-silo control and dissemination,” says Steven Walden of Beyond Philosophy. Without at least one executive sponsor, VoC strategies can become special-interest projects that aren’t able to expand and evolve as they need to. Schorah recommends going straight to the top: “The most successful VoC programs are owned by the CEO, who plays an instrumental part in communicating the importance of customer feedback to both employees and customers alike.” Fuelled by reporting customer satisfaction to the markets and the increasing maturity of customer experience, the ultimate ownership of the VoC programme has risen sharply amongst CEOs (31%) as they recognise its ability to cement the customer base and identify both risk and increased revenue streams.

“the ultimate ownership of the VoC programme has risen sharply amongst CEOs (31%)” Schorah continues: “It is essential that the senior execs are engaged to ensure the VoC strategy is directly aligned to the overall business strategy. Commercially, this will clearly link the financial goals which the VoC program must contribute to and embed The Voice of the Customer Guide

from its inception a clear picture of success in terms of customer retention, satisfaction, new customer acquisition and average account revenues driven by new cross and up-selling.” But it is not just the boardroom that needs persuading. Schorah adds: “Particularly in large international organisations, the entire business needs to buy into the VoC program. Just too many VoC programs fail to engage with all business units within a group. Their inability to build the business case and win over the business unit budget holders is a guaranteed recipe for failure. Engage with the stakeholders from across the business. Spend the time and energy to establish absolute clarity over what the VoC programme needs to produce to support the business goals both for a group level and realistically how it can deliver true value to each of the units. Underestimate the importance of this at your peril.”

“A mature VoC programme should deliver value to every part of the company and each department should be empowered to provide input to keep it relevant and effective.” Del Moro says: “A mature VoC programme should deliver value to every part of the company and each department should be empowered to provide input to keep it relevant and effective.” The Voice of the Customer Guide

Setting goals and metrics

“You have to answer the question ‘What is the point – why are we looking at VoC information, what will it be used for?” says Walden. “If it’s just measuring for measuring’s sake and not taken into action then seriously don’t do it.” A strategy is just words if there are no metrics. And Schorah says that at its heart, the VoC strategy must be measured against clear and relevant metrics. “It is imperative that these metrics go beyond the standard customer satisfaction measures (NPS, CES, RPi etc), the VoC strategy must include commercial measures such as average customer spend, share of wallet, account profitability and so on. Without inclusion of these financial elements the VoC program will struggle to create resonance and drive true cultural change in the business.” He continues: “Reporting progress against the strategy must be built into the management rhythm of every part of the business. Over time it will permeate into the DNA of the business and smooth the way for the senior management to migrate the bonus payments from a profitability focus to aligning with customer satisfaction. This has to be planned and part of an agreed and understood evolution to becoming customer-centric.” Not only is setting goals the only way to measure the success of a VoC programme but can also help to achieve that all-important senior support. “Businesses need to look for tangible goals, rather than ‘fluffy’ aims - “’Better customer experiences’ is not enough,”

The Voice of the Customer Guide

emphasises Del Moro. “It’s important to try to quantify wherever possible, using metrics such as NPS and customer satisfaction scores. In addition, businesses should seek financial targets. VoC programmes can generate new revenue, reduce cost of sale, decrease costs of poor processes and increase customer retention, so it’s important to find a way to set goals around these areas.” BUSINESS INTERACTION WITH CUSTOMERS Contact centre

Instore Mobile

Customer

Social media Online

Diagram 1: H ow businesses interact with their customers through multiple channels

Customer journey mapping

“Most businesses now interact with their customers through multiple channels (online, in store, through contact centres, social media and mobile, for example), so developing a clear view of the customer journey is not necessarily a simple task,” says Del Moro. “VoC specialists must take some time The Voice of the Customer Guide

to really understand how customers experience their company, and put the processes and channels in place to monitor, measure and report on those experiences at all the key touchpoints.”

“Encourage customer immersion techniques as well, get people from around the organisation to themselves experience being a customer or going out and about visiting customers.” Walden adds: “Encourage customer immersion techniques as well, get people from around the organisation to themselves experience being a customer or going out and about visiting customers. Think also about the internal problems in the company that prevent customer-centricity - we often find that these activities should be controlled by a central cross-silo customer experience department critically visible at board level and set to a target. Finally, we encourage companies to go beyond defining the ‘as is’ stage and engage in planning for what ‘to be’ as a redesign would look like and create pilot activities for VoC feedback.”

The Voice of the Customer Guide

So what should a VoC strategy contain? While an actionable strategy depends on your specific business, broadly speaking there is a number of components that should be considered: •

nsure an effective strategic objective: E “There is no point collating VoC data if the objective is not substantive - i.e. to action change,” Walden notes. Schorah adds: “The VoC strategy must be aligned to supporting the organisation’s business goals. It must reflect the requirements of the respective stakeholders so that they can clearly see how the program will directly contribute to their unit and conversely how they will play their own part in the programme.”

•

nsure that there is an ‘action loop’: E There is no point collating VoC if there is no pilot activity planned - i.e. some actions will output.

•

nsure you’re not ripped off: E Walden says: “With so many software vendors out there, it is a warning. If you can get what you need simply and effectively do so. Social media data may sound attractive but as a ‘vendor of bog- standard product X’ if your customers hardly ever say anything about you, beware of wasting your money. Likewise, beware of fancy measurement systems, simple satisfaction often suffices. Having a sceptic on board actually helps cut through the sales BS.”

•

nsure you embed creative strategies: E Presumably you want to do something The Voice of the Customer Guide

with the data, so ideation is an important addition. “Don’t just assume the answer to the next steps in your company will come from quants or qual. Use research to explore new ideas and possibilities in a continuous improvement loop, encourage ideas and pilot change,” Walden notes. “Demonstrate the ‘to be state’ you are aiming for. Note the focus on ‘implemented activity’. •

ollate VoC: Now collect data. “Our advice C would be of a mixed quantitative, qualitative nature with effective and simple reporting to all in the company – make it exciting!” says Walden.

“The VoC strategy encompass not only the technical aspects of implementing a programme across differing channels and touch points but it must embrace a coherent change plan for front-line staff which enables and empowers them to respond directly to customer feedback,” says Schorah. “All too often VoC strategies are hampered by focusing on the metrics and technology to establish realtime measures without tackling a cohesive approach that engages staff at the touch-points and supports with cohesive training and coaching, which will enable them to take ownership of the customer’s enquiry.

“A VoC programme is not a once a year market insight survey. It needs to capture customer feedback in real-time.” The Voice of the Customer Guide

“A VoC programme is not a once a year market insight survey. It needs to capture customer feedback in real-time. Its insights should be challenging and viscous. It must demand that the company changes to incorporate its findings into the management rhythm of the business.” While customer feedback can appear to be a scary, unsettling and disruptive influence in your business, it is essential that you have a robust strategy to guide your VoC journey. Without one, your programme will stall. Schorah concludes: “Creating true change takes time. Your VoC strategy must adapt its cadence to evolve the company’s ability from being able to effectively engage with its customers, manage their feedback to ensuring the business learns and responds with the right changes to improve commercial KPIs and their customers’ experience. “

The Voice of the Customer Guide

Chapter 3.

How to design a VoC programme Neil Davey, editor, MyCustomer.com “There is a big range in the maturity that we see across companies and across their Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes,” says Adele Sage of Forrester Research. “There are still plenty of companies that are just getting started with their programmes – they shouldn’t feel like they are being left behind, they have the chance to learn from the mistakes that other companies have made!” For those just starting out, the temptation is to just go out and blitz it – collect lots of data from lots of customers, gathering as much feedback as possible. However, unless there are concrete plans about what to actually do with the data being collected, then this is futile – it’s just listening for the sake of listening, rather than listening for the sake of improving the experience. And this is common. Brands must build a VoC strategy, and design their VoC programme if they are to optimise the feedback gathering process and the delivery of insights and, ultimately, the process of using these insights to bring about change. The following is a list of tips for designing your VoC programme.

The Voice of the Customer Guide

1. Set a VoC strategy

Before the data starts flooding in, you should ensure that your VoC programme is part of a broader long- term strategy, and that it fits in with the defined wider company goals. “It is imperative to define the key business issues that you need to address – increasing revenue, decreasing costs, driving culture change – at the outset so you can build a programme that will influence business and customer KPIs,” says Karine Del Moro of Confirmit. The VoC strategy will give you clarity on business and stakeholder goals, and provide valuable steer when it comes to the programme. “A survey should be an integral part of an overall company, division or business unit strategy. As such, the survey has to reflect the strategic intent and what the company is ready to act on,” adds Lior Arussy of Strativity Group. “It is the starting point that dictates the fate and effectiveness of every survey. As with any dialogue, what you are seeking to achieve will dictate the tone and quality of discussion.” See the previous article on MyCustomer.com about how to build a Voice of the Customer strategy.

2. Centralise the VoC programme

A central, integrated team responsible for all the listening, analysis and reporting can provide numerous efficiencies, as well as ensuring that the initiative is running on a single standardised set of tools.

The Voice of the Customer Guide

“Having a centralised team is not easy, but it does mean you can look for patterns across all the feedback, and look for the themes that apply across the whole business,” says Sage. “If you have siloed VoC teams, they are not necessarily coordinating about the themes that are applying across everything, so they may be doing things to help their particular silo that are actually hurting other parts of the business, or they are not being leveraged enough in other parts.”

3. Tie questions to your goals and ensure they are actionable

“The purpose of a survey should be to identify problem areas and effect change,” says Arussy. “Even in cases where questions are geared to behaviour validation, the goal should be to answer questions of ‘how’ rather than ‘what.’ Questions should be an invitation for meaningful discussion and feedback and should offer customers the opportunity to be part of a change process. Questions that only provide customers with the ability to validate existing company behaviour will be self-defeating and negate the real benefits that a survey can provide.” To ensure that questions are actionable, a good tip is to ensure that the questions are geared to allowing you to achieve your or your stakeholders’ desired outcomes. Again, this is where having an overarching VoC strategy, replete with goals and definitions, comes into use.

The Voice of the Customer Guide

4. Choose the survey methodology

The type of survey you will ultimately use will be influenced by what it is you’re querying. The research will either be a transactional survey (a sales call, support call or other interaction that takes place after a transaction to survey the customer while the interaction is still fresh in their memory) or a relationship survey (fielded in between transactions and focused on gauging the customer’s overall feelings related to a brand/product). With the growing number of channels used to interact with consumers, a choice also has to be made when it comes to which should be the primary platform for the research: face-to-face, mail, phone, online, social media or mobile.

5. Ensure good survey hygiene

Survey fatigue is becoming more of a problem for brands these days, with the suggestion that businesses are now over-surveying their customers. As such, to optimise survey returns, brands must ensure a good customer experience, carefully considering factors such as length and wording, as well as the timing of when you field the survey.

“There are two parts to the problem,” says Sage. “One is getting people to take the survey in the first place and the second is getting them to finish it” The Voice of the Customer Guide

“There are two parts to the problem,” says Sage. “One is getting people to take the survey in the first place and the second is getting them to finish it. “To get people to start, it is important to have a compelling invitation. This could be some kind of incentive, but often the most effective thing is to show that you get value out of the feedback. If I could give one piece of advice, it would be to demonstrate that your brand does something with the results. In the invitation, describe the kinds of things you’re doing as a result of feedback. If people taking the survey think it is worth them taking the time to tell the company about the experience because their feedback is going to be used, then that is very powerful. “And in terms of getting people to finish the survey once they’ve started, I recommend things like keeping it short, and not asking questions that you already know the answers to, not asking questions that you don’t have any plans for what you’ll do with that data – which is a common problem.”

6. Ensure good sample hygiene

“You need a representative sample, and the big fear is non-responsive bias,” says Sage. “Just because you find something, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true, because of the non-responders. And that keeps people up at night – am I getting responses that accurately reflect what customers think as opposed to what the people who take my surveys are passionate about? There are ways you can overcome the non-responsive bias in your data and it is really important to take the time to perform the right data hygiene The Voice of the Customer Guide

measures so that you can confidently say the sample is representative and the data is representative as a result.” Key points include ensuring that a sufficient sample size is obtained, ensuring that demographics are obtained and aligned properly, with the results appropriately weighed to ensure alignment with the target market. By following data cleansing best practice, organisations can ensure sample quality. If external sample providers are being used then it’s important to work with reputable vendors.

7. Combine insights from across the business

If you have centralised the programme, then this process will be part of the dedicated VoC team. But even if you haven’t set up a centralised group, it is important to combine all the cross-functional and cross-business insights together, not forgetting to include the voice of the employee in the insights – remember that your frontline staff receive feedback via their customer interactions and need somewhere to share this information. This can complement the direct customer feedback.

“Make sure you collect information from across your organisation ...to create a single view of the customer” The Voice of the Customer Guide

“Make sure you collect information from across your organisation – add VoC data to ERP and CRM platforms, employee feedback systems and external benchmarking data to create a single view of the customer,” advises Del Moro. “Analyse data to create a clear view of the issues and opportunities. Tactically, this means using alerts, for example about dissatisfied customers or poorly performing team members to improve problem resolution and retention, or about happy customers to motivate employees and leverage positive word-ofmouth. Also, strategically aggregate data to identify key drivers from your customers’ point of view to help you to prioritise long term investments that will drive business change.”

8. Disseminate actionable insights

While programs are focused on feedback collection and sophisticated analysis, sometimes they don’t disseminate the insights as successfully as they should. So how insights are communicated needs to be examined. But even if you get the right insights to the right people, it still may not be enough to effect change. The VoC programme team is rarely responsible for making any changes to the experience – they are not the people who own the website or the call centre or own product design, for instance. Therefore there is a limit to what they can do, which is trying to convince others that the data is important and should be listened to. “It’s not just necessarily disseminating because they’re

The Voice of the Customer Guide

probably cranking out reports and doing presentations and so the challenge is less about getting the information out and more about getting people to do something with the information they send out,” says Sage. “Companies can use reports and dashboards and presentations as a call to action – to say based on this data we need to do this and fix this. It must be directly spelled out what needs to actually be done and why. And this can become a good challenge for people in the organisation – they know they need to fix something, so they must figure out what is really wrong and identify the right solution. And that is something that is manageable versus receiving a whole bunch of data and not knowing what to do with it.” Properly disseminating insight means communicating the VoC in a way that makes the insights come to life, perhaps using narratives, storytelling or real customer examples. It can also be useful to have VoC ‘champions’ spread out across the organisation to help the centralised team get the message across. “If you have people who are champions within the business, then you are far more likely to be successful because these people can support you and they can understand the business and the VoC programme, and act as a bridge,” says Sage.

9. Act and review

Arussy says: “The tendency to over-analyse results and endlessly discuss proposed actions can severely limit change. Rather than attempting to fix everything, use a prioritisation mechanism to identify a few critical areas that can make an immediate and positive impact on customers. Move quickly from identification to execution.” The Voice of the Customer Guide

“Close the loop with individual customers,” says Del Moro. “This allows you to deliver quick wins, and is often easily linked to short-term financial benefits. In parallel, build the foundations that will deliver long-term results: tailored reports that give insights on a larger scale – i.e. what you need to know about your most profitable opportunities.” She adds: “It’s vital that you review your goals and revise them regularly. Examine all aspects of the programme with a cross-functional team of experts, to seek continuous improvements, to refocus on new issues as they arise and to adjust your priorities along the way.”

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Chapter 4.

How to build an IT architecture to support VoC Neil Davey, editor, MyCustomer.com When it comes to horror stories, grappling with Voice of the Customer (VoC) IT architecture is right up there with the best of them. Lumbered with the legacy of years of siloed departments, once they finally take stock of their VoC projects, organisations can easily be shocked by the number of different programmes and technologies that are working independently within the business. Worse still, even after such an audit is performed, the company could still find that some important customer feedback channels are not being catered for, demanding that even more solution investment is required. And there are more shocks in store. Because if the business decides the best option will be to rip out all the existing technology and standardise on one vendor platform, they’ll find that this really isn’t an option. “My research agenda this year has a big eye on vendor selection because that is where we’re at now - the foundation work has been done by businesses and now they need to choose between the dozens of vendors out there,” says Jim Davies, research director at Gartner. “But the problem is there isn’t The Voice of the Customer Guide

really anybody out there who is 100% perfect in every aspect.” Indeed, while lots of different vendors capture a perspective of the customer voice, whether that’s speech analytics or social media monitoring or a traditional survey, with no vendor providing a full suite of channel solutions, there is no holistic view. This means having to patch together multiple systems and data sources like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster if you want a joined-up view of the customer. “Most companies probably need to have a hybrid approach where they need more than one vendor to do it and therefore it is a case of working out integration and data architecture,” says Davies.

“With the hybrid approach, you choose a vendor that can do as much as it can for you and then for the bits where it can’t help you turn to a best-of-breed vendor, and then feed all of that into a hub.” He continues: “With the hybrid approach, you choose a vendor that can do as much as it can for you and then for the bits where it can’t help you turn to a best- ofbreed vendor, and then feed all of that into a hub.”

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The hub will need to take data inputs from different platforms across different departments. Organisations can either go to a VoC vendor for the hub or to more of a master data management (MDM) style provider. Davies continues: “Effectively, all the hub is doing is aggregating the data and trying to make sense of all of the different types of feedback across the business. It is a tweet? Is it a survey? Is it a recording? And trying to tie all that down to one customer and relate it is something that MDM is all about. So the answer for companies could be to have 10 different VoC niche solutions, all capturing their specific bit of feedback from whatever channel, and then all of them feeding into the corporate MDM environment, for centralised storage, analysis and so on.” But the other alternative is to use a VoC vendor as the hub. Businesses have increasingly been asking the VoC vendors if they can combine data with other data sets, feeding it into their system to put the two together. And as a result of this, vendors have been working for the last couple of years at changing their data architectures so that it is more suitable for supporting other data. “Ultimately, if they started life as a survey vendor, they’re still a survey vendor; if they started life as a speech analytics vendor, they’re still that. But the way that they’re architected now, they are much more suitable for importing other sets of data,” explains Davies. “They have still got a long way to go, but they are starting to view themselves as master data management (MDM) vendors, but obviously

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more associated with pure feedback data than the broader CRM type data.” He continues: “So you could decide to go to a VoC vendor who is good at the data side, but also does some of the capture side as well. For instance, let’s say you choose one of the leading-edge survey vendors as the VoC hub, but then you also think that speech analytics of call recordings in the contact centre is going to contain a lot of useful feedback. Survey vendors can’t do speech analytics and call recordings, so you turn to a best-of-breed for that, they do that work but then the insights and analysis are fed into the VoC hub. The hybrid approach really takes into account the fact that there isn’t one vendor that can do everything so you have best-of-breeds on the periphery and they feed into a central environment.”

Tips for the hybrid approach

So which solution is proving most popular – MDM provider as hub, or VoC vendor as hub? “We’re going to see a bit of both,” notes Davies. “Some early references have gone down the MDM path and used VoC vendors just to do the capture bit, so they launch the survey or scrape the social media environment or analyse the audio. But then all those insights get fed into the big Oracle database or whatever they’re using for their MDM environment.” But in the main, this is a more leading-edge project, with most businesses yet to consider organising a framework for VoC solution design. “There are companies that are trying to get the architecture sorted out, but it is not the majority,” says Davies. “The majority are picking a solution to help in The Voice of the Customer Guide

one area with the knowledge that it can grow to incorporate other things in the future. So they might buy a more advanced survey platform with the knowledge that in three years’ time they can start filling their social data and audio data feeds into it. So it is more plugging a gap rather than ripping everything out and doing it strategically. But there are some big companies that have got the CIO involved and are really looking at this at an enterprise- wide technical level.” For the time being, for those who are adopting the hybrid approach, Davies has the following advice to get the programme off the ground:

Establish the best architecture

Identify the gaps

Facilitate the movement of insight

Recruit a Chief Customer Officer

Undertake a VoC audit

Diagram 1: J im Davies’s 5 tips for a hybrid approach to VoC technology

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1. Recruit a chief customer officer or similar cross-departmental role:

You can’t go down this path without having budget, so there needs to be a top-down commitment. And because the insights and the actions span across the entire business it can’t be driven by a particular department, because there is going to be no willingness to feed the information to other departments. Furthermore, because it is so customer- centric – it is customer experience and customer voice – it needs to be someone that has a customer-type role. That is why the chief customer officer or VP of customer experience, are perfect for this – they can sit above all the operational departments then feed the relevant insight into them.

2. Undertake a VoC audit:

Do an audit of the different technologies you have got across the business that are capturing some sort of customer voice. Where are you doing surveying? Have you got any social projects? Are you doing speech analytics? What are all the different projects you have got going on, even technologies that are already deployed, that are giving a view or perspective on the customer voice. Stock take first of all.

3. Identify the gaps:

If you’re capturing all these different types of voice, where are the gaps? Which types of voice are you not capturing that you think will give you a great insight

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into the customer? And then plug those gaps via pilots to start off with, to see how rich that voice is, how useful it is, and if it is important then you can start collecting it properly.

4. Establish the best architecture:

Spend a lot of time looking at this centralised hub approach in terms of what is going to be the best architecture for you. Which vendor are you going to choose to be the core hub? Or are you not going to choose a vendor to be the core hub? Do you use your own BI platform and internal IT expertise to create your own hub? Do you just buy a big Oracle database and throw it all in that and do the analysis yourself? Spend a lot of time looking at the architecture, the data storage, the vendor landscape, their scalability, their robustness.

5. Establish how you will facilitate the movement of insights:

The next big thing to focus on is how you can facilitate getting the insights to the right people. It sounds easy but it is actually an extremely difficult thing to do to send a tweet to a sales guy, to send a comment made in a phone call to a marketing person, or a response in a survey to a call centre agent, because you have got different collection channels, different departments, different individuals, and knowing what to send to which person and when is a very complex thing to do.

The Voice of the Customer Guide

Chapter 5.

How to capture the Voice of the Customer through your staff

Karine Del Moro, vice president, Confirmit. The case for capturing, understanding and acting on the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is well documented. It’s a powerful driver for change, and helps to create differentiation in competitive markets. You’ve mapped your customer journey, defined key touchpoints, identified the channels through which to gather feedback and you are taking action based on the insights rolling in. Fantastic. But are you still missing something? When we look at VoC programmes, one source of information is often missing and in many cases, it’s the easiest of them all to achieve. The source in question is the Voice of the Customer through your employees (VoCE). Front-line team members have an incredible depth of knowledge about what frustrates – or delights – customers, and they also have an unrivalled opportunity to gather feedback from customers directly. So why are employees still such an untapped resource when it comes to understanding and improving the customer experience? There are three examples of how the Voice of the Customer can be best captured via employees.

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1. The people who hold the most insight are unknown to you

A well-defined VoC programme is challenging to build when you have email addresses, phone numbers and past purchase data of all your customers. For those businesses who don’t know who their customers are, or who need insights from people who didn’t buy from them, gaining clear insight can seem like an insurmountable hurdle. Loyalty schemes and incentives to join mailing lists help, but sometimes, particularly in the retail industry, the people who hold the most insight are virtually unreachable. This is where using your teams on the ground to gather feedback provides a real opportunity. A great example of this is a leading retailer who runs a ‘non-buyer’ survey in their stores. As people leave the premises without making a purchase, an employee will ask them to complete a very short survey on a tablet device to understand the purpose of their visit and what prevented them from making a purchase on that occasion. By harnessing the mobile channel, rather than the old clipboard and paper approach, customers are more inclined to complete a survey which is slick, speedy and highly engaging. In addition, the feedback is channelled directly into the main VoC programme, avoiding a silo or delay which might prevent trends from being identified.

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2. Your employees understand the bigger picture

Customers who provide feedback are only able to talk about their own experience – which is, of course, what you want to understand. However, employees on the front line who speak to many customers every day (particularly those in contact centres) are perfectly placed to recognise patterns in what customers say to them directly. Not only can they identify that the same issues may be arising time and again, but they can help to understand which underlying processes are failing and therefore are causing pain points. In many cases, root-cause analysis would identify the problem but by asking your employees to complete short surveys around what they hear from customers, you can act more quickly and resolve issues faster. Enable your employees to provide feedback either on a regular or ad-hoc basis so they always have the opportunity to escalate issues, rather than simply dealing with one customer at a time.

3. Customers might not pass on their experiences

Despite customer journey mapping and the increased range of channels available to provide feedback, sometimes customers just don’t. Either because they don’t think of it, or the appropriate channel isn’t available in the moment. For example, in a retail environment, there might be a messy display that puts customers off, or the shelves might be empty, or the queues too long. Some customers might be inclined to speak to a staff member, or to contact the company about it later, but in the majority of cases, they won’t. The Voice of the Customer Guide

But they probably will tell their friends, complain on Facebook, and may well not return to the store. Employees who see these situations, but who aren’t in a position to immediately resolve them should have a mechanism to provide details which are integrated into the wider VoC programme. Better still, a picture paints a thousand words, so enable your employees to use their mobile devices to upload photos of what’s going on via a feedback app on their phone. One large retailer has gathered thousands of pieces of this rich data, helping to build up a clear picture of the customer experiences taking place on the ground, each day. Escalating this data to a regional or area manager can help to resolve recurring problems and prevent negative word of mouth from spreading.

Tips to gathering the VoC through your employees

As well as delivering insight that enhances a VoC programme, enabling employees to provide feedback about customer experiences engages and empowers those employees. Taking the information they provide, and using it to drive change is an incredibly powerful way of proving to your employees that you’re listening to them, supporting them and helping them to do their jobs better.

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Here are five things to consider as you build your VoCE programme: 1. Close the loop with your employees and tell

them exactly what you’ve done with the feedback they’ve provided.

se the right channels for the job. Mobile opens U up retail and hospitality environments, while the web will be highly effective for contact centres. Seek out the technology that will encourage employees to get involved.

I mplement the programme across the company. This shouldn’t be a HR initiative silo, but an integral part of your VoC programme that becomes part of your company’s culture.

easure results through your employee M engagement programme so you can monitor how your VoCE programme impacts engagement across the business.

ake sure you report the feedback from M employees alongside your direct customer feedback. It’s all different views of the same subject, and bringing all the data together will help to uncover new ways to drive change in your company.

The Voice of the Customer Guide

Chapter 6.

Proving VoC’s value Neil Davey, editor, MyCustomer.com Voice of the Customer programmes – if ever there’s cause to use that unpleasant phrase ‘no- brainer’, then this is it. Getting insight into your customers’ thoughts and opinions about your brand and products? You can’t put a value on information like that. And unfortunately this is closer to the truth than you’d think. Because according to recent research by Forrester, while businesses are satisfied that their VoC programmes are driving improvements in the customer experience, they are struggling to convert this into the metric that matters most – pounds and pence. In a blog post detailing findings of The State Of VoC Programs 2012 research, Forrester’s Adele Sage wrote: “Our most important finding was that customer experience professionals aren›t getting the value they could be from their programmes. Specifically, we asked how valuable their programmes were in improving customers› experiences and how valuable they were in delivering financial results. It turns out that VoC programmes help companies improve the customer experience; we saw more respondents getting that kind of value. But firms struggle to connect the dots to financial value.” The Voice of the Customer Guide

This presents numerous problems, not only to those who are championing VoC and are seeking to secure more resources, but to the customer experience cause in general. “It can make all of the Voice of the Customer and customer experience stuff feel like a fad – we might care about the customer and what’s right for the customer but if it doesn’t also feel like it is something that is good for the business too then it is going to seem temporary or just the latest thing the CEO cares about, as opposed to feeling like total sense that by having a better experience people are going to be more loyal and we’re ultimately going to have a more profitable business,” Sage tells MyCustomer.com.

“Most people realise instinctively that a better customer experience is going to be a good thing. But it is much harder to make the leap to actually quantifying in what ways it is actually a good thing” “Most people realise instinctively that a better customer experience is going to be a good thing. But it is much harder to make the leap to actually quantifying in what ways it is actually a good thing and that the improved experience is also good for

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the business. A lot of companies don’t know how to do it or haven’t done it, and they are relying on gut feeling that improving the customer experience is the right thing to do – but they don’t necessarily know how that translates into value.”

Gartner rates VoC as the strategic investment for the next three to five years, forecasting an annual growth rate of

+35%.

Gartner rates VoC as the strategic investment for the next three to five years, forecasting an annual growth rate of +35%. But the success of these projects is dependent on it being embraced by the organisation, and so demonstrating its value to the business is critical to ensure buy-in. So how can businesses prove the business value of their VoC programmes? One way that Sage recommends is by tracking the results of service recovery efforts. Service recovery is a common direct action resulting from a VoC programme. Any complaints or bad survey scores can trigger the need to follow up with a particular customer to resolve their issue. And becausethis scenario is one-to-one, businesses are able to more easily track what happens as a result of trying to save that customer relationship. The Voice of the Customer Guide

Sage explains: “If somebody says they are so unhappy that they are never going to buy a product from you again, then there are a couple of things that you can do to save the situation. You can ask them afterwards if you successfully solved their problem, but also are they now potentially willing to buy another product in the future. And you can track them over time to see if they do, or you can identify if there is churn and if they threaten to leave and go to a competitor whether or not they end up staying. And that becomes quantifiable based on the value of the customer or the size of the contracts.” Adding up all the service recovery efforts and the results is one proven way to demonstrate value, with Forrester reporting that the likes of Pitney Bowes have used this to great success. Another approach is to link customer feedback to loyalty and revenue, thereby measuring the value of an improved customer experience. “It is essential that VoC programs are able to correlate movements in customer satisfaction (measured by whichever metric) to gains in commercial KPIs such as average spend, share of wallet, account profitability, retention and acquisition,” recommends Keith Schorah, founder of SynGro. In The State of VoC Programs 2012, Forrester outlines how Adobe Systems found that when it combined historical purchase and upgraded data with survey data it found that it could demonstrate that customers with the highest feedback scores also had the greatest lifetime values. The report concluded that these The Voice of the Customer Guide

linkages “helped maintain momentum for customer experience efforts and project the financial returns associated with changes in customer perceptions”.

“A further way of putting a number on VoC’s contribution is to add up the value of the improvement projects that have been initiated by the programme.” A further way of putting a number on VoC’s contribution is to add up the value of the improvement projects that have been initiated by the programme. “VoC will be uncovering a whole bunch of problems, and the various groups within the company that are fixing the problems should be doing some kind of business case and ROI modelling of what the results are for the fixes,” says Sage. “So for instance, adding content to the website that allows people to get information so that they no longer need to call the contact centre will lead to a significant cost saving. And you add up the cost savings from that project with the cost savings from other projects and the additional revenue driven by improved experience based on other projects. All of these incremental improvement projects will give you a sense in which the feedback you’re getting from customers is contributing to the bottom line.”

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One example of an organisation that has followed this path is Sprint. Its customer experience team traced the root causes of problems that customers were calling to complain about, in bid to reduce the large numbers of calls that its contact centre was receiving from unhappy customers. “Sprint established that the problem was that it had way too many plans that customers could sign up for and so they were singing up for plans that didn’t meet their needs because they were confused,” says Forrester analyst Harley Manning. “Rather than just staff up the call centres, [CEO Dan] Hesse decided to greatly reduce the number of plans.

“...Sprint has the highest customer satisfaction score in the ACSI of any wireless service provider ... and secondly the company now saves $1.7bn per year from reduced contact centre costs.” Recently he gave his annual report to the shareholders and in his speech he highlighted two interesting facts – one is that Sprint has the highest customer satisfaction score in the ACSI of any wireless service provider, whereas before it was by far the lowest, and secondly the company now saves $1.7bn per year from reduced contact centre costs.”

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Even then, there can be some disagreements to resolve regarding attribution, says Sage. “The reaction is usually that if the VoC team isn’t actually fixing the projects then how do they get to claim any responsibility for the outcome. So you have to share the attribution – and the reason for that is that they probably helped to uncover the problem in the first place so the folks who ended up fixing it never knew it was a problem or they helped to uncover the problem faster or showed that it was more significant than the other team had realised. So the team that actually fixed the problem absolutely gets credit for fixing the problem, but the other team gets to share the credit because they helped to identify the problem in the first place.” But the hope is that once VoC programmes are able to demonstrate their hard commercial contribution to the business, there will be greater buy-in, support and appreciation for their initiatives with the company. And that really would be priceless.

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About Medallia

Medallia® is the Customer Experience Management (CEM) company that is trusted by hundreds of the world’s leading brands, including Four Seasons, GE, Gold’s Gym, Nordstrom, Sephora, and Zurich Insurance. We enable companies to survey and capture customer feedback across Web, social, mobile, and contact center channels, understand it in real-time, and take action to improve the customer experience (CX). We offer world-class engineering, technology innovation, a customer-centric services organization, and a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application that is accessed by all your employees, from the C-suite through to the frontline. Medallia helps companies create customers who love your business. Founded in 2001, Medallia has regional headquarters in Silicon Valley, London, and Buenos Aires.

Learn more about Medallia at www.Medallia.com and follow us at blog.medallia.com, on Twitter @Medallia, and on Facebook.com/MedalliaInc.

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What is

MyCustomer.com is an online community of customer-focused professionals, sharing news and advice on fields including customer service, customer experience, marketing, sales, CRM and social CRM.

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Sift Media is a leading business-to-business publisher specialising in online, interactive professional communities. With a range of services including websites, email publications, industry awards and events, Sift Media delivers original, branded content to over half a million professionals in accounting and finance, small businesses and start-ups, HR and training, IT, marketing, customer management and knowledge management.

The Voice of the Customer Guide