Customer Experience is a Two-way Street – Listen Before You Act

If you have to choose one metric to measure the overall success of a company, that would be around customer experience (CX). Measured as NPS, CSAT, Effort Score or others, it is the most significant measure that impacts top line and bottom and this is how. Happy customers buy more, cost less to serve and are strong advocates to bring new customers. Getting to build that exceptional CX starts with getting the fundamentals right. On trying to understand what your customers really want, listening to them constantly and enabling every employee in the organization to act is imperative.

While the value of Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs seems obvious, many companies still struggle with building one. It is either because they don’t have enough data on the customer or the data is silo-ed and not integrated or there is no organizational alignment to execute on customer insights.

Here are some aspects to think about as you plan your VoC strategy.

Take an Outside-in View of the Customer not an Inside-out Organizational View

Understanding customer journey is critical and most organizations take an inside out view of this. They look at organizational structures like Marketing, Sales, Support and other groups and start collecting customer interaction data within these groups. That is a silo-ed approach and will lose sight of critical transition paths. Instead, think of an approach which is more customer focused and follows the customer as they go through their entire journey from awareness, evaluation, and purchase to on-going success. The outside-in view will tell a better story on points of friction and moments of truth. Similarly take a deep look along specific functions like Customer support or Marketing to get targeted feedback for the specific group.

Get a Large Data Set to know More about your Customer

The better the data across the customer experience journey, the more insights you can glean. Think about not just direct feedback mechanisms like surveys but all the analytics you can use to get more insights on the customer - maybe it is the tone or the language used by the customer in the interaction Maybe it is analytics on buying patterns and choices. Marry operational data from various systems like contact center, ERP and others into a large data set to mine the best insights.

Engage and Empower Every Employee to Act

Getting every employee to be customer obsessed needs not just change management practices but also the right size data about the customer in the right hands, at the right time. A call center agent might want to know details on customer transaction history while a Marketing executive might want data on customer touch points along the buying process. Surface the right data to the right people and more importantly serve it in the right place. For a contact center agent maybe it is the previous customer transaction details that pop up right when the customer calls, all available in the contact center app. Harvest your VoC goldmine to create that frictional and effortless experience for your customers. Hear about setting up a successful VoC program in this webinar.