The opportunity for a distinctive business lies in offering optimal service and customer experience. Insight into customer feedback is necessary and KPI’s such as NPS, CES and CSAT make that possible. But how do you really implement the Voice of the Customer into your organization? We distinguish three levels in this article to give more insights into the deployment of VOC within your organization.
Collecting customer feedback: check! And then?
Collecting customer feedback is the first focus. Don’t be afraid and start with collecting the Voice of the Customer, but don’t focus too much on the score. You’ll find the most input for improvements in the stories behind the score. By using NPS, CES and CSAT and the follow up questions with the CYS innovative questioning process based on the Root Cause Analysis Method, you make the Voice of the Customer more tangible. Collecting this feedback ensures a big amount of data. But what to do with this data?
Implementing customer feedback into your organization
It isn’t simple to implement customer feedback into your organization. Measuring is one thing but optimizing processes and redesigning based on outcomes is a bigger challenge. To make a real impact with the Voice of the Customer, we distinguish three levels:
1. One-on-one follow up
Start with one-on-one follow up by consistently and pro-actively asking feedback from all your customers. Don’t be afraid of complaints but embrace them and take care of sublime complaint handling. Listen also to positive feedback and use this to improve your online reputation. Instruct every employee on how to deal with negative and positive feedback. By making the complaint handling for your employees transparent, it provides structure and creates a challenge. Making a customer happy also contributes to a higher energy level and enthusiasm of the individual employee.
2. Operational level
One-on-one follow up is step one. By continuously measuring individual feedback, you will receive insights in the needs and wishes of the customer. This provides a huge amount of information where and when in the customer journey the consumer is satisfied or not. Map the customer journey and pair customer feedback to different touch points. Are there a lot of complaints in the logistic area of your organisation, is that best scoring employee also the friendliest in your customer service team or is the NPS score quite lower in that one store or department in comparison to other stores or departments? Translate the received feedback to the operation.
By enriching the Voice of the Customer with additional information from your internal departments, processes, and systems, you know even better how to make an impact and how to set priorities where improvement is most needed.
3. Strategic level
The deployment of the Voice of the Customer can also be implemented at a strategic level. Collaboration (with the customer) is the key. Take a closer look at customer feedback and analyse this periodically and not only at one-on-one follow up level. This will support your organization’s strategic decision making process. Think about a re-organization of a department, an improvement of the product, a different policy approach or a different type of customer service employee to improve complaint handling. Find out what the true wishes of your customers are and use this information to make strategic decisions.
Be a more customer centric organization by using Voice of the Customer
From one-on-one follow up and improvement at operational level to strategic decisions in organizations: these different levels lead to an optimal use and implementation of customer feedback. Start with asking feedback from all your customers and involve your employees in this process. When your employees have been instructed well enough and know how to handle feedback, look at this feedback on a wider scale and find improvements on operational and strategic level. Don’t be afraid of making changes and implementing the Voice of the Customer, it will contribute to a more customer centric organization.