What separates a great Voice of Customer (VOC) programme from an average one? It comes down to how well it is embedded within a business. If you want to get the most out of the insights your VOC is generating, grow the programme’s ROI, and drive commercial results, actioning your VOC insights across your business is a must.
VOC programmes are often driven and implemented by one core team who has a direct and obvious use-case for the data it generates. However, the reality is all teams should be making use of the insights to drive business-wide decision-making.
“VOC programmes are frequently owned by the insights team or the frontline channels team and aren’t getting into the hands of the rest of the business,” says Kate De Marco, Strategy Director at Perceptive. “Businesses need to focus more heavily on the ROI of their programmes and recognise how this can be multiplied when VOC insights are used across their entire business.”
For better ROI, this means going beyond executives and the boardroom metrics that VOC provides and giving access directly to all teams to drive product innovation, CX transformation, customer service optimisation, issue resolutions, and trend analysis to inform future roadmaps.
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to sharing VOC insights across different business teams is the different needs of each audience. In the case of leadership, a high-level overview is enough to ensure the business is on course or inform decisions to course correct. However, operational teams need much more granular detail to drive decision-making for their specific area of the business.
“Previous, one-size-fits-all reporting limited how VOC was used,” says Kate. “But the new generation of VOC enables dashboards and analysis tools to be created to suit the needs of each area of the business, giving them exactly what they need to make informed decisions.”
Organisations can now put their VOC insights at the fingertips of everyone across their business to understand customer experience insights, be it from AI summaries for high-level overviews or drilling down into in-depth detail.
To begin embedding VOC across your business, start by understanding the needs of the different stakeholders across your organisation, from leadership, operations, product and sales to CX, digital and frontline. Who across these teams needs to make decisions using customer insights and what decisions do they need to make? Then find out what insights would help answer the business problems in their specific area. Lastly, find out what metrics matter most in their area of the business. Once you have clarity on these from across your business, you can begin to look at how your VOC programme can solve the business needs for each area.
Understanding the needs of each of your business areas can help to inform what parts of your customer journey you capture insights from and how you make these insights easily available in a way that is useful for every one of your teams.
Putting VOC into every area of your business can massively impact the experiences you deliver to your customers, from influencing in moment experiences through to future interactions. For example, contacting at-risk customers who have had a poor experience with your business and are at risk of leaving. By getting in touch and resolving their issue, you may be able to prevent them from churning. Automating responses through self-service portals is another example of this and empowers customers with immediate solutions to easily resolved issues.
Forward thinking business are also using VOC data to inform future interactions with their customers in the form of building customer profiles into frontline dashboards. Doing this means that when customers next contact the business, employees can look the customer up to see their VOC feedback alongside what products they’ve bought or services they subscribe to. Having this information readily on hand allows staff to better tailor any assistance accordingly.
“If a customer has given your business negative feedback, staff members may approach the conversation differently compared to a customer who has given high praise,” says Kate. “It allows staff to better understand the customer context, any frustrations they’re experiencing, and respond more empathetically.”
VOC data can also highlight where your employees are excelling and where additional training is needed. Providing this data to team leaders, managers, and HR teams can help you implement training plans and to bring staff up to speed. The data may also help identify high-performing staff members who could be approached to mentor or train other staff.
In terms of culture building, sharing positive VOC feedback with staff is a great way to build team morale and workplace culture. You may also choose to celebrate and reward staff and teams who feature in these stories.
In the same vein, offering a reward for staff if they perform well in a VOC programme can also provide extra motivation and encourage them to provide exceptional service to customers.
“One of our real estate clients introduced a reward programme based on VOC data for their real estate agents because they knew their agents all had a competitive streak,” says Kate. “The results spoke for themselves.”
Read more in our LJ Hooker case study
Without properly embedding VOC in your business, your ability to drive action from its insights will be severely limited. Next generation Voice of Customer is creating a completely new world of opportunities for driving your business forward with VOC insights. These opportunities could include:
The caveat? Taking advantage of these evolutions to capture customer insights and connect them for more powerful insights and impactful action across your business all relies on how well VOC is embedded within your organisation.
Want to maximise the value of your VOC programme? Take our free assessment to see where it could grow.