CHAPTER 1
VOICE
Keep your fingers on the customer's pulse and react accordingly
C-CHANGE GROWTH DRIVERS
- Organisations should put in place a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme to find out what their customers really think about their brand, products and services. This is often the starting point when it comes to driving customer-led growth.
- Embed your VoC programme into your company's culture. The VoC programme is not a one-off, single-strand activity. Instead, it should be considered as a continuous customer listening channel. VoC programmes take on board feedback from multiple data and knowledge sources, multiple customer segment groups and personas, and across many regions (national or international).
- Companies should avoid the classic VoC pitfalls – for example, by only running a net promoter system (NPS) survey once a year and calling it ‘VoC’ or just doing it to tick the box of listening to customers. This can produce completely skewed results. Often in such a scenario, the NPS survey delivers invalid responses that ultimately lead to, or simply just validate, poor business decisions. Instead, the VoC programme should be authentic and probe for deeper meaning and root causes.
- Create an outcome-oriented VoC team. Once the continuous customer listening channel has been firmly established, organisations should be prepared to drive actions and improvements on a regular and constant business. Some improvements can be executed quickly and have an immediate positive impact on Customer Experience (CX). Other changes are cross-functional and more medium term – nevertheless, they must be planned and actioned over time.
‘We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak’.
– Epictetus
‘Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply’.
– Stephen R. Covey
‘What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds?’
– James 2: 14, NIV
THE ULTIMATE GOAL: A CULTURE OF CONTINUOUS CUSTOMER FEEDBACK AND APPROPRIATE ACTION
It is often said that the key to a successful marriage, a successful business partnership, or indeed any successful work relationship, is communication. And how many times have we heard employee feedback saying, ‘we need to communicate better’? It is like a broken record. The key point is that successful communication generally entails two-way dialogue between interlocutors and comprises both verbal and non-verbal forms. The value of listening cannot be overemphasised. Many companies spend so much time and effort telling the world about themselves that they forget how important it is to listen to their customers and, most importantly, to act upon it. However, there are caveats to this concept. First, companies should listen to their customers in the right way – that is, with the intent to both truly understand (and not to gloss over or trivialise) the customer's feedback and to correctly represent it when articulating the consequent actions. Second, everything the customer says should be acknowledged, but not necessarily acted upon. It really depends on who you ask in the customer's organisation, when you ask the person and how you ask it. Hence, it is important to discern and prioritise feedback from customers. Finally, listening to customers should be an integral part of the culture of any organisation. Customer feedback, from any relevant source, should be constantly digested, prioritised and turned into appropriate actions.
Although the C-change growth engine does not prescribe addressing each component in a sequential, step-by-step fashion, one could argue that all good decisions start by listening to what the customer says, and acting accordingly. This is a good, old-fashioned principle that has always helped great companies deliver on their promise of retaining, delighting and growing their customer base. When Finastra, one of the world's largest fintechs, launched its award-winning customer engagement programme, ‘Finastra Connect’, it analysed customer feedback from a plethora of sources to bucket customers' concerns into key areas of company improvement. All of the improvement areas could be addressed by involving its customers in the Finastra Connect programme offerings.
CX leader Claire Sporton sums up the value of VoC information as follows: ‘The Voice of the Customer is core to customer experience efforts and one of the best sources of business intelligence. However, it cannot be the only voice. Employees, suppliers, partners and others all have important perspectives on the experience you offer. Also, other data from, for example, operational and financial sources add colour and context.’
This last point links in very well to the other aspects of the C-change growth engine – in other words, VoC is an essential part of driving transformation in the Customer Economy. It becomes potent when combined with intelligence from other sources such as employees (see the Culture chapter) and operational data (see the Technology and Success chapters).
WHAT IS VOC?
The VoC C-change driver is the essential fuel to power all customer-led decisions of a company. Also, it helps inform the company culture and employee experience. We all know that happy employees mean happy customers, but customer feedback is key to understanding what the problems and issues are in the first place.
According to Confirmit, the VoC and CX platform provider: ‘Voice of the Customer refers to the way an organisation collects customer feedback, analyzes the data, distributes it to the right people and takes action on these insights in order to generate financial benefits. Voice of the Customer programmes aim to gather and analyse customer insights, and enable you to take action in order to improve customer experience and deliver positive business outcomes to your organisation.’
The insights–actions–results flow is a clear and simple way of understanding the principle of VoC. Jeanne Bliss, author of the Chief Customer Officer book series, builds on this theme in the chapter ‘Build a Customer Listening Path’. She suggests that customer feedback comes from multiple sources, throughout the customer journey.
A FREQUENT REALITY: AN ANNUAL NET PROMOTER SYSTEM (NPS) SURVEY THAT MERELY TICKS THE ‘CUSTOMER FEEDBACK’ BOX
When Fred Reichheld, Satmetrix and Bain launched the NPS in 2003, it quickly became the industry standard tool for measuring customer satisfaction and customer feedback. Today, NPS is deployed universally, in some shape or form, across all industries, and often, is heralded as proof that the company is indeed listening to the voice of its customers. However, rarely are companies using NPS as it was intended. For example, organisations may celebrate their high NPS scores or score improvements without truly understanding what the scores mean. Alternatively, they might solely rely on the ‘Ultimate Question’, that is, ‘what is your likelihood to recommend?’ as sufficient, without any attempt to understand the true meaning or context behind the customer scores. They might even be summarising customer feedback from the limited (often statistically insignificant) subset of customer contacts that bothered to respond to the survey. Worse case, no actions are taken as a result of customer feedback, or the wrong decisions are made.
The debate still rages on today – is NPS really fit for purpose in the Customer Economy? Suffice it to say, NPS only receives the level of attention it does because there is no other measure of customer satisfaction that is as universally accepted across all industry sectors and geographies. Also, NPS is easy to calculate by simply subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters (those who rate 0–6 from those who rate 9–10). Companies with an NPS score of 0 or less generally need improvement; scores between 0 and 30 are good, with some room for improvement, scores between 30 and 70 are great; and anything over 70 is outstanding.
NPS data can be useful, for example, when looking at customer satisfaction trends over time, or even when comparing one company's NPS scores against its competitors. However, it is highly subjective, and can be very time sensitive (e.g. people are much happier with their laptop when it works than when it breaks down). Also, in the worst case, NPS can be easily gamed by internal teams (e.g. sales), especially when their bonus depends on it! In summary, NPS is still alive and kicking today, even if it has serious flaws, and there are many other measurement system alternatives out there – for example, customer effort scores, customer lifetime value scores or the goodwill index created by Olaf Hermans. Also, we will consider other approaches in the Customer Health chapter.
Furthermore, companies will sometimes overload customer satisfaction questions with too many (often poorly considered) questions. The aim of the questionnaire may not even be to find out what the customer is saying, but instead to prove a point. Even if the hypothesis is not immediately proven, there is a temptation to skew the data to achieve the goal. According to leading CX expert Steven Walden, ‘Don't think that if you torture data like this, it will eventually squeal’. Walden continues, ‘It is far more important to look at causality, narrative and context behind the data than the numbers themselves’.
At the Customer Catalyst, we believe NPS has validity, but only as just one of many VoC components. It should never be used on its own and in isolation from other VoC sources.
THE BENEFITS OF A MULTIFACETED, REAL-TIME VOC PROGRAMME
By continuously listening to customer feedback across the entire customer lifecycle in real-time, from multiple qualitative and quantitative sources, it is possible to build up a much broader and richer understanding of customer needs. In addition, continuous customer feedback enables you to better consider your business from an outside-in perspective and to break down and ultimately remove instances of functionally siloed, myopic business decisions. This, in turn, helps improve both the customer and employee experience, which helps the company achieve growth in the Customer Economy.
At the highest level, listening continuously to customer feedback helps an organisation understand and segment their customers better. It helps to identify ‘at-risk clients’, define necessary action plans, and uncover cross-sell and upsell approaches. Ultimately, listening continuously to customer feedback decreases the cost to serve (e.g. C-suite spending time reactively dealing with issues that could have been proactively dealt with much sooner).
Furthermore, when you consider the sub-components of the C-change growth engine, an effective VoC programme will be beneficial in all areas. The following are just some examples (see Table 1.1).
TABLE 1.1 How can an effective VoC programme help drive customer-centric growth?
Source: Developed and owned by Chris Adlard and Daniel Bausor.
| C-change growth driver | How can an effective VoC programme help? |
| Culture | Feedback from customers (both positive and negative) can motivate and clarify employees' actions and understanding of their respective roles. It gives them customer-based evidence to empower them and re-enforce a customer-led culture. Above all, VoC can serve as the ultimate rallying call to help employees better understand their roles in the growth of the organisation. |
| Customer Experience (CX) | By listening to customers (e.g. at customer workshops and feedback groups), it is possible to map out their typical customer journeys from an external customer perspective and to understand where things are working, and where things could be improved. Such sessions can be hugely revealing and very powerful in terms of driving cross-functional change programmes. This approach also helps understand customers better to segment different customer types and their respective journeys. |
| Technology | Most companies use a plethora of technology platforms – both back-end and front-end systems – to serve their customers. One of the client's frustrations, especially in B2B, but also in B2C, involves having to deal with different systems and processes depending on which part of your organisation the customer is interacting with. VoC feedback helps companies understand where these inconsistencies are occurring. |
| Digital | Building a frictionless digital user experience, or even a product that makes life as simple as possible for the customer, will help reduce costs, and drive customer satisfaction and growth. Zoom Video Communications lives and breathes this mantra. Not only does Zoom use innovation in the VoC channels (see the following example), but also funnels customer feedback quickly into the design of its user experience. |
| Success | Customer Success Managers (CSMs) represent one of the fastest growing roles on LinkedIn today. They live to serve the customer and act as the cross-functional facilitator across the organisation. Not only can CSMs gather their own real-time VoC information but they can also help to collate VoC information from other sources to better understand how the company can retain and grow their customer base. |
| Health | An effective VoC programme will help define the customer journey and ideal CX. Also, VoC will help select the most critical operational metrics that form part of a Customer Health scoring system. Ultimately, the Customer Health score will minimise the need to constantly survey customers as it becomes easier to predict customer behaviours. |
| Engagement | The Finastra Connect programme, cited earlier, is an example where value-added engagement programmes were developed and launched in direct response to Customer Voice. In other words, by actively listening to customers, new and more effective ways of engaging with them can be achieved. |
| Co-creation | Effective VoC provides evidence to open up opportunities to co-develop new product and service offerings with the customer. |
| Advocacy | Customer feedback can uncover, often immediately, hitherto undiscovered satisfied customers who are keen to promote the companies they buy from. They are no longer just users of a company's products and services – they are advocates and fans! Arguably the best form of advertising a company could ask for. |
BEWARE OF THE COMMON VOC PITFALLS!
Richard Owen, former CEO of Satmetrix (the co-originator of NPS) and CEO of OWEN CX, has helped hundreds of customers to successfully transform their business with industry-leading VoC and CX programmes.
Richard believes that VoC is often misunderstood, and that companies commonly consider VoC to only mean taking direct periodic feedback from (often a handful) of customers to improve the perceived quality of its products or services. Such initiatives do not always help an organisation decide how to change the business, even if they might help turn around the CX in places. For example, an annual NPS survey on its own will not provide anything like the depth and breadth of insight required to make smart business decisions.
According to Richard, ‘Poor VoC data is far worse than no data’. Richard cites other two other measurement sources of VoC information – operational data (which will be covered in the Customer Health chapter) and employee data (which we will be covered in the Culture chapter).
Also, Richard shares another word of caution. Customers and employees do not always give rational feedback when completing surveys. Surveys can sometimes contain hundreds of cognitive biases. Just because a customer rates himself or herself as a ‘6’ on an NPS survey does not mean that they are not a promoter or advocate of the organisation. Such surveys give us one data point that, when compared to the results of the same survey conducted later, might give us just a small fraction of insight into VoC.
The bottom line, according to Richard, is that, when analysing VoC data and information from a multitude of sources (whether quantitative and qualitative), it is essential to be able to discern noise from signal. Trends are harder to find than anecdotes, but far more important to identify. The skill of the VoC leader lies in extracting the most meaningful, important issues for customers and translating them into actionable programmes of change for the organisation. Some changes are described as ‘quick wins’ and ‘low-hanging fruit’. Others will represent more fundamental, medium–long-term cross-functional change programmes. Either way, if a company wants to succeed in the Customer Economy, its VoC programme should form important bedrock of all its customer-led growth initiatives.
SOURCES OF VOC INFORMATION
Table 1.2 lists out some examples of VoC data. A simple audit of a company's VoC sources, such as this, will help a company understand what information is being gathered and where gaps may exist.
TABLE 1.2 VoC information sources
Source: Developed and owned by Chris Adlard and Daniel Bausor.
| VoC information source | Description/notes |
| Weekly/quarterly/annual business reviews | In B2B especially, customers are providing feedback all the time, in both structured and unstructured ways, to account managers and indeed other functional representatives (professional services, customer support, Customer Success, product management, etc.). Sometimes the information is documented by e-mail, sometimes in knowledge systems, but often it remains in the heads of those people that spoke to the customer. Although this feedback is subjective, it will give some unique and actionable insights, especially when gathered from multiple people in the organisation and the client. |
| Customer workshops/focus groups/user groups/customer advisory boards | Giving customers the opportunity to interact with their peers and share their experiences is also an invaluable source of feedback. It can help companies prioritise and democratise important product roadmap and business decisions. Note that companies must be careful not to action everything on the customer wish list but instead prioritise actions that have a win-win benefit. The other key benefit of customer workshops is to map out customer journeys and experiences. This helps you to understand the moments of truth and areas of improvements and to define the outside-in customer journey. |
| Online customer communities | A similar principle as in the preceding text. The great benefit of online community feedback, however, is that it does not need to be gamed or initiated by the vendor. It is entirely unforced and can be incredibly revealing about a customer's true wishes and intentions. |
| Executive meetings | In B2B, most company executives like to spend time meeting with their executive counterparts at the customer. Under pressure to drive short-term revenue growth, CxOs prefer the positive meetings that could lead to the prosecution of new business. However, the reality is often the opposite. CxOs are instead frequently brought into customer escalations. In the honeymoon period of new customer relationships or new projects, CEOs will willingly hand out their business cards and offer a ‘hotline’ to customers in case there are any questions or concerns. This can come back to haunt them. Due to the functionally siloed inside-view of many organisations, the client is left with no option but to escalate to the CEO if things go awry. If the organisation was more operationally proactive in its cross-functional client engagement up front, the CEO could spend more time on strategic, constructive client conversations. Either way, the CEO becomes an important source of Customer Voice, and this feedback should be shared with the cross-functional team that is responsible for the ongoing health and satisfaction of the client. |
| Annual/periodic survey (e.g. NPS) | E-mail surveys are regularly sent out in both B2B and B2C environments. Response rates are generally dropping and customers quickly lose interest if they do not believe a company will respond to or drive consequent actions from their feedback. Surveys are rarely tested with focus groups before being sent out en masse, and responses may be glib at best. That all said, NPS does allow for some trending analysis over time. Also, NPS may, in some cases, give some insight into whether a company is making improvements or not. However, a company that relies on periodic customer surveys (e.g. NPS) does not have a fit-for-purpose VoC programme in place. |
| Telephone/support surveys on the fly | Sometimes we are asked to complete short telephone surveys post a call centre transaction, or the technical support team might ask for feedback from the customer. Time-sensitive, in-the-moment feedback can be useful, provided it is considered in context with other VoC sources. Customers will generally rate highly when their immediate issues are quickly resolved. When issues are unresolved, it is important to understand the narrative of bad experiences. This may provide very meaningful information about where cross-functional client interactions are not working well (this often relates to billing and invoicing issues). |
| Social media commentary | Many companies use social media as just another channel of outbound communication. Conversely, companies that are constantly interacting with their customer base have adopted the right spirit, sometimes to help customers, sometimes out of necessity. Examples include travel companies such as airlines and train operators. While much of the client feedback through social channels creates a lot of noise and unspecific or uncoordinated ‘panic button’ complaints, some key insights can be derived. |
| Complaints – e-mail, telephone, web | Listening to customer complaints and resolving them quickly is often the key to turning unhappy customers into loyal advocates. A deeply unhappy customer can often present the greatest opportunity for positive cross-functional change. |
| Paper (e.g. event feedback forms) | When feedback is provided on paper, it should always be digitised and included in the VoC mix. Similarly, insight from surveys and complaint forms should be digitised too. |
| Website enquiries/feedback | Website enquiries and feedback forms tend to be more transactional in nature. Nevertheless, if your organisation offers this channel via the web, it should at least respond to customer feedback. |
| Call centre recordings | Call centre feedback should be considered from the perspective of content, duration and sentiment analysis (e.g. tone of voice, vocabulary). The cost of serving unhappy customers is also an important operational metric when considering the need to invest in more proactive ways to predict and resolve issues before they surface. |
| Employee feedback | In the Culture chapter, we will consider ways in which employee feedback – either about internal ways of working, culture or feedback about customers – can be leveraged to better understand VoC. |
| Operational data | Given the general survey fatigue that exists today, companies are increasingly turning to more data-based solutions in order to truly understand VoC and to predict customer behaviours and actions. We will cover this in more detail in the Customer Health chapter. |
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER – HOW TO MANAGE THIS VOC KNOWLEDGE?
Many companies rely on annual customer surveys because they are relatively easy to execute. In simple terms, gathering and collating the customer responses and feedback can be executed by building an e-mail distribution list, creating a questionnaire through a survey tool and sending it out. When organisations look to gather VoC feedback from across the entire customer lifecycle from multiple customer stakeholders, some of the toughest challenges include identifying the sources; collating the data; normalising the findings and then packaging up the information into a meaningful report to drive appropriate action.
Hence, a successful VoC programme is as much about knowledge management as it is about asking customers for their opinions. The most important issue is that companies employ someone who (either alone or supported by a team) is responsible for managing VoC knowledge and turning it into a strategic, operational and tactical plan that both the C-suite and middle management can work towards.
HOW ZOOM LEVERAGED VOC WITH HELP FROM THE ANALYST COMMUNITY
As covered in the Growth chapter, Zoom is a great example of a successful organisation in the Customer Economy. Its mission to ‘make users happy’ has not just manifested itself in terms of product and user experience design, but also in the way it constantly solicits feedback from its customers and acts upon it. This, in turn, feeds back into product/user design, thus creating a virtuous circle of customer-centric growth.
Zoom deploys many imaginative ways to gather VoC feedback. One such way is how it partners with industry analyst firms who are also keen to talk to the end users of companies to make accurate market assessments about them. When you compare this to other organisations who struggle time and time again to find enough customers who are willing to advocate on their behalf, it is quite refreshing to see how Zoom has completely turned this issue on its head.
In November 2018, Zoom partnered with leading analyst firm Gartner on its peer insights review programme. It generated 2,456 user ratings from its customer base – an impressive achievement! It received an average feedback score of over 4.7 out of 5, which is extremely high for a technology/software organisation.
Some of the user feedback shared in Zoom's 2018 press release:
‘The implementation and training process with Zoom was top-notch. We were able to switch all of our sales team out in 2 days.’
– Services Industry
‘Zoom has allowed us to do more with less expenditure. All of the promises the sales team made work. Our students can individually join class sessions or join in a classroom with our equipment. I highly recommend Zoom’.
– Education Industry
‘The interface is designed in a very simple way, even for a new user. The cloud version of the product is remarkable in terms of performance and reachability. The new generation is one of the most preferred meeting applications’.
– Manufacturing Industry
CASE STUDY: CLOSE BROTHERS TRANSFORMS CULTURE AND DRIVES BUSINESS PERFORMANCE WITH A BEST-IN-CLASS VOC
‘Driving a great customer experience is like regulation; you just need to do it’.
– Martyn Atkinson, Group COO
Close Brothers is a leading UK merchant bank that provides lending, savings, trading and wealth management to businesses and individuals across the UK. Within the banking division, there are five distinct lending businesses, with a broad cross-section of customer types and many regional offices across the UK. With a strong foundation in the corporate values of service, expertise and relationships, and a relentless customer focus, it has achieved impressive growth, even during and following the financial crisis of 2008.
The CX team, led by CX leader Danielle Croucher (see Figure 1.1) and Chief Customer Officer Ian Hunt, is the embodiment of the company's cultural values and raison d'être. During the near-3-year tenure, the CX team have systematically and robustly engineered an ongoing transformation to help it in its quest to become one of the most customer-focused businesses in the UK financial services industry.
FIGURE 1.1 Danielle Croucher, CX Lead at Close Brothers.
Source: Danielle Croucher. Reproduced with permission.
The VoC programme at Close Brothers provides a good example of how to turn valuable, meaningful customer insights into real actions and tangible business results. According to Croucher, ‘It's all about listening to customers’ feedback, particularly at the moments of truth across their respective customer journeys with the company'. Croucher emphasises the need to go deep at these moments, looking at rich data and information from multiple VoC sources, to understand the customers' pain points, emotions and opportunities in each case.
For Close Brothers, rich feedback means looking at VoC information from a variety of sources – surveys, conversational SMS and journey analytics, sales conversations, ethnographic research, contextual interviews, etc. ‘All of the VoC information we use is from primary research’, adds Croucher. Her team deploys a user-centred design approach to the VoC programme, which comprises four stages: LISTEN – ANALYSE – ACT – MONITOR. Croucher continues: ‘We added the monitoring element to this model because we recognised the importance of dashboarding and management reporting for leaders across the business. Ultimately, we need to keep things as simple and clear as possible for executives to ensure they understand and can act upon any recommended changes’.
The CX team first looks at research from both employees and customers – either anecdotal, observational or from interviews. It then carries out design thinking workshops – either over a period of weeks or in a shorter 5-day sprint window. Post workshops, it provides a VoC information pack to both executives and other business leaders about the as-is insights and pain points. Also, deliverables include strategic recommendations, to-be journeys or service blueprints, customer segmentation models and personas. And every quarter, a VoC summary is provided to the group board. ‘I want our business decisions to be based on customer feedback’, remarks Croucher.
Driving customer-led change is, of course, challenging for any company. Close Brothers is fortunate to possess leaders who believe, with conviction, that a truly customer-led company is the most successful business. However, how does a company prioritise VoC-initiated change-requests (relating, e.g., to processes, systems or solutions) above other (predominantly functionally siloed) change programmes? At Close Brothers, as with most companies today, this tension continues. Even investment decisions around, for example, new VoC platforms are not made overnight. Croucher responds to this concern with clarity and confidence: ‘In the end, every employee is a part of the customer-value chain. Every decision we take, and every investment we make, all leads back to improving the customer experience in order to drive growth’. Hence, it is not a matter of if, but when.
That all said, Croucher and her team have achieved a remarkable feat, having delivered a consistent and effective VoC operational framework that is universally discussed and respected across the company's businesses. Croucher adds, ‘The framework provides the flexibility needed to understand and address both the huge variety and segmentation of customers across all business units, with an operational robustness that befits the professionalism and effectiveness of the CX team’.
The team now enjoys even greater executive commitment, as indicated in the COO quote earlier. The customer has always been in the company's DNA, but the CX team and their VoC programme continue to evolve Close Brothers' maturity, winning the hearts and minds of both executives and employees as they go.
A successful VoC programme, such as the one ran by Close Brothers, is the cornerstone of strategic and operational customer-led transformation. It should be continuous, multifaceted and multi-persona. Ultimately, it should drive actions at all levels across the organisation and should continuously monitor and track organisation performance against its customer vision and objectives. It forms a critical part of the C-change growth engine.