Most loyalty marketing companies need and want a successful Voice of the Customer program.
During Thursday’s Loyalty360 webinar titled, “The 4 Pillars of Successful Voice of the Customer Programs,” which was presented by Verint, those critical “pillars” were discussed by Brian Koma, Vice President and Practice Leader, Verint and Koren Stucki, Director, Voice of the Customer, Verint.
Koma discussed how there is a new breed of customer who isn’t “shy about sharing his or her ideas with you.”
Some typical comments offered by the new breed of customer include the following:
I want to communicate with you however I want, whenever I want
When I complain on social media (and I do) I want quick action
I use my smart phone for almost everything
I have a lot of choices – and I’m not afraid to go somewhere else
I want you to treat me like you know me in every interaction
I want to share my ideas for product and service improvements
I want self-service and I want to get in touch with other customers if I have a problem so I can benefit from their experience
I want you to tell me what you’re doing to improve
Koma told attendees that the way things should be (one customer, one company) aren’t the way they are where customers interact with different silos within an organization.
“Customer engagement data is everywhere, both structured and unstructured,” he said. “Being able to connect those dots, aggregate and analyze that information is where most organizations are challenged today. It’s very challenging to connect those dots.”
Koma said many organizations lack the resources and knowledge to aggregate and analyze the data. There is a Customer Engagement Challenge because consumers channel hop. Organizations must connect the dots from web to contact center to social media to surveys.
Koma offered these suggestions regarding the Customer Engagement Challenge:
Organizations want to identify and understand the root causes of customer issues.
Organizations lack knowledge and resources to aggregate & analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data (huge challenge for companies)
Organizations want to predict customer actions, deliver personalized service, and reduce churn
Stucki said that collecting the data is one thing, but making sense of it is an entirely different thing. She discussed the 5 Foundation Stones of Great CXP Programs:
Vision
Define the strategy and vision for engaging with customers
Align with the corporate strategy and overarching customer experience goals
Governance: A key way to do this is to have a cross-functional group in place among key stakeholders that meets on a regular basis, offers strategic guidance, and uses that body to drive standards and share best practices
Establish a cross-functional Center of Excellence or Governance model
Provide strategic guidance and help manage priorities, communication and funding
Culture
Build a customer-centric culture
Capture feedback from employees and engage them in designing solutions
Processes
Evaluate customer-facing processes
Identify closed-loop processes with customers and employees
Technology
Identify the right technology solutions for customer feedback and engagement
“A company vision is how do you want to engage with customers, what role do employees play in relation to customers, corporate objectives, and corporate values,” Stucki said.
The First Pillar: Listen & Capture Feedback (probably the foundational element of the Four Pillars that’s most important)
VoC/VoE at key interaction points
Multichannel feedback
Email
Mobile
SMS (one of fastest growing channels)
IVR
Web
Structured data
Transactional surveys
Relationship surveys
Unstructured data collection
Chat sessions
Social media
Call recordings
Survey comments
“There is a big push in unstructured data,” Koma said. “Structured data gives you a way to quantify data; unstructured gives you the why behind it. Look at how customers are communicating with you across channels. It’s helpful to understand the lifecycle.”
Second Pillar: Analyze & Measure Trends
Analyze structured data
Identify trends/themes
Identify outliers
Use CRM data to enrich survey results
Create segmentation & personas
Text & speech analytics
Identify themes & overall sentiment
Measure customer experience
Balanced metric framework
Insights for customer journeys
“Use CRM data to enrich survey results,” Koma added. “It allows us to create deep segmentation and personas to affect the customer-centric culture. Organizations use a balanced metric framework to look at the customer journey.”
A customer journey is a set of interactions required to accomplish a key customer goal.
“Companies that measure customer journeys and map them have far better outcomes,” Koma said.
Third Pillar: Distribute Insights
“Bring the data to life and write about data in the present tense,” Koma explained. “People want the data to be fresh, insightful, and make it relevant to their operations.”
Stucki said stakeholders need to be able to receive data in a workable form.
Executive reports & readouts
Bring the data to life
Use the present tense
Pull out the most important points and show them first
Develop dashboards & scorecards
Make the data easy to understand
Stakeholder reviews
Share best practices
Here are some key takeaways:
Look at the data, get ideas for examination
Look at the data in its totality
Don’t report on the data based on where the questions appeared in the survey
Pick out the most important data no matter where it was collected in the survey and show it first
Pick out the three to five most important findings and build your report around them
Use executive summaries, key findings and detailed findings sections to segment data for every level
VoCA provides a unified view of customer
Feedback across channels
Fourth Pillar: Act on results (probably the most important pillar)
Use case management & closed loop processes to follow-up on deficiencies
Identify and implement detailed process, system and organization improvements (holistic look)
Develop targeted action plans and governance
Optimize your enterprise
Drive company-wide process improvements
“If all we do is listen, your program will be less than successful,” Koma said. “Your customers want you to get better.”