How tailored VoC dashboards unlocked benefits for Sky Spain

Macfarlane’s 20-year CX career, which has featured the likes of BMW, Renault and Vodafone, has seen him frequently embody the role of a Voice of the Customer (VoC) advocate.

One particular CX success occurred for Macfarlane when he led the customer experience team in the launch of Sky’s OTT streaming service in Spain.

After setting up a dedicated contact center, introducing text analytics and VoC listening tools for the project, the team began to “build a holistic, enterprise-wide, end-to-end view of everything our customers were saying to us on every platform they interacted with us on”, said Macfarlane.

Over the next six months the VoC data grew understanding and awareness across the business, but limited action was being taken to operationalize the insights.

Mobilizing Voice of the Customer data across the business

Macfarlane noted that the art of getting business departments to listen and act on customer feedback was a key challenge for this project. “We wondered how we could help our stakeholders engage with this information and believe in the merit of VoC. The answer lied in understanding what was important to those specific business units and what they needed to know.”

“Initially when we observed insights across customer journey stages, the CX team asked, for instance, ‘what are people telling us when they sign-up?’ But then we flipped our angle and asked ourselves: ‘who does that feedback relate to in our organization?” explained Macfarlane.

This question inspired the build of feedback dashboards that were customized to specific departments with relevant real-time data from customers. Rather than asking staff to trawl through endless verbatim comments from customers, Macfarlane notes that departments had access to “beautiful-looking dashboards tailored to their exact questions and interests”.

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Actioning small changes with big results

Sky Spain’s ecommerce customer journey saw impressive results when VoC data was used to address customer confusion around Sky’s retail partnership with takeaway pizza company Telepizza.

Analysis revealed that customers had no idea how to use the Sky sign-up code on Telepizza takeaway boxes, which was due to the misleading instructions provided. Sentiment analysis identified this particular glitch was triggering frustration and confusion from many individuals.

“We changed one thing in the journey and the sign-up rate went up by 80 per cent,” said Macfarlane. “Suddenly we were getting numbers through this partnership that we hadn’t seen before, just from the ability for departments to listen to customers at scale with their own individualized VoC feedback dashboards.”

“That big result spawned a huge interest in what else could we do and we set a target of completing 15 actions off the back of the insight we were getting. That focus gave our program real impetus and ultimately those VoC-led improvements had direct revenue implications for Sky Spain which had around 100,000 customers at that time.” Macfarlane notes: “We probably made savings of around between €300,000 and 500,000 in a year.”

Macfarlane added: “Listening to what customers say to and about your organization, as broadly as you can, brings insight that is pure gold and that you can’t get at that scale anywhere else.”

Sign up to the upcoming CXN Live: Voice of the Customer online event to hear more insights from Macfarlane on the power of VoC management.