Understanding the emotional and rational motivations of customers is one of the tips shared by Lorna Brown, B2B customer experience manager at T-Mobile, and David Hicks, founder and president at TribeCX, to build a successful voice of the customer (VoC) program.
Taken from CXN Live: Voice of the Customer 2022, the two experts explained the key considerations VoC practitioners should take into account when looking to create a best-in-class program.
CX leaders are the true voice of the customer
According to Hicks, one of the most important traits that a CX leader can possess is bravery. When you are the one voice of the customer, it is your responsibility to ensure that this voice is heard and that the customer is being understood.
“You are the one person whose job it is to make absolutely sure that the voice of the customer is being listened to and understood. As a result of this you will not always be popular, but it is important that you build in confidence and ensure that the team believes in the metrics,” Hicks notes.
This process is made easier if CX leaders can demonstrate some success stories that demonstrate the efficacy of actioning voice of the customer insights. When teams are confident that the work they are putting in will lead to positive results, this provides motivation to ensure that customers are being heard.
What makes a successful VoC program
Do not draw comparisons to other VoC programs
Brown explained that it is important that CX leaders do not try to compare their VoC program to others when just starting out. She explained that it is easy to look at a full developed program featuring advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and text-to-speech analytics and become disheartened by the amount of work required to reach that stage.
“It is really easy to look at someone with a very sophisticated VoC program with every pipe hooked up at every touchpoint and compare yourself to them. If you can simply start on your journey to get a little bit of listening done and work toward a well-designed program, this is truly a herculean step and any work that is done to understand the customer will be positive,” she explained.
Understand both the rational and emotional
Hicks explained that there are two key components that a VoC program should seek to understand, which are the rational and emotional motivations of customers. Understanding the rational entails determining what the customer has done, whereas understanding the emotional focuses on why they have done it.
In light of this, it is not only important to ask customers for their feedback in the form of trackable metrics like net promoter score (NPS), but also to ask them why they have given the score they have.
According to Hicks: “Once you have both the rational and the emotional, then you can start to identify what levers you need to pull to move the focus of CX in the right direction and work toward your North Star.”
Hicks remarked that if businesses only focus on the rational, they risk CX becoming just a commodity. When brands include the emotional element, this allows them to drive loyalty in the customers they engage with.
VoC programs do not need to be complicated or sophisticated
When beginning a VoC journey, it can be easy to believe that the initiative will require significant investment in training and new technologies for staff to deliver on its goal. According to Hicks, this is not always the case and sometimes simple initiatives can have excellent results if they demonstrate a desire to listen to your customers.
Hicks shared an example of this from his time as a trainee at a food and beverage company that delivered milk to customers’ homes. When many similar businesses were losing customers to supermarket chains, Hicks realized that the ones that were not losing had developed strong relationships with their customers.
Hicks developed the idea of simply handing out postcards with the deliveries that requested feedback from customers. The business was surprised at the amount of feedback its customers had, and senior leadership became very interested in the initiative. The result was that the business identified many customers that were ready to churn due to a recent change in supplier and retained them by simply switching back.
This is proof that you do not need sophisticated technologies or painstakingly designed VoC programs to gather valuable customer insights. As noted by Brown, the first step of a VoC program is the most important one and any work that is done to understand the customer, however big or small, will deliver positive results for the business.