Voice of the Customer tips from a global business

Fonterra is a publicly traded dairy cooperative based in Auckland, New Zealand, that is responsible for approximately 30 percent of the world's dairy exports. As well as exporting 80 percent of New Zealand’s dairy to the world, it owns a number of international subsidiaries including Anchor, the well-known butter and milk brand.

So how does a global business ensure it remains customer-centric? By running a well-oiled Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.

Make a clear case for VoC

Before embarking on a VoC project it is essential to establish clear goals right from the beginning, with realistic targets so that other parts of the business will buy into it.

Roshena De Leon, voice of customer program manager at Fonterra, says that setting out a clear case at the start was critical to gain support from the rest of the business. “Communicating the case for change was vital to providing the business with a compelling reason to implement a VoC project,” she says. “This can be something as simple as showing stakeholders a declining line chart of something that is valuable for the business.”

Spend time on discovery, not figures

After getting the green light from stakeholders, it can be tempting to go straight to design, but at this stage it is important to spend time analyzing what both success and failure might look like – and not just through KPIs, but by getting real insights from within the business.

“Having too much focus on a KPI was distracting us from focusing on what's really important, which is delivering improved experiences to our customers,” De Leon explains.

This phase also enabled De Leon’s team to get to know who was for and against the program initially. “Getting to know both promoters and detractors gave us the chance to hear from them directly and find out what they are looking for. What are the things that they think need to be delivered well? And what will make them happy about this programme, if it was to be delivered the business?”

Roshana de Leon speaking at All Access: Voice of the customer APAC 2023

Establish who VoC will benefit

It is just as important to establish who the program is for and what it is meant to enable. In the case of Fonterra, it was applicable to everyone within the organization, therefore it needed to encompass the needs of many different roles and departments.

“Each function or group of people within the business has a different way of working. Understanding how they operate is critical, and important in terms of engagement with different parts of the business at the very beginning,” De Leon says.

Her team spent almost a year doing this groundwork before moving on to the design of the program itself, but having a good grasp of what needed to be delivered saved time and questions in the long run, as everyone involved was clear on what the objectives were.

“The buy-in was there. It may not be 100 percent perfect, but it's always easier to do tweaks than apply major changes while you are in the middle of the execution,” she adds.

Customize the program to meet business needs

Part of setting up a VoC program involves researching existing best practices to work out what you should apply to your own program, but it is just as important to customize it to what your organization needs. De Leon says that in practice this means avoid doing things centrally, by getting others involved early in the process. “It really makes a lot of difference, in terms of getting a more holistic design, but also allowing us to see things that normally as a central team you probably would not recognize,” she explains.

To do this, three working groups were created:

• An advisory group consisting of senior leaders provided strategic direction and helped unblock barriers whenever there was a roadblock.
• A group of subject matter experts (SMEs) from different parts of the business helped guide the program’s design and ensured it was fit for purpose for the various functions across the organization.
• A broader working group was created with teams on the ground, who are involved in execution on a daily basis, speaking to customers. This group provided De Leon’s team with a “reality check” in terms of what they were hoping to achieve.

“The combination of these three groups was really valuable in ensuring that we had a more comprehensive understanding of what we were trying to build in the first place,” De Leon says.

Align VoC with the overall business strategy

For a VoC program to be successful it must be aligned with the overall strategy of the company. “For us part of this was really using an approach that was more in line with how the business thinks, and how our different teams could deliver their best in the conversations that we're pulling them into, as we're doing the design,” De Leon notes.

“Our stakeholders can only give us so much of their time, so in terms of workshopping and brainstorming, we made sure that we were giving them a starting point, not a blank canvas, working in a more cross-cultural global context. If we are starting from a blank piece of paper and we have 20 people, we will probably come up with 20 different things and not land a solution or a design afterwards. So it is really important to give them a starting point and build from there.”

Demonstrate value fast

Being able to demonstrate the value that the business will get out of VoC is critical, De Leon says. “A lot of businesses have a short attention span in terms of what the output is and what it means for the business.

"The key here is not to go for perfection, but to demonstrate some quick wins. We were very conscious of starting simple in terms of what we wanted to deliver," she adds. 

This approach allowed Fonterra to be more nimble with the execution, as they were testing and learning along the way.

Bring the project to life with employee stories

Statistics can only tell part of a story, no matter how good they are. Getting people who are part of the organization to share their experience of working with customers, and how they achieved their targets by addressing customer feedback, really brought Fonterra’s VoC program to life.

This also benefits employee engagement by helping to bring people along into the project. “You now have champions who are really keen to work with you, because you have given them the chance to explain what they're working on and what they have achieved.”

Keep other people’s workloads in mind

Keeping things as simple as possible was at the core of Fonterra’s VoC program, both to make its execution easier, and for it to be simple for stakeholders to understand. Being conscious of people’s existing workloads is central to this.

“We work with really busy people,” De Leon says. “We are always competing for attention. The key thing is they understand very clearly what we're trying to deliver and what is the process we're going to go through. So today, when we talk about our VoC program, people can articulate what we are trying to do.”

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