Effective Listening to Voice of Customer (VoC)

Once you have established that customer service is paramount to successfully running your service business, the obvious next step is to devise systems and procedures that can help you effectively learn, combat and manage customer grievances and any shortfalls in service levels from customer expectations.

This is a complex process, though not overly so, and can be succinctly summarised in the following points:

Being concerned

The very first step is to view each customer as a potential detractor, and thus being concerned about any untoward reviews from them. Studies have shown that a single negative review can offset 12 positive reviews. This puts an ever greater pressure on management and support staff to be actively involved with each and every customer, so that no customer leaves disgruntled. The caveat here is that being concerned alone won’t solve the problem, unless supplemented with the following actions.

Installing effective feedback tools

An effective listening to voice of customers would work only when effective tools to collect feedback are in place. While the definition of ‘efficiency’ in the context of feedback collection tools may be subjective, there are three things that any feedback collection mechanism must provide for it to be deemed worthy of consideration:

• Ability to capture vast amount of data – Only an innovative and unconventional feedback collection method will excite customers to leave their feedback.
• Ability to manage all collected data – A massive amount of data is meaningless if not stored in a format conducive to drawing business insights and trends of customer behaviour.

Ability to allow immediate addressal of customer grievances

As important as it is to store and record trends of customer behaviour, it is equally essential to solve service-related issues that customers may have, while they are still on-premises as this can eliminate the possibility of a customer venting their dissatisfaction online. A study has gone so far as to report that 82% of customers say that the most important factor leading to a great customer experience is having their issues resolved quickly.

Given that a manager’s focus is on effectively listening to his customers, a logical conclusion would be the installation of a strong and reliable feedback collection procedure.

Understanding your customers and their complaints

This is basically a continuation of the definition of an effective feedback collection system, but merits a separate mention. Immediate addressal of customer complaints becomes feasible only with a thorough knowledge of what the exact issue is and where the grievance has arisen from. Gaps in service quality can be plugged in only with an in-depth understanding of why and how the lapse in service occurred in the first place. Complete data capturing of customers can help in a more robust loyalty module allowing personalized service to regular patrons.

This points to the development of a process that naturally tends towards a “systematic listening” and address of customer grievances.

Empowering customer-concerned employees

With the installation of a sound feedback collection system, comes the added responsibility of delegating responsibilities appropriately to the front-line, customer facing staff members. Doing so will ensure that all customer grievances are handled in a timely and accurate fashion.

An effective feedback collection tool, should, therefore, provide a means for assigning tasks to staff members, particularly the customer-centric staff. It would be even better if this mechanism could work in real-time, thereby resolving customer complaints quickly and ensuring cent per cent customer satisfaction.

Overall monitoring of customer’s behaviour

With on-premise resolution of customer grievances taken care of, the real value of a customer feedback system can be extracted from its ability to track trends in customer satisfaction and behaviour over time.

Customers rate a business over several parameters – pricing, service quality, attitude of staff while interacting with customers to name a few. Their overall satisfaction of interacting with the business will then, not be limited to just the quality of service provided but will depend on a delicate balance of these parameters, based on what weight they assign to each of them. An important thing to note is that these preferences may change over time and vary across customer segments. In an effort to keep all customers equally satisfied over time, these changes must be carefully measured and appropriate actions taken.

An effective feedback system will allow business managers to understand their customers changing preferences and make business decisions in accordance with those changes. This will truly include the customer’s voice in implementing business strategies.

Getting involved personally

Last but certainly not the least, nothing makes a customer’s day more than the pleasure of having his issue resolved instantly, and that too with the knowledge that their servers took a “personal” interest in their service. Establishing a personal connection with customers is becoming a vitally important aspect of service-oriented businesses.

Therefore, merely assigning customer complaints to staff members may no longer help the business acquire and retain customers, but taking a “personal” interest in the resolution of their customer’s issues will. Since this personal connection will help the customers achieve a sense of belongingness with the business and there will then be a higher likelihood of them returning again and again.

An effective methodology to listen to customer’s voice, then, remains incomplete without a mechanism to getting involved personally with the customers.

Managing a business that does not sell tangible goods but intangible service can be tricky, but a task that can be accomplished if the basics are done right – listen to what the customers are saying, respond effectively and analyse their feedback to make sure things don’t go wrong again.

https://goo.gl/MyMyje

3 Ways Customer Listening Powers Marketing Effectiveness

Ernan Roman

Today customers can make sure that their voice is heard like never before. And, if marketers don’t have measures in place to listen, they are turning a deaf ear to potentially significant problems and missing out on essential insights for improving their customer experience.

Following are 3 ways to leverage customer listening and examples of how companies are putting these strategies into action.

1. Realize that Customer Listening (and Responding) is a 360-Degree Commitment.

Engagement with customers includes business partners who are also the face of your brand. So, how every aspect of your brand listens to the voice of your customer and responds is key.

For example, NASCAR made the decision to revamp its marketing and listening in five key areas. But that’s not where it ended. NASCAR also encouraged its business partners and drivers to do the same.

“We developed an industry action plan,” stated Steve Phelps NASCAR CMO, “… A plan for digital and social, a plan for driver star power–and within each plan, [we came up with] a number of different action items … [In an] effort to be thought leaders who provide the best available experience to our fans. We strongly encourage those across the entire landscape of the sport to embrace digital and social media — from drivers and teams to tracks and corporate partners.”

2. Customers are More Than Numbers, They are People, Talk to Them … (And listen.) 
Data gives you a good view of what customers are doing. However, it is not going to tell you why or give you theemotional factors like a conversation. Personal interactions can be more valuable than all the big data you will ever collect. 

Starting in October, Flow and Columbus Business Solutions, a telecommunications company serving the Caribbean, asked customers to tell them how they felt. Michele English, Columbus’ executive vice president and chief customer officer noted, “Our plan is to significantly enhance our customer ‘listening’ systems and ensure that feedback is integrated into our daily decisions and connected to our customers’ experiences across the organization… we have to design and implement [operational processes] to ensure that every customer touch point in the organization can support our customers’ needs efficiently and effectively… We now look forward to more customer feedback. “ 

The Company designed an easy to use online customer survey and sent communications to customers to encourage them to complete the survey and tell the company what matters. 

3. Make Conversation (and Listening) Easy with Social Communities 
Online communities enable the exchange of ideas in discussion forums, polls and social media. They provide brand information, mitigate problems and provide opportunities for a collaborative two-way conversation.

Southwest Airlines launched a Listening Center to monitor its online communities using a keyword-based listening tool that pulls in mentions from social platforms. The Listening Center monitors insights in real time to quickly identify issues and immediate engagement opportunities. Customers can connect their Twitter handles to their Rapid Rewards frequent flier numbers to get personalized services. Southwest Airlines also leverages the Listening Centers to send apology letters for delays, find new opportunities for engagement and implement company-wide customer care. 

Alice Wilson, social business advisor for Southwest’s marketing organization notes that sharing the information collected is the key to listening success. “The customer feedback means something different to each [department] and can inform each group in a different way…From a social care standpoint, [employees] want to help assist and resolve. But somebody from the marketing team may be looking at that [data and ask], how do we alter communications to help these future situations?…The point is not to keep it as a silo.”

Keys to Effectively Listening to the Voice of Your Customer:

• Listening should be at the heart of your marketing strategy.
  Listening lets you understand the “why” of what your customers are doing and experiencing so that operational issues, communication, and experience can be overhauled for a more positive overall brand impression.
• Learnings from Listening Needs to be Shared with Every Part of your Business.
  Having data without acting on the implications does nothing for your business. Set standards for how the insights from your listening programs are regularly integrated and shared with all departments so that changes and actions are put in motion to respond to customer needs and comments.
• Meaningful Dialogue Based on Listening.
  Develop authentic, honest and direct conversations based on listening, which lead to meaningful connections and two-way dialogue.
• Use Listening to Develop Strategies.
  Once you launch programs to listen, develop means for incorporating these learnings into new strategies that address the issues identified in customer conversations. Put in motion ongoing review of the data collected through listening programs so that you have a clear roadmap that delineates what customers are expecting, their pain points and their current/future demands.
• Listening Objectives Must be Established.
  If you don’t know how you are going to listen, you will not be able to hear what your customers are trying to tell you. Whether you have the means to set up a full scale listening center, a social monitoring program, a survey, or a call center monitoring program, know what you are implementing and how you will regularly harvest and utilize the insights.

In summary, customers have a lot to say and they want you to listen. The good news is that customers generally have valid concerns and smart advice to offer. Marketers and customers will both benefit if the marketer creates multichannel ways of listening to customers and processes for acting quickly on their input.

The seven strategy questions

This list of questions is based on a book by Robert Simons, a Harvard professor (“Seven Strategy Questions” (Harvard Business Press, 2010). It relates to strategy execution more than strategy formulation, because the advice is to continuously ask these questions in order to fine tune the focus of the organization and stay ahead of the competition. The questions are:

• Who is your primary customer? Have you organized your company to deliver maximum value to that customer?  
• How do your core values prioritize shareholders, employees, and customers? Is everyone in your company committed to those values?
• What critical performance variables are you tracking? How are you creating accountability for performance on those variables?
• What strategic boundaries have you set? Does everyone know what actions are off-limits?
• How are you generating creative tension? Is that tension catalyzing innovation across units?
• How committed should your employees be to helping each other? Are they sharing responsibility for your company’s success?
• What strategic uncertainties keep you awake at night? How are you riveting everyone’s attention on those uncertainties?

If you don’t feel like reading the book, there is also a related HBR article that explores the key issues (link).

https://hbr.org/2010/11/stress-test-your-strategy-the-7-questions-to-ask

How Well Do You Know Your Customer?

Dave Brock

My friend, Tim Ohai, has a brilliant bet he makes with sales people.  He puts a $100 bill on the table, saying, “If you can talk about your customer, their problems, opportunities, and challenges for 20 minutes, without ever mentioning your products, the $100 is yours.”

The tragic part of this story, is that Tim has never had to pay the $100!

The unfortunate imbalance is, any sales person can talk for hours on end about their products, pausing occasionally to take a breath or a sip of water.  They can fill whiteboard after whiteboard with facts, figures, feeds and speeds.  When they run out, they can pull out decks of Powerpoint pitches, endless product brochures, and case studies.

But that’s not what the customer cares about.  That’s not the help they need.  They can get all the same stuff on the web, downloading brochures, sitting on webinars, talking to others.

What customers really need and value is someone who can talk about their customers, competitors, markets, industries, and their own companies.  Customers struggle to get through the day to day, so they need help learning about opportunities they may be missing, things they could improve, ideas for growing, or simply reducing the stress and problems they face daily.

In virtually every survey asking customers about the biggest problems they have with sales, the following issue is always in the top 5:  “They don’t understand me, my company, our markets, or our business!”

Going back to Tim’s story, he reports, on average, sales people can only go on a little more than 3 minutes before they are forced to start talking about the product.

Stated differently, sales people can only speak for about 3 minutes on the things most important to the customer!

It’s no wonder we have problems engaging our customers!  It’s no wonder why customers don’t want to talk to us until they are 57-70% through their buying process.  We are irrelevant to them until that point.  We create no value on the things that are most critical to them.

There are two levels to this problem.

The first is organizational.  Billions are spent on training every year.  The bulk of that investment is training on products and services.  Some of that training is on sales skills/techniques.  Some, in fact, may be on how to deliver insight, but not about the insight itself.  If you sell to financial services companies, when was the last time your company took you through comprehensive training on the financial services industry?  What is the structure of the industry (it’s hugely diverse with lots of business models)?  What are the key drivers, trends, issues?  Who are their customers?  Who are the competitors?  What are the strategies of the key players?  How are the companies organized/structured, how do they work, how are they measured?  What are their biggest problems/challenges/opportunities?  What are the problems we help them solve?  What are the things they are talking about, what should they be talking abut?

Name an industry or segment, to be relevant to our customers, being conversant in these issues is table stakes.  If you are a sales or corporate executive, it’s critical to provide this foundation to your sales people.  They have to understand how businesses work, what drives the decision makers we work with in those businesses.

The second element of this problem is at a sales person level, and their preparation to meet with customers.  Who are they meeting with?  What’s their background?  What’s their role?  What are their concerns (or what are they likely to be)?  What’s happening with the company?  How are they performing?  Have there been any big changes?  And the list goes on.  Unless we research and prepare, we aren’t equipped to talk about the things the customer most cares about.

Sales managers, try this in your next team meeting:  Take a tip from Tim, put $100 (or the equivalent in your currency) on the table.  Ask your sales people to talk for 20 minutes about the customer, their strategies, challenges, opportunities, performance, markets.  They have to do this without mentioning your products or services.  It’s a bet you want to lose!