You need to put together a business case for a Voice of the Customer Programme. Maybe your boss has asked you, or maybe maybe you’re driving this: We’ve pulled together all the resources you’ll need to produce a business case which demonstrates a need and justifies its costs.
Getting Voice of the Customer right isn’t a ‘nice to have’, it’s a competitive advantage. A VoC programme which not only prioritises insights for service improvement, but – critically — enables real-time service recovery will:
Ultimately, a best-in-class VoC programme improves the bottom line.
The cost of inaction is clear. But how will implementing a VoC programme help? And what’s the difference between a succesful VoC plan which delivers these results, and one which looks good on paper but fails to deliver?
The primary objective of deploying a VoC solution is to systematically capture, analyse, and most importantly, act upon customer feedback. Long-term service improvement initiatives can not prevent imminent attrition. If customers leave before new long-term projects are put in place, they won’t see the benefits of those projects.
Therefore, your priorities are:
One non-objective is quantity of feedback. Whilst it’s important to gather ‘enough’ feedback to have confidence in your decisions; trying to artificially increase your feedback volume can — at best — reduce its overall quality, and — at worst — negatively impact satisfaction scores!
You will require an easy to use platform, able to collect and segment customer feedback across a range of touchpoints.
The solution should be able to report standard CX metrics, like CSAT, NPS and CES, showing both current status and trends; for the organisation as a whole, and allowing drill-down into different business units.
Integration with existing CRM/ERP solutions, both to automate feedback collection, and to increase visiblity of feedback, is highly desirable.
Most importantly, the solution provider needs to be able to act as a genuine partner who will guide and challenge you to implement, and continuously improve a genuinely best-in-class VoC programme.
The solution partner should be able to guide you both strategically: What exactly are you going to do to realise a revenue uplift from VoC; and tactically: Which metrics are you going to use? How should you time feedback collection? How do you pick questions?
If your VoC programme is well-designed, you can expect an increase in customer satisfaction.
This in turn willl lead to a material year-on-year increase in:
But simply putting a VoC process in place doesn’t guarantee these results. You need to design the process for a return on investment from the outset.
To de-risk your new VoC programme, you should adopt a phased roll-out.
You do have a chicken-and-egg problem, though.
Should you start by appointing a partner to help run the project, who can assist with internal stakeholder engagment and help define project goals? Or do you get your stakeholders on board, collectively agree goals, and then appoint a partner to help you hit them?
Naturally we prefer the former. Our entire client-facing team have experience in CX roles, and have worked on projects like yours. We can help you plan a project that’s guaranteed to deliver.
But of course, we’re comfortable joining a project late. We find the strongest teams are flexible, and enjoy being challenged if we come on board and have suggestions for improvement.
Whichever route you choose, your project should move through these phases:
Define your customer journeys, identify their touchpoints. Which channels will you use to reach customers at each touchpoint? Which questions will you ask?
Ensure your team are trained on your platform of choice. Ensure you’re able to extract data in the correct format for internal reporting. And most importantly, ensure the people responsible for turning around customer issues are confident that they have the tools at their disposal to do so.
Once the project is working well on a single customer journey, roll it out to more journeys. Working with your implementation partner, regularly review all touchpoints, and identify if you need to change what you’re asking or how you’re reporting on it.
The main risks we see to large Voice of the Customer implementation projects are:
These risks can all be mitigated.
You should assign priorities to different integrations. It is key to integrate your VoC system with another line-of-business system to ensure that feedback requests can be triggered in a timely way. The reverse (sending customer feedback into a CRM, for example) is desirable, but not essential.
Provide clear communications to all stakeholders about the objectives of the VoC project and how they will be achieved. Engage these stakeholders early, and if necessary, bring in your external partner to act as an advocate for the benefits of doing VoC correctly.
The success of this kind of project can depend on your organisational culture: If your senior leadership do not instinctively understand the benefits of investing in customer experience, a technology solution may not be able to turn this around.
Deploying a VoC solution is a strategic investment towards enhancing your competitive edge and financial performance.
If you’d like support implementing your new VoC project, or just an assessment of your current level of VoC maturity, and some recommendations on how to increase it, get in touch! We love talking to people in your shoes.
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