Growing a Voice of Customer Program

Brian Hansen

Hello, GGR! 

I am looking to make our VoC program more substantial and official. We use NPS and CSAT today and capture product feedback in ProductBoard, so some of this is operationalized. I would like to take this a step further. 

If you were moving your VoC out of it's early stages into something scalable, what are the key steps you would be thinking about? Any experience/thoughts would be appreciated! 

Dayna Trautwein

Hey Brian! Following this thread because I'm also building this out at the moment. Time for us to catch up!

So that I'm adding some substance to the conversation, and while not a totally scalable program, but we're building out a functional customer advisory board and exploring community forums and events. We're earlier stage than y'all, but it's something that is also drives our advocacy program.

Brian O'Keeffe

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Brian O'Keeffe

Love the topic.

Evan Klein

Some thoughts:

• Listening posts at key touchpoints (i.e. Sales Win-Loss, Post-onboarding survey, key acct interviews, churn interviews, support ticket survey, CAB) used for continuous learning and improvement.
• Reporting / insights / analysis shared with all members of the ELT so every leader considers how their organization can contribute to a differentiated customer experience
• Strong closed loop processes, so customer feedback is acknowledged and acted upon
• A focus on Detractor remediation to minimize churn risk
• Activation / mobilization of Promoters so their advocacy is leveraged for sales, marketing, CS, etc.
• Continuous reinforcement of the company culture of customer-centricity / service excellence (rewards & recognition, story-telling, hiring & advancement, etc,)
• A VoC Championship Team - cross functional team of passionate CX/CS folks to help execute on many of these items
• A neutral, 3rd party to assist where needed (objective, more candid feedback, unbiased analysis, application of B2B best practices, maximizing participation and engagement across all programs, etc.)
• A mechanism to invite feedback from employees on what obstacles are getting in their way of providing better service (to internal and external customers), or ideas on what they feel management should do to improve the customer experience
• Strong customer communication to share what the company is doing to make their experience better and draw the clear line from feedback (through surveys, interviews, in-app) to investments, priorities, roadmap, etc.
• Strong messaging for sales to emphasize the company's commitment to CX as a clear differentiator

There are more but hopefully this is a good start. :)

Evan

rdesmarais

If you wish to expand your VoC program, you may wish to consider another customer sentiment metric which is refreshingly different than NPS, CSAT and CES. It's called the Customer Perceived Value (CPV) metric and it is offered by a company called TheySaid. It's worth checking out because unlike the other metrics, the CPV is actionable and not a lagging indicator so you can be much more proactive along the customer journey.

I am not able to post links yet but if you Google "TheySaid", you will find them (theysaid.io)

Brian Hansen

@rdesmarais, I actually went to the Nuffsaid/They said podcast to listen back to VoC episodes! I'll check them out. Thanks. 

Brian Hansen

Thanks, @Evan Klein. Those are great nuggets. I'm wondering how to break them down into "tactical steps 1-5" type of view. 

Anita Toth

Hi @Brian Hansen. This diagram might help you with scaling your VOC.

The best approach is to add one new activity at a time. The biggest mistake people make when scaling their VOC is to add in more monologue-type activities (surveys) and not enough dialogue activities (interviews, focus groups, community groups, etc.)

Since you're already collecting NPS and CSAT, the best thing is to add in something that captures deeper data. Look at the list under "Dialogue" to help you determine which activity is the best one for you.

Once you've implemented it and it's running smoothly, then you want to add in another VOC type activity.

The best way to determine which activity you should add next is to ask "What data gaps do I have?" and "Which of these VOC activities is the best one to fill that gap?"

@Dayna Trautwein thought this might be helpful for you too.

Let me know! 🙂

Amy Long

Thanks for the recommendation @rdesmarais!!!

I head up CS at TheySaid and would be happy to share more with anyone interested. We are evolving VoC to make it easy for you to set up a journey based campaign and also introduce CPV (Customer Perceived Value) as a compliment to NPS and CSAT.

Our Journey based campaigns allow you to gather actionable feedback from your customers and while we have quite a few customers using us for their "tech touch" or pooled CS segments - we are introducing it into more Enterprise segments to implement a hybrid approach.

Email me for more info or a quick demo: amy@theysaid.io

Brian Hansen

That's helpful advice, @Anita Toth. I like the idea of going slowly and smartly. Thank you!