Customer Experience Management is making the transition from niche to necessity. As more established methodologies and technologies are developed and adopted, companies are beginning to understand that simply having a Chief Customer Officer is not enough. CEM needs to deliver actionable insight that will drive change across the business and create competitive advantage. If it doesn’t deliver Return on Investment, there’s simply no point.

Your business will have its own definition of the customer experience, but it is useful for the purposes of this paper to have a guideline of our own. Gartner defines the customer experience as “the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels, or products. With this definition in mind, let’s consider what is needed to successfully create a program of managing and improving the customer experience.

To begin, we must remember that improving the customer experience is not an end result in itself. It brings about a number of benefits, all of which ultimately affect the bottom line. When you improve your customer experiences, you can increase customer retention, drive more customer referrals, and reduce costs. As these benefits are recognized at a senior level, significant budgets are being allocated to CEM. Such budgets are entirely justified when Gartner research shows that 86% of consumers would pay more for a better customer experience and 73% say they would expand their purchases with a vendor by 10% or more if the experiences were superior.

This paper addresses the vital role played by the Voice of the Customer in creating a customer experience program that will generate ROI. Gartner’s definition shows that it is the customers’ perceptions of your business that matter, and there’s only one way to understand those perceptions—ask.

Market Drivers: Experience the Difference

The trend towards focusing on the customer experience has not come out of nowhere. In most industries customer churn rates are rising, and in this delicate economic climate customers are keen to ensure they’re getting the best deal available to them. More worrisome for particular industries is that the advent of online comparison and switching web sites have made it incredibly easy for customers to change suppliers without even leaving the house. Price only takes you so far. Once you’ve established your optimum pricing policies, probably much in line with your competitors, you need to look elsewhere. Options are limited. You can’t reduce your prices further and you can’t develop an innovative product overnight, so this is where the customer experience comes into play.

Customer experiences drive word of mouth, and bad news travels fast. According to Gartner, “After a poor customer experience, 26% of consumers posted a negative comment on a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter.” 3 This means that, not only do poor customer experiences drive customers away, they also hamper your ability to gain new ones.

There’s no escaping it, customer experiences matter. Furthermore, as an increasing number of companies realize this, the challenge is on to not only improve your existing experiences, but to make them better than those offered by your competitors. To do that, you need a systematic approach, including all your key customer touch points and incorporating a range of feedback channels.

Customer Experience: Managing in a Vacuum

Before you can improve customer experiences you need to understand what you’re offering now and where you’re failing to meet expectations. This may not be as simple as it sounds. Multiple sales and service channels, different regional offices, and varying touchpoints in the customer relationship all provide different experiences.

You can’t create a meaningful CEM program without incorporating the Voice of the Customer. Decisions made in a vacuum are destined to fail, leaving you with disillusioned employees and a lot of explaining to do to the board.

Without the Voice of the Customer, you’ll hit some or all of these problems:

1- You can’t improve experiences you don’t understand

You know which business processes support your customer interactions. But those processes translate into real-life customer experiences, and they may not translate as well as you expect them to. Business processes are designed to support your company internally, but you need to understand if they’re putting up barriers to purchase, confusing customers, or simply making life more difficult for somebody who’s trying to do business with you. Large companies, particularly those which have grown through acquisition, have myriad processes which impact customers and without asking customers about their experiences, you may be irritating or alienating your customer base.

2- Not all experiences are created equal

The customer experience is not a distinct entity. There are Moments of Truth throughout the customer lifecycle, and different customers will use different channels at different times. With most businesses operating online, by telephone, in retail stores, and increasingly through mobile devices, getting a view of the customer experience is not as simple as analyzing a single channel. For example, your contact center agents may offer the best experiences in the industry, but that doesn’t benefit customers who choose to use your web site, which might be badly designed and unreliable.

3- You can’t enter into dialog with mystery customers

While the long-term aim of a CEM program might be to streamline processes to offer better customer experiences, you can’t ignore the customers who have poor experiences on the way to that utopia. When customers are unhappy with experiences, only a fraction of them will actually complain, leaving you unaware of the problem, and them complaining about you to their friends. In many cases, these experiences can be rectified by getting back in touch with the customer and putting things right quickly. But to do that, you need to know who they are and what you did wrong. Again, without the Voice of the Customer coming into your company, you can’t get back to them to resolve problems. Not only do you slow down the process of continual improvement, but you continue to disappoint people along the way.

4- Process-driven improvements don’t change company culture

A successful CEM program must involve employees at all levels of the business, and should change the way in which your employees interact with, and think about your customers. Simply fiddling with processes in an attempt to improve an experience will not engage your employees. That means it won’t change your organizational culture or create a stronger customer focus. Employees may adhere to new processes but that’s not about engaging them with customers, it’s about pressing a different button during the interaction. Employees become far more involved in the customer experience when they hear real feedback attached to real interactions.

5- You might make it worse Identifying ways in which you can enhance the customer experience is only one step. The effects of the changes you make might not be quite what you intended. It may resolve one problem, but create three more. It might confuse customers or force them into channels they’re not comfortable with. Failing to maintain an ongoing dialog with customers prevents you from getting insight into what you’re achieving. The Voice of the Customer is not a moment frozen in time, it must be treated as a conversation that provides value in the long term, and which gives you the ability to say, “This hasn’t worked. Let’s try something else.”

Capturing the Voice of the Customer: Multi-Channel Feedback Platforms

You are not capturing the Voice of the Customer for the sake of it; you are seeking out vital input to your CEM program. In order to operationalize feedback and drive action you need to consider how you will gather the information, share it, integrate it with other information (such as CRM data), and how you can react to it quickly when the situation demands. The Voice of the Customer is not the same as an annual survey of all your customers. Regular relationship surveys are useful, for example, to help improve your marketing efforts and highlight underlying trends, but they don’t give you the context that you need to act quickly to improve customer experiences. To get that context, you need to engage the customer at the time of a specific interaction.

Enterprise Feedback Management platforms provide the most comprehensive approach to bringing the Voice of the Customer into your CEM program. Forrester Research, Inc. states that “EFM is the platform for many organizations’ centralized voice of the customer (VoC) hub that will handle all of their key activities. As such, this is a go-to technology solution for market insights professionals looking to understand the consumer, monitor and measure customer experience across multiple touchpoints, and conduct standalone customer research. Underpinning your CEM program with Voice of the Customer technology is the standard for efficient, effective insight into your customer experiences.

Such platforms give you the ability to capture the Voice of the Customer at the point the experience takes place. This means that the feedback you receive is specific to a particular situation and while the experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind. This “in-the-moment” approach increases response rates and data accuracy, so you know that you are basing decisions on solid information.

VoC platforms enable you to ask customers for feedback over multiple channels. This is crucial when your customers interact with you through these multiple channels. Whether a customer used your web site, your store, or called into your contact center, you can gather timely, accurate information through the appropriate channel. For example, if a customer made a purchase online, it may make sense to direct them to a web survey, either through a pop-up on your site, or by email invitation. For people who used your contact center, you can divert them into an IVR survey to immediately gather feedback on that interaction. Again, it’s about getting the right feedback at the right time, in the way that best suits your customer.

VoC platforms also make it easy for you to share data across your business. Gathering feedback is only the first step, and if that feedback languishes in silos, then its value is significantly limited. The customer experience is influenced by processes that encompass many departments, so you need to share feedback to ensure that the right stakeholders can identify how their department can improve those experiences. Dynamic reporting dashboards provide clear insight, while being able to drill down enables you to get into the detail of individual interactions. The ability to share feedback in the way that best suits your stakeholders is as important as gathering that feedback in the way that suits your customers. To address issues immediately, automated alerting systems can send an email to the person best placed to take action, ensuring that while insight is analyzed, businesses can resolve individual issues.

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What to Look For

When you are ready to start bringing the Voice of the Customer into your CEM program, there are some key features to look for that will ensure you’re able to benefit fully from the opportunities above.

1- Multi-Channel Feedback Capture

All feedback platforms will offer web as a channel. This is now the most common form of data collection. It enables access to a very broad customer base and enables customers to provide their feedback in their own time. IVR is also a very powerful way to gather feedback while you have a customer on the telephone, and increasingly mobile is a channel which must be seriously considered. Mobile devices can also capture rich media such as photos and video which help to truly capture the customer experience, particularly in retail, tourism and leisure situations. It enables businesses to capture in-the-moment insight and is hugely engaging which increases the accuracy of the feedback customers provide.

Even if you only need a single channel as you start out, it’s likely that you’ll want to expand your program, so you should ensure that your provider has the facilities for you to add more channels as you need them. Setting up a successful Voice of the Customer program is not an overnight task, so avoid the requirement to repeat it in 12 months if you need to add a new channel.

2- Clear Reporting

Customer feedback and customer insight are not the same thing. Without reporting that gives you the information you need to take action, then feedback is nothing more than a series of snapshots of how your customers feel about a particular interaction with your business. Consider what information you need, who needs access to it, and how detailed that information needs to be. Look for a solution that enables you to view both the big picture and detail in a single place. This will reduce the time that stakeholders have to spend looking for the crucial piece of data that they need. Ensure that whatever channel you collect feedback through, it all ends up in a single report—silos will only reduce your ability to gain insight.

Create Key Performance Indictors around your CEM program and ensure that your reports are geared around those metrics. KPIs, such as Net Promoter Score5 not only provide focus, but also give executive management an immediate view into the general direction of the program, helping to cement senior buy-in. Seek out a vendor that offers live reporting. This reduces the lag between what customers are saying and you taking action, and makes it more “real” to your employees.

Finally, remember that the verbatim statements that customers provide, whether in text or verbally via an IVR survey are an incredibly rich source of insight. While rating scales and simple, closed questions deliver value, seek out a solution that can provide text analytics to ensure you’re not missing the real message that your customers are providing. Wading through thousands, or even millions, of customer comments is not feasible, but using technology to categorize comments to provide sentiment analysis and identify key drivers of behavior certainly is.

3- Alerting

Your CEM program should drive changes that deliver better customer experiences. Whether that means smoother business processes, better trained staff, or making more sales channels available, it’s a long term project and won’t be achieved overnight. However, you can improve experiences before you reach that stage. Your feedback platforms should include an alerting function that helps you to immediately respond to situations where your customer has come away from their interaction dissatisfied. When a customer receives a survey and states that they were unhappy, pre-defined rules will forward the details of that customer to the relevant person within your business. You can follow up with the customer and rectify the situation, providing an excellent customer experience and preventing disparaging word of mouth.

4- Share and Integrate Your Feedback Data

Along with being able to create reports that give you the information you need, sharing data is vital to get real value out of customer feedback. It doesn’t really matter how you share the data, as long as it is in a format that people in your company will understand, embrace, and use. Live reporting dashboards, as highlighted above, are the most interactive, up-to-date way to do this. Look for a solution that offers personalized reporting functionality. This will allow, for example, a customer services manager to see data only relating to his team, while a CEO would see the top-level view that shows general trends. This will help to maintain that crucial executive-level buy-in to the program.

Portals like these might not be suitable for all your users; ensure that you are able to easily export the data in a format that suits your company. MS PowerPoint is one of the most popular options, so if this would suit your business better (e.g. to share amongst contact center staff), then ensure that you can regularly and quickly export live data because sharing out-of-date information will quickly cause employees to lose interest.

Finally, consider whether you should integrate your feedback with other customer data. Your CRM database, among other such tools, holds a wealth of information which may be enhanced by the addition of feedback. Rather than requiring stakeholders to log into multiple systems to find all the information they need, channeling it all into a single place may be a more appropriate option.

Next Steps: The road to Great Customer Experiences

A successful Voice of the Customer program must deliver actionable insight that enables you to drive change throughout your organization. By helping you to identify failing business processes, pinpoint training requirements and find new marketing opportunities, you can generate real ROI simply by listening to your customers, and acting on what they tell you. Launching into a VoC program without a clear plan of what success looks like is a recipe for failure. It’s important that you define key areas, such as the customer journey and clarify what outcomes you are looking for from the program. Only then can you design a program that is capable of delivering the wins you’ve identified.

The role of technology in a Voice of the Customer program is vital in ensuring that you can build the multi-channel program that you’ve designed. If a key part of your interaction with customers is through a contact center, you must select a platform that can deliver feedback through IVR. Similarly, if you have a significant youth audience, or need access to situational feedback, then mobile must form part of your feedback channel. Like all customer touch points, your Voice of the Customer program must offer engaging experiences to your customers, regardless of the channel with which they choose to interact with you.

Your technology must also engage your employees and enable them to take action where they need to. Whether it’s alerts that drive immediate activity with individuals or tailored, interactive reports that give your board members the insight they need to make longer-term decisions, you need to establish what information each team needs and embrace a technology platform that can provide it.

Finally, you have to go back to the start and do it all again. A Voice of the Customer program must be a constantly evolving process to ensure you continue to reap the rewards of customer feedback. You need to consider how a range of factors, both internal and external, have impacted the targets you set and re-evaluate and re-set them to ensure you’re focusing on the right areas. The job of listening to the Voice of the Customer is never over – you just get better at listening.