How CX and CSM fit together : Voice Of Customer

Welcome to a new Customer Experience era.

Companies increasingly compete for business based on their user experience rather than their products. What caused this to happen? Product technologies were (and still are) growing at such a fast pace that everyone was steamrolling over everyone else. It looked as follows:

“We added this new feature.” 

‘And we added this feature!” 

“Well, WE added this feature.” 

“THIS feature is the greatest feature of them all!” 

You get the point. 

In today's market, the only way to set yourself apart is to provide your customers with an exceptional experience. As a result, customer experience has become a vital corporate function. Some companies are great at providing brilliant customer experience, and they’ve figured out how to “do it” all the time. What is it they do? They make customers feel GOOD. That is why recent research shows that 89% of companies that lead with customer experience perform better financially than their peers.

In the age of the customer, executives don’t decide how customer-centric their companies are — customers do

Customer experience was once thought of as a support function. "Oh, the customer experience is what they have when they call support?" most people assumed. However, experience has become more appealing and strategic over time, and deservedly so.

We have been in a customer-dominated, subscription-based economy for some time now (Netflix started streaming 24 years ago), where retention of the customer is preeminent. So, how can we tell what kind of consumer experience we're providing? How can we tell how the consumer feels about the service we are providing?

Listening to, analyzing, and acting on consumer feedback is what customer voice is all about. To ensure that you maintain, increase, and build advocates within your client base, you should use tools that measure and track this across your entire business.

You may not recognize how much data you're collecting on your customers throughout the customer journey, whether it's through survey responses, escalations, support tickets, email marketing campaigns, or even one-on-one chats. Information about the consumer is constantly given to us during the customer journey. Capturing that data and storing it in a centralized location where it can be examined is critical to better understanding where the customer is on their journey and what their experience with your brand has been.

The Aberdeen Group conducted a study called “The Business Value of Building a Best-in-Class VoC Program” and found that companies investing in customer feedback programs experience higher customer retention and employee engagement. These same companies also spend less on customer service.” 

A few words about surveys

When I got my first car, my grandfather said, “Looks like you're going to need some insurance.” 

"I don’t think I can afford the insurance,”

I said. 

“Then you can’t afford the car.” he replied

When it comes to cars and insurance, you cannot have one without the other. The same goes for surveys. Do not survey a customer if you are not prepared to immediately respond. 

Let me give you an example from my own life. I had a horrible delivery experience with H&M. I answered to a survey I received, frustrated, and the customer service representative responded the same day. He said he understood my frustrations, explained why my experience that day had been so bad, and then told me what he was going to do to address the situation and prevent it from happening again. I know he values my opinion because he reacted so quickly, and as a result, I will be a lifelong H&M customer.

If you build it, they will come

The voice of customer tooling gathers actionable feedback and analyzes it for patterns. Take all the data and information you have and, once you've gathered it, search for trends and themes that will help better understand and qualify the experience customers have with your brand. Then figure out the barriers and solutions.

You might wonder, "How can I improve the essential parts of the business while focusing on customer value?"

The voice of the customer is louder than it has ever been. Our customers are speaking to us, not with a megaphone, but with a sound system that would make Metallica proud. Let's look on how to develop a voice of the customer capability now that we've highlighted how important it is to your customer success organization. Here are a few easy steps to follow.

Timing of survey

Every time a customer orders a product, H&M sends them a survey. When it comes to your voice of the customer program, the first thing you need to know is when you should start collecting content. Consider the touch points and behaviors that should trigger a survey along the customer journey.

For software and subscriptions, gathering feedback should happen after onboarding and adoption and anytime you introduce a new feature. 

For retail, continuity between all the stages of a customer journey and key business processes from order fulfillment to customer relationship management is something that unified commerce delivers. In an increasingly digitally diverse world today, consumers move between mobile apps to the website to social media within clicks of a few buttons, the consumer journey experience across these channels should be seamlessly interconnected and fluid as well.

Here is an everyday example. A customer discovers a product on offer from Instagram and enters the website to learn more about the product. If the discount is not automatically applied, there is a disconnect in the flow, causing the customer to give up on the purchase.

If you want to optimize the conversion rate across your digital sales funnel, then unified commerce is a must. Not only does it improve the efficiency of your marketing, but it also enhances the overall user experience (hence affinity towards your brand). 

We are always capturing the voice of the customer through all our work actively listening and monitoring the community and social channels, but when we integrate all input in the customer feedback capturing tool, we can collect and analyze customer feedback in real time, creating meaningful insights. We can better understand whether we have hit the mark and if the customer is in a good place. If you see a change in customer usage or behavior or if a project has been fully implemented or a milestone achieved, send a survey. 

Response to Customer Feedback

When it comes to voice of customer surveys, however, if you can't reply to your customers' feedback immediately, you're better off not asking in the first place. This is the second thing you should know while developing your voice of the customer program. Nothing is more irritating than being asked for your opinion and then having it ignored.

When I gave H&M my opinion after a disappointing experience, if no one had reached out to me that day, it would have left me feeling even more disgruntled. If you cannot respond to your customers’ negative feedback on the same day, do not bother. It will only backfire as it shows you are surveying for internal metrics (vanity metrics) and not because you are interested in listening to the customer. 

Content sharing

The third thing you need to do is share your voice of the customer content across your entire company. Even though this ' responsibility is typically owned by customer success, it is truly cross-functional. If people complain about the product or service, we need to share that feedback with those teams. Inversely, if someone has an incredible experience with them, we need to let the team know that, too. Imagine how many surveys are sent out by support or services (or product or marketing) and your CSMs do not have visibility into the responses from their customers. 

Our job as customer success professionals is to disseminate and share the information we get from our voice of the customer tool with the rest of the organization. It is our responsibility to celebrate victories and devise strategies for removing any friction from the customer's experience.

Scaled personalized journeys

There is nothing I despise more than a scripted, automated response. 

“Thank you for your feedback! You have made a difference! Have a good day!” 

Today's technology can adapt and personalize things merely by using your name, which is why scripted responses (especially to negative feedback) irritate me so much. It’s even worse when you receive a response that does not include your name, you will conclude that no one in this interaction is interested about your experience and the company is just chasing profits. You put out the effort to provide feedback, and all they could do was respond with an automatic, impersonal response? They clearly put in zero effort—we call this doing the absolute minimum.

If the response comes back with their name, at least they will say, “Well, they (the system] know who sent them the feedback, that’s good, but it’s likely still automated.” 

Consider what you could do if you tailored the response even further. You'd hit the ball out of the park.

“Thanks for your feedback, Cristina. We value you as a member and want to thank you for staying loyal to us for the last five years. Looks like you put together a few classy outfits this year!” 

When I get a response like that, I am impressed. The response is still automated because the information can be pulled from your CRM system (it is not like someone is sitting there researching customer tenure), but it demonstrates you put more effort into your response—you care about the experience. Not only does the customer feel appreciated, but they are also encouraged to continue to provide you with feedback. And who does not love getting their discount and savings report telling them what they ordered and how much points they saved that year (dresses and shoes was on mine, in case you were wondering). Personalized journeys at scale right there!

Negative feedback should be treated as a customer escalation

If you get negative customer feedback, treat it like a product escalation case. For example:

“The product's on fire! It isn't working and it’s impacting our business!”

So, everyone jumps on a call immediately to strategize how to address the problem. 

Treat negative customer feedback as something that needs to be examined and solved right away. “This is a problem, and we need to go fix it.”

Do not just sit there and say, “Oh, it is a shame they are having a bad experience. Let us make sure we respond within 72 hours.” Potentially too much damage (to their business and your brand) will take place within that time frame. Treat it like an escalation. The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding customer service.

Conclusion

In the end, the voice of the customer is about learning how to improve the customer's experience. It is not about trying to make life difficult for you as a vendor or customer-focused leader. This is not about you; it is about genuine feedback from your customers. So, take it as that. As a customer you can feel it when a company has gone above and beyond for you, it feels...different.  

What you decide to act on does not necessarily need a big, involved plan. Sometimes all it takes is a quick response. When you respond quickly, you get the customer's attention. If you contact that customer within the first hour of receiving their feedback, you can have a powerful, positive impact.

But if going above and beyond for customers was so easy, every business would do it - but they don’t. Why? Well it’s hard to do! It’s hard to create an amazing experience for all of your customers when you have not made it part of the bones of your company.

Customer Success Management solutions that integrate the full voice of the customer and coordinate the actions necessary to close the loop across all communication would be the ideal solution. It would be hard to argue that your Customer Success team would not be better off if they had a system that alerted them when a customer’s usage dropped, or a customer responded to a survey with a low score, or they stopped doing references, or their current invoice is 60 days past due, or, or, or.

If information is power (and it is), more information (assuming it’s relevant) is more power. That’s why the best Customer Success Management solutions integrate all your customer information, and provide notification and workflow to make sure the loop is closed and nothing falls through the cracks.

When the customer makes you or your business the center of what they do in your solution area, you have achieved customer centricity.

Each approach, and each solution, has its place (and price). The choice is obviously driven by value, and the value of a solution is directly tied to the value of your install base. What hidden churns, or unknown upsell opportunities, reside in your customer base? What is the value of integrated customer data across your entire company? What are 2, or 3, or 4 points of retention worth? What would the costs be if you attacked that challenge with people instead of technology? Answering those questions is important. And if your recurring bookings are approaching 25% of your overall company bookings, it’s critical. Act now. Choose wisely.

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