Just because your customers are using your phone service now, or coming to your restaurant for Sunday brunches these last few months, or have been the first people in line to buy your latest gadget model, doesn’t mean they will keep doing so. It’s simply foolish to expect it from this generation of consumers. Customer loyalty may not be dead, but it certainly is not as strong as it had been in the past. Customers are more empowered, and your competitors contribute to that empowerment.
Consider T-Mobile’s enticement to “break up with your carrier” campaign. The promotion invites potential customers to switch to T-Mobile by offering to pay for the early termination fees imposed by the prospect’s current provider. Termination fees are not cheap and deter most consumers from switching even if they’re unhappy with frequent dropped calls or weak signals. Introduced in early 2014, T-Mobile’s revolutionary promo just “un-leashed you and yours from the old rules of wireless forever,” and further eroded the already very fragile state of customer loyalty to network providers.
Demystifying the Customer
With so many options available for the customer, the balance of power has shifted from the seller to the customer. However, despite the many tempting offers out there vying for the customer’s attention, the contemporary customer is not as fickle as one might think. There is one thing that remains constant in customers’ set of preferences: the need to feel valued as a person and not treated as just another account number. To meet this expectation, organizations need to get into the customer’s head.
The customer is a complex creature with varied demands, preferences, and expectations. It’s no wonder there are as many methods available to extract this information from them. Traditionally, there are mailed-in, online and phone surveys, and focus groups to get their pulse. Now, thanks to the meteoric rise of social media over the last decade, we can add social listening to that list. It is unsolicited feedback freely expressed through the social media space, and quite useful in getting candid and uncensored opinions.
Additionally, there’s a concept that’s gained a foothold in recent years: Voice of the Customer (VoC), a market research technique, which according to Ernan Roman, author of the Voice of Customer Relationship Research, uses an “in-depth process of capturing a customer’s expectations, preferences and aversions.”
The Long and Short of VoC Programs
VoC programs take the traditional survey method to the next level by taking into account the whole customer experience, and not just poll the customer’s feedback at the end of a specific transaction.
A good VoC strategy puts a formal system in place to capture, manage, and act on customer feedback to construct an organization’s concept of what the customer needs, wants and expects. It then takes this customer intel to guide management into making intelligent decisions that shape strategic plans and product development initiatives, which will ultimately impact the customer.
Your call may be recorded for quality assurance and training purposes.
When you call in to customer service you’ll often hear an automatic announcement informing you that the call will be recorded. This is perhaps the most literal example of Voice of the Customer because it is the customer’s actual voice that’s being studied.
Many call centers integrate recorded calls to their quality-assurance process. Actual customer voices, including voice inflections, provide a more complete picture of the experience. Trends can likewise be established from these calls, especially when the types of calls, the keywords used and the issues raised spike in a given period. In product launches, for example, organizations get immediate feedback about how customers feel about a certain product feature once the support phones start ringing. But, it’s not enough that the organization becomes aware of what the calls are about. For the insights to be meaningful, they need to be delivered to key people in the organization to significantly improve product research and development, design relevant customer support training modules, and coach reps on the floor.
Conclusion
There are quite a number of good VoC programs in the market and one may be more suitable to your needs than the other. If and when your organization decides to embark on a VoC program, your goal is to have a complete picture of what great customer service looks like from the perspective of your customer. Then take that insight to construct a map for how your organization can provide the exact brand of service your customers demand.
Ultimately, the end result is to build your capability to hang on to the last shreds of loyalty you can reasonably expect from the empowered customer.