Voice of the Customer as a Leadership Resource

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Do you currently have a VOC (Voice of the Customer) program in your organization? Are you or your marketing department conducting surveys on a regular basis? If you are, what kind of data are you receiving? Customer Satisfaction Scores? Net Promoter? Brand Awareness? Product Satisfaction?

All great data, but too often contact center leaders overlook the value a VOC program can bring to leaders. In fact, it can be one of the most powerful tools to help improve employee performance, improve morale, improve turnover, and increase manager efficiencies.

First lets review the 3 basic employee segments you have in your organization.

1. Top Performers. Your rockstar agents!
2. Average Performers. They do good work everyday.
3. Poor Performers: These are the people you wish you could give back to the community!

Here is a typical snapshot of how these employees are allocated across a team or organization.


Now lets review how a front-line manager spends their time with employees.


So you see the problem. Leaders often spend 80% of their time with a small percentage of employees – not to mention it’s their worst performers!

And here is the rub… Your top performers are more than likely wired that way. They are motivated to excel, regardless of how much time you spend with them. Don’t misunderstand, top performers need a coach to challenge them or they get burnt out. A great way to reward top performers is to give them a problem to solve or teach them new things.

The real challenge is that the largest employee segment, average employees, is your largest segment and often most ignored… and yet they do require attention to improve. They rely on encouragement and acknowledgment, yet simply go unnoticed.

And then we have the problem employees. The folks that have us wrapped up in paperwork and action plans until we start to go insane.

So here is how customer surveying can help. Customers spend time with all of your employees every day. So if you start surveying customers, they can help you encourage and motivate you staff. Especially the average employee segment. The key is to ask questions about the agent they interacted with and then share the data with your employees. The closer you can get to real-time feedback delivery to agents, the more powerful the results. Ask how the agent did. How was their energy level? Did they seem to care? Did they take initiative? Certainly use some quantitative questions, but don’t lose sight of the fact that employees respond to “words” much better than any number. Don’t be afraid of text response questions simply because they are difficult to quantify.

Think about this: Which would be more meaningful to an agent?

Category: Empathy
Score: 3.87

Or this?

“Julie did help me process the order, but I was so upset about our car being stolen I couldn’t keep from crying. Julie didn’t seem to notice. It made me feel awkward…”

Which will impact Julie more? Which helps Julie “buy in” to the fact that should could be more empathetic?

So if your budget is tight, and your plate is full, consider putting customers to work coaching, motivating and improving your employees. After all, customers show up every day…hopefully

That’s all for now. I’d love to hear your thoughts about numbers!

Are you customer driven? Do you leverage the voice of the customer in improving your employees? Are your customers working for you to reduce operational costs while improving employee performance?

Take the free Customer Driven challenge and put your customers to work today. Visit the Tamer Partners Corporation website at www.tamerpartners.com to find out how!

Scott O. Thomas

Senior Partner @ TPC

Customers @ Your Service!
twitter: http://twitter.com/scottothomas | linkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/scottothomas

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Scott Thomas
Scott O. Thomas is the Senior Partner with Proponisi. Proponisi provides award winning enterprise product solutions and professional services to customer driven organizations. Greek for "coaching", the word Proponisi reflects our software's ability to leverage your customers to coach, encourage and provide feedback directly to your employees.

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