As we go down the journey of working with our customers to leverage their customer conversations as a business asset, we end up working with our customers and partners on developing what we call the Voice of the Customer (VOC) Playbook. The Voice of the Customer Playbook goes beyond the software to the processes, business rules and people that it takes to have the optimal Voice of the Customer program in place. While I don’t want to give-away every aspect of our playbook (you’ll have to engage with us to get the full view) – I will review some of the elements of the playbook to give you a flavor of the kinds of things that are critical to think about when taking on customer listening, analytics and engagement. These are in no order…
- Engagement “rules of the road!” – we published ours both internally and externally – it’s a combination of our customer bill of rights and our commitment to creating an amazing customer experience for our customers. The rules of the road define who can engage, under what conditions and in what role. They include what customers are entitled to ( the information they seek, respectful engagement, response times, help, etc.) They also outline the different channels of engagement – social, private forums, email, chat, etc. As part of this process, create your Social Service Level Agreement (SLA) – you probably already have your customer service SLA (but if you don’t, define that too) and publish both both internally and externally while you are at it!
- Engagement processes – this is so critical for being able to deliver on your engagement rules. How do you handle certain kinds of messages and conversations? Who is supposed to respond and what kind of information can you share? In what situations should you take engagement offline? If a customer makes a complaint in a survey, what next? An offer? These ultimately get “systematized” in your business rules.
- Business rules – these are the literal processes for how information flows. Who gets alerted if a customer or product is having a problem? If a particular issue hits a tipping point and will lead to customer service volume, who should get an email? Who should get a “to do” in their queue? What other people and systems need to be notified? What profiles or customer records need to be updated? Should it show up in the executive dashboards? Defining these who’s, what’s and how’s then translate into specific business process rules in our application and in your existing Business Process Management (BPM) systems. They are critical for your VOC playbook – they define what comes after listening and analytics – they define how you take action and really get the leverage out of your customer data.
- Engagement tracking– Companies have been tracking customer interactions since CRM systems came to be. Now that interactions happen in so many places – inside and outside your four walls – this step in the playbook broadens beyond CRM to tracking social, feedback and other customer engagement activities.
- Figure out how these processes fit with other processes and systems (CRM, BPM, Call Center Desktop, WFO) – You couldn’t drive your Voice of the Customer program without ultimately integrating with existing customer interaction processes and systems. Now you might not start out doing this. For example, if a separate team is engaging via social, they might not initially integrate with the call center system that tracks customer calls. But ultimately companies realize that connecting customer interactions across channels is critical to the customer’s experience. Knowing when someone calls if they are an active “tweeter” about your products or just negatively answered a survey is important, along with that customer’s lifetime value, to how you engage with that customer in that particular call.
These are just a few components of the playbook. We don’t do this alone – we work with some great partners (Cap Gemini, Ants Eye View to name a few) who leverage our technology and then deliver to our customers a complete VOC Playbook. We are happy to share our VOC playbook with you and how it fits into our offerings…just let us know.
Photo Credit: By Capricorn45rbjd
