Forsta Compass

Visualizing a VoC program using Forsta Compass

A Voice of the Customer program operates at multiple levels: strategic and tactical, leadership and front line, financial and operational. And at any given time, all these and other elements are operating at slightly different speeds and with differing trajectories. Understanding your progress with each element is key to planning next steps to ensure you continue to drive business value. Doing this will keep your key stakeholders on board for the long haul.

Forsta Compass is a methodology that defines the maturity of a VoC program as part of a larger customer experience (CX) strategy, enabling businesses to map their activities according to five key elements; Vision, Design, Engagement, Action and Value.

Forsta Compass

Forsta Compass is the industry’s only independently scientifically validated Customer Experience (CX) Program Maturity Assessment Model. In conjunction with Rockbridge Associates Inc. (www.rockresearch.com) and professors from the University of Miami and St. John’s University, Forsta introduces an assessment that ensures your organization is working on the right elements that drive customer experience success.

By focusing on these five elements, Forsta’s Voice of the Customer consultants work with you to build a visualization, like the one below, that shows where your program stands. This clarifies which activities are well underway, and where you’re just getting started. You can then establish key areas of focus linked to business outcomes.

Vision

A clear strategy links your VoC program to key business priorities. How will the feedback and insight gathered align with customer, operational and financial goals? How will your success be measured? Is the business prepared to act on the data? Don’t try to do everything at once, and instead create a roadmap as a guide to your future program. Ensure that you have a clear strategy, but think carefully about the phasing of your program so that your organization is aligned around reporting of insights, action and measurements. Take time to tweak as the business changes, which usually happens often.

Design

You must design your program for two audiences: internal stakeholders and your customers. For the business, your VoC program must be relevant, robust and aligned with action. This is where the customer comes in. It’s vital that the customer feels that you are going to do something with the data, so be clear about what you are asking for and why. You need a consistent approach across touchpoints to allow the business to prioritize key actions.

Engagement

A successful customer-facing organization has the client embedded in its culture. VoC and CX programs can help to drive this culture change by providing actionable, engaging information about the customer. Remember to tell the story and bring the customer to life across the business. Also make sure you share the results with all employees, and empower them to use the data to suggest actions.

Action

Action is what CX and VoC are all about – and you must shout out early results. The challenge comes as your program matures and those quick wins are over. Big wins in the later stages of a VoC program aren’t impossible, but they’re harder to come by because they’re often more long-term, strategic changes that take time to implement. To ensure you’re able to uncover what those actions are, you’ll need to run key driver analysis harnessing advanced and predictive analytics. And most importantly, you’ll need to show that your VoC program contributes a steady stream of insight to support re-designed experiences for your customers and employees.

Value

When you design your program, you will set expectations on how you plan to deliver value. For example, if you can reduce your churn rate by 10 percent as a result of following up with unhappy customers and resolving their issues, you could increase revenue by $500k. As your program evolves and matures, you’ll not only need to deliver on those projections, but continue to seek out new ways to deliver value across the company. With adequate planning while developing your vision for the program, you can and should project and measure Return on Investment in this critical proving-value stage.

Getting started

During a customized Forsta Compass CX Assessment, Forsta’s CX consultants will work with you to map your CX and VoC maturity to produce a roadmap to define the best next steps for your program. The process include

Self-assessment scoring

Your organization’s CX maturity score, key areas scores and individual attribute scores, which collectively tell you“where you stand.”

Prioritization

Based on self-assessment impact and feasibility measures, the analysis here will answer for you the question: where do we start?

Recommendations

Informed by the prioritization, we provide our next steps recommendations to take your CX program to the next level.

Forsta Compass is unlike any other CX assessment available. With the assurance of independent, academic validation on the elements critical to success of a CX program, Forsta clients can answer internal questions about their program with confidence. Forsta Compass is available to Forsta clients, and is administered by consultants with years of experience in the discrete discipline of customer experience. We know the value of ensuring that your VoC program is perfectly tuned to your broader CX program, and shows its value every day!