How to make your Voice of the Customer programme work

The path to a successful Voice of the Customer programme is well established. But how do you make sure you are heading in the right direction?

Delivering industry-leading Human Experience for customers takes more than just systems of data collection. HX leaders focus on creating value from that data, capturing its impact, and communicating success across the whole organization, thus multiplying the value.

Future Lab and Forsta work closely together to make sure clients get the Human Experience they deserve. Future Lab’s best-in-class, proprietary approach, known as the Virtuous Value Cycle, is a key part in their client’s successful VoC programs.

Read on to see how you can use the Virtuous Value Cycle to maximise the potential of your current and future VoC programme, no matter where you are in your journey. And make sure to test how you are doing using the checklist we have provided in the end.

Struggling with voice of the customer in your company?

This paper will help.

A Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme is a powerful business process that helps organisations understand their customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviours. Through various data collection and analysis techniques, it provides insight into customer loyalty and engagement, and by proxy – to their willingness to continue bringing their business to the brand.

However, many of those responsible for VoC are still struggling to make things work the way they are supposed to. Our recent interviews with CX professionals have shown that internal buy-in is still difficult, IT implementations are often slow and chaotic, and even after several years of gathering feedback, proving the value of customer feedback remains a challenge.

In this paper, we will address some of the typical pitfalls of VoC programmes and offer the readers solutions from those who have managed to make it work.

After all, it is not an easy task. According to a study conducted in 2019, more than 50% of all Voice of the Customer practitioners were unhappy with their programme. Fred Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter System, who claimed that 95% of companies did NPS wrong, has since come out of retirement to reinforce his message of earned customer profit as opposed to forced or squeezed one. CX budgets, already reduced during the pandemic due to the shift of focus towards faster digitisation, are slashed further in the light of looming inflation and workforce crisis.

According to the latest Forrester prediction, 4 out of 5 programmes will become extinct unless they manage to prove a substantial ROI.

But Customer Experience (or, rather, Human Experience) as a concept is rapidly reshaping as well. While the demand for good CX remains an important driver of organisational transformation, the attention is now on round the clock digital availabilities and seamless omnichannel journeys which are expected to help organisations save money in the long run.

Call centres are developing into customer interaction hubs, sitting on a treasure of hard and soft data waiting to be mined. Chatbots have entered the game with a strong offer of fully or partially automated customer service. Finally, AI and machine learning tools connecting multiple sources of internal and external data are promising to deliver customer insight even without asking for the feedback.

However, these developments are still in the early stages of the innovation curve and will be used mostly by those companies whose CX maturity is already high.

Both B2C and B2B companies recognise a growing need in customer insight which can only be delivered through a robust Voice of the Customer programme.