Almost every C-suite executive claims that their company is — or desires to be — customer-driven. However, the truth is that very few executives base their business strategy and daily decisions on an intimate understanding of the customer and real customer insights.

Constructing a customer-centric business starts at the top.
If you truly want to leverage Voice of the Customer it has to start with you.

For Voice of the Customer (VoC) to be a difference-maker, the entire executive team must make VoC a key driver in the business and omnipresent in the corporate culture.

What does it take to make this happen?
What level of commitment is required from you and your executive team? Let’s delve into what it takes to define and manage a winning VoC initiative and find out. But first, let’s define what VoC is:

“Voice of Customer is a formal initiative used to gain collective insight into customer needs, wants, perceptions and preferences through direct and indirect questioning. VoC goes beyond just hearing what customers are saying to actually listening, taking what is heard, deriving meaning and intent from that, and turning it into action.”

Based on this definition, do you have or are you ready to launch a formal VoC initiative across your business? Before you answer that, let’s break down the definition a little further.

A Formal Initiative
For anything to be considered a formal business initiative, it must have complete CEO and C-suite endorsement and support. It also needs to be comprehensive in nature. This is true for any successful VoC initiative. To be successful, VoC initiatives must be driven from the top-down and drive improved decision making across multiple dimensions of your business. VoC must be viewed as a foundational element for how your strategy evolves, your culture is formed and how your customers are served over time.

Gain Collective Insight
VoC is not one-dimensional. It is not simply capturing customer satisfaction data. To be successful, VoC initiatives must be intentionally designed to capture multidimensional insights from your customer experience and across critical elements of the business. From sales, to product development, user experience, fulfillment / delivery, customer support, etc. What’s important is that you identify specific areas of the company that can benefit most from VoC insights and how those insights will be used to improve or change the way the business operates moving forward.

Listen to What Customers Are Saying
Most C-suite executives focus on analytics and business impact too early in the VoC process. They forget that before employees will care about a VoC initiative, they must first understand how their decisions and actions actually impact the customer. For this to happen, they need to hear real stories from the Voice of the Customer. This means your C-suite must make a concerted effort to elevate real customer experience stories across the organization. Employees must literally see that customer stories are part of your culture. By sharing real stories in daily work activities, employees will start listening to, understanding and empathizing with your customers. Remember, they won’t care about metrics and data until they care about the customer. So, the entire executive team must be willing to invest a significant amount of time sharing real customer insights and stories throughout the business.

Turning it Into Action
Only after you have defined how VoC insights will benefit specific areas of the business, demonstrated C-suite commitment, and elevated real customer experience stories in your culture — can you expect employees to be engaged in the process. With these cornerstones in place you are ready to start analyzing and acting on the data / insights you capture. Now, comes the most important part of the VoC process — taking action. You must define specific actions you will take based on the data you are collecting. How will you use VoC insights to …

  • Evolve your go-to-market strategy?
  • Drive product innovation?
  • Make user experience improvements?
  • Optimize customer service models?
  • Deploy self-service technologies?
  • Refine fulfillment and delivery processes?
  • Enhance marketing messages?
  • Improve sales strategies?

Deciding how the insights will be used to drive daily, monthly, quarterly and annual decisions and strategies is the final piece of the puzzle. Remember, what matters most is that your employees not only have access to the VoC data but also understand what the insights are telling them to do differently or better.

So, are you ready to commit to VoC?
Before you set sail with a VoC initiative at your company, you and your C-suite executives should answer these questions:

  • Why are we doing this?
  • What will success look like?
  • How will we use the insights to improve what we do in specific areas of the business?

If you and your executive team can’t align on the answers to these fundamental questions, then don’t invest in VoC. You will just be wasting a lot of time and money.

However, if you and your executive team are aligned and committed to applying sustained effort in each of the areas we have outlined — VoC can become a strategic advantage for your organization and deliver a significant return on investment in the years ahead.