Paying attention to and listening to the Voice of the Customer

– showing that you care could be your game changer

There is a very emotional story of a family that went on holiday and lodged at a particular hotel. This was a family with kids and so naturally, on reaching home after they had checked out of the hotel the youngest of the kids suddenly realized that her teddy bear was not among her things. The dad followed up with the hotel to report the missing teddy. Fortunately, it was found in the room they had checked out from, and so the hotel confirmed this and made plans to return the child’s toy. There was something else the hotel did worth mentioning. They passed the teddy bear through all the departments of the Hotel and had staff take photographs with it.

The toy was shipped back to the family with an album containing all the photographs taken by staff with the teddy bear. A note was attached with the inscription “Thank you for sharing with us”. The family was so touched by this gesture they immediately reacted by sending a thank you note to the hotel for their kind gesture. Special moments like this are always etched in the memory of customers. As a business when you have an intuitive understanding of your customer your brand will stand tall in their minds for as long as it takes. Staying close to and understanding the customer’s needs in this instant was the fait accompli.

Listening to customers to understand their needs and using the feedback to deliver personalized services is a rule of thumb for churning out “out-of-world” experiences. To do this effectively you need to build capabilities to listen and learn from the interactions regularly. Know that people are moved much more by how you respond to them than by the price of a product or service. In England for example customers spend triple the price at Starbucks compared to other local coffee shops. Talking to a friend the other day he intimated why he keenly visits an eatery in Osu regularly. his reason was that the Jollof meal served there had a special taste. Not only that you get to watch an English Premier League (EPL) match while enjoying your meal.

How are businesses able to attract so much attention as though effortlessly? The truth is that these “special” businesses by their actions have demonstrated to their customers that they care. Their approach to building personalized relationships is easily noticeable by customers who develop dogged loyalty in response to the attention they are getting. My friend Alfred in London unashamedly declares his loyalty to Apple products and says he will choose Apple over any other brand. How should we differentiate our brand? The simple response to this is to listen and learn from your customers.

Here are a few talking points on listening to the customer to help our quest to influence loyalty to our brand.  In customer experience (CX), this is known as the Voice of the Customer. It is generally the process of collecting and analyzing customer feedback to improve the CX and overall business performance. It is about how you use feedback variously. First, identify the target audience. Second, select VOC tools carefully to give you the right mix of customer information. Third, share information across the organization to keep all aligned with the customer. Fourth, ensure that you act on customer insights. Fifth, measure success and make revisions where necessary.

Identify target audience

The VoC is valuable research that enables you to identify distinctly the traits of your customer and understand the difference between their expectations. Different customers have different expectations and this is necessary to unearth as a business as it enables you to engage them not only proactively but also in a manner that makes them feel special and valued. It is about leaving your ego behind and humbly engaging the customer on her terms. Establish yourself as an unbiased cipher for the needs of the customer. Your goal is to precisely adjudge what the customer’s preference is hence the need to segment them.

Consider customers who prefer to use your online touchpoints. Think about what comes to their mind when they interact with you online. What ads will be of interest to them? What message are you sending them on social media? Your responses to these questions will depend on how much you know about your customer’s needs. By listening to them frequently you get to understand how your customers hear about and engage with your company. Focus on listening to their experiences. Collect feedback through direct communication (interviews and surveys) and/or sentimental analysis (reviews and social media interactions).

Armed with the existing information online move on to ask for feedback directly from them. Note a marked difference between “hearing” and “listening”. Your goal is not to simply gather data to throw it back to internal stakeholders. What you are trying to do is to aggregate and understand the challenges your customers have, and to elucidate those problems clearly and concisely to your internal public who are required to understand and respond to their needs. Be guided here by the adage of “not judging someone unless you walk a mile in their shoes”. Aim to accurately represent a customer succinctly in internal conversations.

Select tools

The market offers a decent range of tools for gathering large amounts of information however the caution here is that we need to have enough control to make the data we collect actionable. What this means is that as appealing or attractive as many of the tools in the market appear, we must ensure that our choice of tools will benefit the business.  Your goal in receiving and analyzing the feedback is to understand the experiences of your customers as they interact with your brand. The data you collect must tell you very clearly what customers think and say about your products and services. This underlies the need for careful selection of your tools.

Gartner identifies 3 types of data (customer feedback) as follows. Direct feedback, includes VoC surveys, market research, customer complaints, panels, forums, or other in-person interviews. Indirect feedback includes conversations taking place over email and chat platforms, call recordings, customer service agent notes, and social media posts. Inferred feedback, includes transaction and operational data such as website usage data (heatmaps, etc.), customer location data collected via mobile apps, purchase history, and other call center data. a plethora of tools exist to help you build capability in intuitively understanding your customers.

The fact is that in our CX era customer needs and demands are ever-growing as customers expect more than ever from the brands they use. To stay aligned with their ever-increasing needs businesses must focus on collecting customer feedback using best-fit tools and analyzing the data for customer insights. A few common tools in the market include (and are not limited to), MonkeyLearn, a no-code text analysis platform for voice-of-customer analysis and data visualization. The data is analyzed using a range of integration tools such as Zendesk and Google Sheets among others.

Share information

Some actors in the industry such as Medallia are actively engaged in experience management (XM), which is simply explained as the “voice of everyone”. The aim is to improve the experiences between a company and all entities they interact with including employees, customers, vendors, and company stakeholders among others. The approach here is to collect both solicited and unsolicited feedback and translate it into real-time insights. This helps you understand what your customers are experiencing. They use a range of CX apps to combine customer survey data, internal customer data, and web-use data analytics to offer immediate results on mobile devices.

Doing so enhances the capabilities of the business to provide users with the most recent data on request. These are combined with other VoC tools, like sentiment analysis, in the Medallia Experience Cloud to detect patterns and anticipate the needs of customers. this helps businesses gather customer feedback, analyze it, and take action to improve their customer experience. Medallia’s platform collects data from various sources, such as surveys, social media, and online reviews, to help companies understand their customers’ preferences, pain points, and overall satisfaction with their products or services.

Customers leave feedback at every step of the journey. Note that customers come to you because they need to solve a problem in their lives, and if your product or service is not addressing their needs, they will not hesitate to state it. This feedback must be shared across all touchpoints to ensure that there is consistency all through the journey. This could be a complaint about rude staff, or an overly complicated payment process. Providing friendly and timely customer service, factors heavily into the customer’s experience. Ensuring that the customer’s concerns are top of mind across the business will win hearts and minds and keep them satisfied.

Act on insights

Customer insights empower you to figure out exactly where to deliver personalized experiences along your customer journey. responding intuitively to their challenges helps them feel special, and ultimately earns you, their loyalty. When your interventions are appreciated it boosts customer satisfaction (and eventually creates an army of loyal fans who will be advocates for your brand). According to the latest Microsoft Global State of Customer Service survey, customers have higher expectations. In today’s competitive digital world, customers increasingly expect high-quality experiences to accompany high-quality products and services.

Data is fundamental in providing valuable insights into customers’ behaviors and preferences. Using customer insights to inform strategic and tactical decisions helps you understand their needs more specifically and develop relationships with them proactively, to better understand the connected customer, personalize your customer interaction, and generate meaningful and quantifiable results. This brings to light a story I shared years ago about a British gentleman on my flight to Ghana. He was an army veteran, had just retired, and was looking for some adventure.

We got talking about our connection from Amsterdam to Accra, as it turned out the decision to come to Ghana was a random one. He had never been to Africa, so I got curious about why Ghana was his choice. Well according to him he was researching online for hotel accommodation and was also interested in additional offerings for him to travel around and get to see places of interest. This particular hotel (can’t remember which one) in Elmina, offered him all that and assured him of a pick-up from the Airport to Elmina on his arrival. The creative use of customer insights will potentially turn the fortunes of that business around.

Measure success

Customer metrics for CX success are critical to ensuring that your customers are satisfied with the experience they are getting at your touchpoints. Common metrics to help measure CX success include Net Promoter Score (NPS), which shows the percentage of customers who would recommend your brand to family and friends. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), is for tracking how satisfied customers are with your products and/or services. Customer Effort Score (CES), typically answers the question, “How easy was it for you to solve your problem today?” The goal here is to make it as simple as possible for your customers to interact with your brand.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measures the total lifetime worth of a customer to your business. With it costing six to seven times more to attract and win new customers, this way you are better able to assess the value of keeping your existing customers. These metrics can help you better measure CX’s success in identifying and implementing CX improvements. Here is a tip from Harley Manning a consultant at Forrester, “we propose ……”, “to improve ..”, “which will bring us economic benefit”,  “for D”. Measuring your customer interactions is good practice as it enables you to respond promptly to their concerns and to keep your brand top of mind.

Here is an example, “We propose to redesign our customer service portal to make it easier for our clients to fix their technical issues which will save us GHS 150,000 per year by avoiding road trips by our tech support team for GHS 15,000”. To help you successfully measure your customer experience acquaint yourself with the company’s goals, measurable targets, and priorities. Develop a strong culture of cross-functional collaboration to keep all aligned with the customer conversation. Speak the universal language of business, and financial outcomes and quantify the financial benefits of your CX initiatives.

To ensure that you are well-positioned to deliver unique out-of-world experiences, make it a point to listen to your customers and understand their needs, preferences, and pain points. This can be achieved by collecting customer feedback regularly through various channels, such as surveys, reviews, social media, interviews, or focus groups. Listening and engaging the customer and influencing the internal culture in that manner is the sure way to gain their attention and be rewarded with their loyalty.