Last time I wrote about our lack of common definition of VoC, leading to both poor purchasing of platforms and a narrowing of the definition. My biggest worry about VoC is how it is being redefined as surveys. It simply is not.
Where did VoC begin?
Let’s remember we have borrowed the term from Six Sigma.
“The Voice of the Customer represents a strategic approach to deeply understanding and aligning with customer needs and desires. It go beyond simple feedback collection, embedding itself within Lean Six Sigma methodologies to capture customer expectations, preferences, and aversions. In today’s marketplace, where customer-centricity is paramount, VOC is a critical element in creating resonant products and services.“
Guide: Voice of the Customer (VOC) – Learn Lean Sigma
There is no mention of surveys. Six Sigma recognises that customer feedback comes in many forms.
How does this translate into Customer Experience Management?
In our world, surveys have their place, but spontaneous feedback, like that on social media and review sites, is vital. Many VoC platforms also gather feedback from chat, email, videos, calls, support desk software and UX platforms. These multiple sources can help us understand more customers and more viewpoints. We have no need to settle on one.
I particular like the way many platforms encourage employees to add insight based on the behaviours they see. And some platforms go even further by analysing emotions so we can understand the importance of an issue to customers and better predict their behaviours.
So, I’d like to propose a definition for Voice of the Customer, that recognises its roots and its evolution. How about this?
Voice of the Customer is the use of customer feedback to:
1. Identify and resolve specific customer issues to retain customers,
2. Find common complaints and address underlying issues to prevent dissatisfaction,
3. Identify unrecognised customer needs to build solutions that transform and disrupt.
Of course, in Six Sigma, Voice of the Customer hands data over to another process step. My definition of the VoC process ensures we manage, not just measure, how our customers feel. I would like to go further and suggest a simple, common process. I work with Gather, Analyse, Share and Act.
That said, there are multiple other activities that need Voice of the Customer data and insights. For example, we need it to understand the customers’ changing perception throughout their journey, and we struggle to define meaningful personas without understanding what customers feel (and do) about their journey with us.
The VoC process?
In the Gather stage we pull together data – not just feedback, though we enjoy an embarrassment of wealth in customer feedback as described above. We need the data that helps us make sense of the feedback. That could be operational, customer and business data.
This additional data helps us pinpoint the action we need to take to retain customers (the Inner Loop), fix recurring issues (the Outer Loop) and innovate our products, services and touchpoints (the Innovation Loop).
This brings us to Analyse. Just knowing a number is not enough to take action. It is the comments that help us understand what to improve and what to protect. Natural Language Programming (NLP, a form of AI) has provided text analytics in VoC platforms for many years. During this stage many VoC platforms blend data to not just understand but to predict customer behaviour – in particular churn.
A word of caution
AI can blend data to make those predictions, but, for now, only humans can redesign e-2-e journeys. That means we (humans) need more than a number, we need understanding to craft retention and upsell messages and to design or redesign products, services and touchpoints.
And onto the Share stage. All these lovely insights have to travel further than the CX team. But charts and word clouds leave many people in the dark (see my previous post), LLMs have (for years) allowed platforms to create human readable reports. This feature has grown in supply since the advent of ChatGPT. But be wary of platforms that only use LLMs. Unless you create customer LLM models, NLP technology gives better insights, even if it presents them less well.
Now we can Act
Bain defined the Inner Loop as reaching out to dissatisfied customers, in particular detractors. Their Outer Loop definition is a bit vague, but roughly equivalent to a continuous improvement loop. Like many others, I find these definitions backward. But I don’t feel we need to challenge them now. I add a couple of other actions, and for consistency call them Loops too:
The Emerging Loop – real time analysis of feedback can alert us to changes or immediate issues (a website not working for instance).
The Innovation Loop – brings us back to that Six Sigma definition of VoC. When we listen, we can hear the hidden needs of customers – those they articulate and those they haven’t recognised just yet. For me, the Innovation Loop is the most mature level of VoC maturity.
The Employee Loop – understanding and enhancing the impact individual employees have on touchpoints – for example, contact centre staff. This is not the same as EX, though you need good employee engagement to enable the employee loop.
Let’s keep the conversation going
Should we ditch the term VoC to mean gathering, analysing, sharing and acting on customer feedback? What can we use in its place? Or should we stop worrying about the name and work out why CX Professionals rate VoC platforms poorly and do something about it?