How to include the voice of the customer across your CX
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Your customer needs aren’t a mystery, but you do have to talk to people to discover them.
There’s a famous story in the marketing world about McDonald’s milkshakes. Leadership at the company noticed shake sales were lagging, so they went through an extensive research and development process. They studied their key demographic and its behaviors. They considered things like flavor, sweetness, and time of day. They tweaked their marketing based on feedback from focus groups, but sales did not budge.
That is, until outside researchers, led by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, talked to customers coming out of stores with milkshakes in hand. It turned out the majority of them weren’t looking for a sweet treat. They were single men, coming through the drive-through before 8am. The thicker and more satisfying the milkshakes, the better it fit their needs as they made their way through traffic to job sites. Milkshakes filled their time and fueled their work.
This simple insight unlocked the key to sales growth for McDonald’s.
While the milkshake story is most famous as a proof for Dr. Christensen’s Jobs-to-be-done framework, it also conveys a simpler message: listening to your customers adds unlimited value to your business.
A Voice of the Customer program is a system designed to gather valuable customer insights in one place, at scale. Here’s how a VoC program can help you.
What is a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program?
A Voice of the Customer program is exactly what it sounds like: a process put in place to systematically gather customer feedback and translate that feedback into useable insights that a company can act on to improve both the product and the customer experience.
When implemented well, a VoC program can improve business metrics such as customer satisfaction, referral rates, sales and customer lifetime value.
Why should you implement a VoC program?
A VoC program is not just beneficial to your Sales or Customer Support teams, though those are the teams that are often the early adopters. If you’re a CX leader and find yourself having to convince stakeholders in upper management about why you ought to implement a comprehensive VoC program across the customer journey, you can point to these concrete benefits. VoC data will help your company to:
[Product] Stop basing product decisions on instincts
[Engineering] Match deliverables to customer expectations
[Marketing] Sharpen product positioning and messaging
[Sales] Highlight key selling points and identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling
[Customer success] Increase customer satisfaction, customer retention, and LTV
In a landscape where consumers have many buying choices, especially when it comes to software, Voice of the Customer programs become especially important. According to data from Accenture, 64% of consumers wish companies would respond faster to their changing needs.
Talking to your customer early, often, and in a way that covers all touch points of the customer journey will keep you ahead of the curve.
Where to gather customer feedback
Voice of the Customer data is qualitative feedback. After all, how can you say, with 100% certainty, what any given customer wants? Feedback also comes in from several channels – in fact, we recommend an omnichannel approach to meet customers where they are – but all sources have one thing in common: they are primary sources. The data comes directly from the customers themselves.
To give you an idea of where to get started, you can gather feedback from:
Live interviews (calls, video, or live chat)
SMS chat (texting)
Social media
Customer reviews
Customer surveys, such as CSAT and NPS
All of the feedback gathered from the above sources is literally in the voice of the customer, so you can trust that it is accurate and timely.
VoC Methodology: The Triple Diamond
Getting started with a VoC program is easy. All you have to do is spend a few hours interacting with customers. Scaling it up so that it adds value to your business is slightly more complex.
First of all, how do you know which pieces of feedback to pay attention to? How do you weight online reviews vs. 30-minute Zoom chats? Whose opinions matter the most?
And from all the pain points customers identify, which ones present the most valuable opportunities to develop solutions? And which of those solutions can you accomplish first?
At TheyDo, we work with hundreds of companies who translate customer insights into action every day. We do this through:
Journey mapping - detailed, step-by-step visualizations of the customer journey for several personas
CX frameworks - models for thinking about and measuring the customer lifecycle
Gathering insights - recording qualitative and quantitative customer data
Prioritizing opportunities - identifying which insights present the most valuable business opportunities
Solution development - creating roadmaps for product updates
Over time, we’ve found the most useful framework for thinking about the process for conducting user research and connecting it to product management is what we call the Triple Diamond. It looks like this:
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The first diamond is focused on journeys. At the start, you are not aware of any pain points or opportunities because the journey hasn’t been defined yet.
Once you’ve mapped your journey, you can start to see patterns in where people drop off, or move towards buying. These are your problems and opportunities. The more feedback you gather from new customers, the more opportunities you can identify. The diamond opens up with possibilities.
Once you identify the most urgent customer problems, the diamond narrows. At the middle point are problem definitions: succinct, written versions of each problem, as seen through the eyes of the customer.
The next stage is solution discovery. This is a cyclical process of ideating and gathering evidence for solution opportunities. This can be done with whiteboard sessions, customer surveys, and more interviews.
After coming up with a wide array of solutions, you again must go through a process of prioritization. Which solutions best match what customers are asking for? How easy will it be to communicate value? What is the weakest point in the customer journey, and how will this solution fix it?
This is where you start to incorporate your product vision and goals into the process. Projects are chosen for development when the problems that are most relevant meet the solutions that are most achievable.
Finally, once you’ve narrowed down solutions options, it’s time to put those solutions into action.
Solutions are designed, tested, and validated (again by user feedback). Finally, the new solutions are rolled out - first in beta, then in alpha.
Once those solutions are developed and shipped the feedback process starts all over again. The customer tests the new solution, offers opinions via your Voice of the Customer program, and the feedback is incorporated into the ever-spinning loops.
Voice of the Customer tools
If you’re already collecting customer feedback from the various sources mentioned above, you may find it hard to keep track of everything. Tools specifically designed for Voice of the Customer can help.
Modern Voice of the Customer tools generally fall into five categories:
CRMs - sales-focused customer relationship platforms, that cover every interaction from prospecting leading up to closing deals.
Customer insight tools - research and analytics tools that help you organize and visualize customer feedback
Journey management systems - scalable customer journey managers that cover the entire customer lifecycle and uncover opportunities for turning feedback into action.
Collaborative whiteboards - flexible, visual tools for recording ideas and sorting them into categories in real-time
Survey tools - interactive, form-based tools for gathering standardized answers from your customers.
CRMs
Salesforce is the #1 worldwide CRM solution for large enterprises looking to manage their own complex customer relationships. Along with built-in tools for measuring CSAT and NPS, Salesforce has the added benefit of automating feedback processes.
Hubspot is another leading CRM solution for large enterprises. Along with its comprehensive suite of features and equal focus on marketing alongside sales, Hubspot also offers tons of integrations to make feedback gathering easier.
User research tools
Dovetail
Dovetail is the “world’s leading customer insights hub” (according to G2). It’s a simply designed, card-based visual platform that allows you to collect customer feedback and get organized quickly. You can organize your Dovetail databases by projects, collections, and people - making it easy to sort insights at the macro levels (customer lifecycle, new products) and micro levels (personas, new features).
Journey management systems
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TheyDo
TheyDo is a platform for businesses of all sizes to improve the customer experience via customer journey management.
TheyDo operates on the Triple Diamond framework - based on journey discovery, problem discovery, solution discovery, and solution development. The voice of the customer influences each stage - from prioritizing opportunities, to design of new products.
Storing your customer data in TheyDo is easy - from importing survey data, to creating journey maps, to identifying customer problems along that journey, and tracking progress towards solving those problems.
From a broad visual overview of the journey, you can navigate to drill down into specific insights from individual customers. These insights live in their own cards, which can be updated with priority status and development progress.
One piece of feedback can unlock the key to changing the trajectory of a customer journey - and TheyDo will help you reach those insights faster.
Collaborative whiteboards
Miro
Miro is an open-ended whiteboarding tool designed for creative teams to work closely together, no matter where they are. Its colorful, neat Voice of the Customer template make setup super fast.
Figjam
Figjam is a whiteboard solution from the brilliant design minds at Figma (now part of Adobe). Much like Miro, Figjam offers a template for quickly jotting down customer responses. Whiteboard tools like Figjam are great for one off projects, brainstorms, and when you’re working in tandem with several colleagues and want to get your most valuable insights down quickly.
Survey Tools
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Qualtrics
Qualtrics is an experience management tool (XM) with features specifically designed for gathering data about the customer experience. With surveys for measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES), you can easily listen to and act on the voice of the customer without much heavy lifting from your Product team.
Qualtrics’ product suite is extensive and can be tailored to the unique needs of large enterprises with many customer journeys to keep track of.
If you’re interested in connecting survey data to your journey management system, you can use the Qualtrics x TheyDo integration to import data directly from Qualtrics into your TheyDo workspace.
Typeform
Typeform is a more flexible and general survey tool for use by small businesses and large enterprises alike. Its user-friendly, customizable design makes its surveys inviting and enticing for customers to fill out.
Tips for customer interviews
Some forms of customer feedback are easily quantifiable. Net promoter scores, for instance, are identical surveys that indicate which of your most loyal customers are likely to champion your product. Engagement on social media can indicate brand awareness.
However, some customer research doesn’t always have a measurable goal. Especially when it comes to live conversations.
Some chats with customers are simply information-gathering sessions, or opportunities for customers to share opinions. However, if you’ve got a customer on Zoom, and you only have 30 minutes to talk you’ll want to glean as many useful takeaways as possible. Here are some tips for guiding the conversation in a productive direction:
Keep things focused by putting the purpose of the interview in the email subject line and/or the calendar invite. Example: “James<>Julie: Chat about signup flow”
Stick to a script you’ve written ahead of time. This reduces the number of variables in your research and makes VoC data easier to sort later on.
Ask people to share their screens and to “think out loud” so you can see exactly which aspects of the UX they’re talking about
Have a list of follow-up questions ready so that you can minimize follow-up after the fact.
Record all interviews via video so you can transcribe quotes to use for marketing or for design research (with permission, of course).
Ultimately, the interview process is not about you, and only a little bit about a new product. It’s about living out your customer-centric values by making the customer consistently feel seen and heard.
When the customer wins, everybody wins
Ultimately, a Voice of the Customer program creates and sustains a direct line between your team and your customers. If you keep the connection alive, you will always be able to respond to and anticipate customer needs. And your customers will respond in kind - with brand loyalty, repeat business, upgrades, expansions and referrals. In other words, it pays to lend a listening ear.