Voice of Customer Alone Isn't Enough For The CX Journey

10 Jun 2019

Customers journeys and customer experience make a huge difference for brands. While simply managing crisis was sufficient in the past, building a great customer experience is now a key marketplace differentiator. What sets businesses apart today is not price, but rather how they listen and adapt to customer needs. While there is a lot of buzz around journeys as a concept, it’s more than simple hype. Investing in better experiences delivers better business results. Forrester reports a nearly linear increase in revenue when compared with higher CX ratings.

You should care about the customer journey not simply because of the financial advantages to your business, but because of the qualitative organization value added here as well. How you manage customer journeys affects not only your customers but every employee in your business. Because every employee impacts your product, how smoothly the business runs, or how consumers interact, even employees who don’t interact with customers directly have a tremendous impact on the experience that customers have with your brand. Excellence in customer experience can only be delivered when every department is aligned. This requires the brand and its employees to support a CX driven strategy across each department. When integrated with Voice of Customer, this data proves even more powerful.

The Importance of Voice Analytics For the CX Journey

To understand what happens along the journey, you need to listen. Customers, your employees, and your own processes all can reveal truths about customers journeys at your business. Today, many companies use Voice of the Customer data to reveal what customers are thinking, what their intentions are and how they react to different experiences. This is extremely useful data that unfortunately can also be misleading.

To capture a bigger picture and the larger truth behind your customer data you need to incorporate not only Voice of Customer, but also Voice of Process and Voice of Employee. The wide angle lens of customer data through these “voices” will give you that 360-degree view of your customer experience, and empower your team to make the changes for a great experience. Each voice adds a particular type of value to your understanding of the customer experience at your business.

Voice of the Customer is only the beginning

Voice of Customer isn’t new. In fact, 95% of businesses use some form of Voice of Customer feedback, but only 11% actually use that data to impact their business. Why do so few businesses use the data they gather? The fact is that though results are often good when applying VoC data, customers often lie. They do not intend to mislead businesses most of the time, but customer preferences expressed in feedback surveys not only are self-selecting for a particular type of customer, but also are often not true expressions of the customer’s opinion. Related to this challenge, even when customers intend to tell the truth and deliver on that intention, it can be difficult to generalize out to a larger business strategy. So why collect voice of customer data at all?

There is a huge value in collecting voice of customer data and it lies in the possibilities for personalization. While some of the more advanced survey tools do allow you to send the results of customer feedback surveys directly to a CRM, if this data reflects a poor experience, it can often take someone manually reviewing the form to actually fix a problem. This misses something critical. What’s missing is the real-time context that caused a certain customer response. To get the most value out of VoC efforts, you need to integrate it within your larger CX program. As important as the customer’s voice is, it isn’t enough to manage the customer experience all on its own. To understand their journey, businesses need to see not just what customers say has happened, but what they actually did.

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