The Voice of the Customer Speaks!

Your customers can be a diverse bunch...And that's putting it mildly. There are times, truth be told, that your Voice of the Customer research will yield feedback that (at first) will seem incoherent, unreasonable, or laugh-outloud funny. And that is exactly the reason this research can be so important.

As an owner or manager, you've got a distorted, fun house view of your own organization; you're acutely aware of hundreds of tiny details that make your business move along. Lease agreements, taxes, long-term revenue projections, big picture marketing, and product placement all occupy a significant space in your imagination. And worse, your employees, sharp and focused as they are, all think the same way. Presumably. So, if you're not careful, you'll spend all of your time talking, working, influencing and listening to folks who all see the world in exactly the same way.

It's dangerous and short sighted to function with this narrow view. Think about it for a second; the customers don't just have an outside commentary on your business; their opinions are the only ones that matter. Through new social media and the spoken word, their voices are a principal tenet of your advertising, whether you like what they are saying or not. If you want to thrive in this business climate, you'd better find out what they are thinking, and implement ways to react quickly to their insight.

Building a Better Suggestion Box

So, you've decided to implement a structured feedback program, and have some great ideas on the media tools, the feedback model, and the format. Here are some general tips to keep in mind.

If your customers don't feel that your heart is in the right place, quick action is required. Formulate questions that will help you seek out perceived indifference in your customer's retail experience. Perceived indifference is deadly. Find it, study it, and crush it at the source. It is the main reason customers don't come back. It is a valuable indicator of the success of your branding strategy, your retailing expertise, and your customer service model. This factor alone makes Voice of the Customer research worthwhile.

Make someone accountable for timely, actionable responses in every part of your organization. From the outset, it should be clear who owns the duty for response, and establish a quick-moving alert system to take action on at-risk customers. It is important that your customers see you react in a positive way to their input, and you'll build valuable long term relationships by showing them your willingness to improve.

Use a scaled model (e.g., having the customer rank his experience on a scale of 1-10), to help quantify efforts to improve. This will also help build a historical database showing how your customer's views can change and evolve.

Word your questions carefully; make sure the customer is inclined to give an answer that will allow you to take specific action. Open ended questions are not always bad, but make sure their numbers are limited.

Remember, you don't have to achieve statistical purity; A random sample is exactly...well, random. As a trigger for facilitating response, use the purchase of a specific profitable product or service which allows you to pinpoint areas of improvement.

This brings up a related point. Some customers are more profitable than others. And typically, the profitable ones are a reclusive species. It's depressing, but true. Bargain hunters are always demanding more, and it can be easy to let their voices drown out all the others. Look for ways to correlate feedback with profitability. Make a special effort to draw these customers out, learn about their concerns, and make them feel free to share their impressions. These are the folks that pay the bills. A customer loyalty program should ALWAYS ask for feedback, preferably through several different sources.

Develop a base set of consistent questions that allow you to monitor long-term trends. Once you implement your program, you'll see that your Voice of the Customer research is a long-term tool, and these questions will allow you to measure historical progress and compare yourself to industry standards.

A Voice of the Customer feedback program can reveal surprising insights, demonstrate a unique point of view, and reveal weaknesses in your delivery model. Most importantly, this research can immediately showcase customer concerns, and gives your staff a structured way to rebuild those valuable customer relationships. In our modern hyper-competitive environment, you'll need to communicate with your customers in every way that you can.

Build a research process that will give you honest and fast feedback, and move decisively to repair the damage. You can bet that your competitors will, too.