flevyblog
The Flevy Blog covers Business Strategies, Business Theories, & Business Stories.




Voice of the Customer: Internal and External

By Charles Intrieri | July 22, 2015

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Digital Transformation Strategy (145-slide PowerPoint presentation). Digital Transformation is being embraced by organizations across most industries, as the role of technology shifts from being a business enabler to a business driver. This has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Thus, to remain competitive and outcompete in today's fast paced, [read more]

Also, if you are interested in becoming an expert on Customer-Centric Design (CCD), take a look at Flevy's Customer-Centric Design (CCD) Frameworks offering here. This is a curated collection of best practice frameworks based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. By learning and applying these concepts, you can you stay ahead of the curve. Full details here.

* * * *

We should all listen to the Voice of the Customer (VoC) in this customer centric market to improve our business operations.  VoC isn’t just for your valued external customers, but also your valued internal customers, your employees or associates.

What is more important than listening to your customer? Without customers there is no operation or business, is there?

When you receive VoC input, review the input and use Pareto’s 80/20 principle to prioritize your VoC replies.

Now, implement these customer ideas, tell your customers and become a better company.

So, what exactly does VoC capture?

4255321476_93d737a959

Voice of the Customer (VOC) 

  • The needs and wants of your customers
  • The relative importance of features and benefits associated with your product
  • The expectations and promises that are both fulfilled and unfulfilled by your product or service
  • What your customers need for increased satisfaction.

Voice of the Customer is a term that describes your customer’s feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. Qualtrics VOC is a multi-source information tool that focuses on customer needs, expectations, and product improvement.

Gathering Voice of the Customer Information

  • Direct interviews of customers (site intercepts, personal interviews, focus groups, customer feedback forms, or structured online surveys)
  • Indirect interviews with your representatives (sales people or customer service representatives) who interface with the customer and report on their needs.

The voice of the customer is best heard as an ongoing conversation. The key to creating an effective VOC program is to gather and use information in a timely way that helps you to improve. Organizations often have multiple touch points with the customer that occur all across the organization, including sales, support, warranty, and accounting interactions.

Don’t forget that different customer groups may exist, each having one or more voices that can be aired to reflect experiences at the different points of contact.

Why Conduct Voice of The Customer Research?

  • Customize your products, services, add-ons and features to meet the needs and wants of your customers
  • No one becomes an industry leader without listening to the customer. Quality (customer perceived) is the leading driver of business success
  • Maximize your company’s profit. Higher market share companies have higher profits

Improve Customers’ Satisfaction

  • Identify and prioritize voiced needs and wants
  • Prioritize issues and development
  • Solicit and evaluate new concepts, ideas, and solutions
  • Report your new developments to help them

When your customers share their voice in real-time with you and your organization, they expect you to listen, act, and report back to them.

The goal is to go beyond the customer’s expectations.

There is even software, like “Qualtrics Cutting Edge VOC” and iPerceptions.

35-slide PowerPoint presentation
Digital Transformation touches practically every function in the entire organization. This thus requires an unprecedented amount of coordination among people, process, and technologies throughout the organization, leading to a difficult Transformation program. The Six Building Blocks of [read more]

Want to Achieve Excellence in Customer-Centric Design (CCD)?

Gain the knowledge and develop the expertise to become an expert in Customer-Centric Design (CCD). Our frameworks are based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. Click here for full details.

In the modern Digital Age, advances in technology and communication, combined with the explosive growth in data information, have given rise to a more empowered global customer. Recent economic and political events highlight the need for organizations to understand how consumers view the world and the most important attributes for their purchasing decisions.

Thus, increasingly more organizations are seeking to invest and focus on Customer-centric Design. A clear understanding of customer needs and behaviors across the organization will help drive profitable growth strategies and provide the confidence to invest in opportunities at a time when staying within budget can be extremely difficult.

Learn about our Customer-Centric Design (CCD) Best Practice Frameworks here.

Readers of This Article Are Interested in These Resources

56-slide PowerPoint presentation
Customer Experience is fast becoming the key business battleground in many markets. In order to be successful it is critical that all business create a Customer Experience Strategy, an all encompassing view of how they will deliver superb experiences to their customers. Having such a strategy [read more]

225-slide PowerPoint presentation
[NOTE: Our Design Thinking presentation has been trusted by an array of prestigious organizations, including industry leaders such as Apple, MIT, NASA, Ford, Boeing, Fujitsu, Syngenta, Palo Alto Networks, and Mercer, to name just a few.] Design Thinking is a process for creative problem solving. [read more]

143-slide PowerPoint presentation
Customer Journey Mapping is the process of creating a graphical representation of the steps and stages a customer goes through to experience a product, service, an online experience, or any combination. It may focus on a particular part of the process or the end-to-end experience. The journey [read more]

30-slide PowerPoint presentation
Delivering great customer experiences is one of the true differentiators of many of the great organisations of our time. However, delivering these great experiences doesnt happen overnight. Organisations need to become mature at all aspects of creating, delivering and improving customer [read more]