How to use the voice of the customer to improve your experience, without staying halfway
The voice of the customer is the fundamental input in the great challenge of constantly improving the customer experience. In this article, I will show you the steps you must take to avoid staying halfway and reduce your dissatisfaction costs dramatically.
Who boasts of knowing the voice of the customer? It is the fundamental input in the great challenge of constantly improving the experience that you offer to your clients.
It is an unquestionable law: the only one capable of judging the experience he lives is the client himself, and in no way can you try to improve it without asking himself, the client, his opinion.
For this reason, knowing “the voice of the customer” has become a very important mission for Customer Experience Management teams: those who are constantly looking to improve the customer experience as a competitive advantage, a strategy that is becoming increasingly relevant in the market.
And to know that voice, different channels, methodologies and processes are deployed, which allow the complex map of the client's voice to be put together. Because although we speak of "the client", we know that we do not have a single interlocutor, but rather a number of real people, different from each other and at the same time dynamic, who we must interpret as "our client". Not a simple task…
But I do not want to dwell today on this complexity, which is a deep topic and deserves an analysis in itself, but on the complete path that we must travel to, not only know and interpret the voice of our clients, but mainly, act effectively in function of that voice.
The boy at the well
Imagine the following scene: it is Sunday and you are at home calm, reading a book, when you hear a child's cry. You immediately leave your book and go out to see what happens. A boy has fallen into a well and asks for help to get out.
You do not doubt it, you reach out your hand and get it out of there. Then you calm him down, see if he has any injuries, wash his hands and knees, which are full of dirt, and take him with his family. Mission accomplished? Not yet!
You go back to the accident site and look at that well. How many children will have dodged it before this one… and how many more will have to do it to avoid ending up inside. Can we leave this danger latent, when we are now aware of the consequences that it can generate?
It falls of mature: it is necessary to cover the well, and to do it as soon as possible.
"Plugging the well" is the only thing that improves the customer experience
In our parallel looking to improve the customer experience, we can identify the three fundamental elements of our process.
- The child's cry = the voice of the client. Listening to it and reacting is the first step. If you had stayed reading the book, the boy would still be there. Therefore, you should amplify that voice as much as possible, and sensitize your organization to listen to it, interpret it, and identify the warning signs. The child's rescue = recovering the dissatisfied customer. The second step is to act in front of that person who is in trouble. If you hear that someone has "stumbled" on your service, that customer needs attention, and personalized attention. He is the first affected, and from it you will be able to evaluate the consequences, and learn to prevent that same accident in the future, but he is affected now. Cover the well = preventive actions. However, we have said that the objective of listening to the voice of the client is precisely to improve their experience.But if we stay halfway, we have missed a golden opportunity, and we have not improved anything. It is necessary to cover the well! It is essential to take action so that, once the danger is known, no other customer has the same reason for dissatisfaction.
It is curious to see how so many organizations stay halfway, in an endless discussion to know with what methods, indicators and channels they will obtain the most reliable version of the voice of the customer, or how to recover those unsatisfied customers, so as not to lose them despite the problems they have suffered…
And meanwhile, their clients' experiences are undermined by wells, of latent risks in which they fall again and again. And nobody cares about covering them!
Profit is in the third step
In the book "Outside in: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business" the case of Sprint, a telecommunications company that focused on: identifying the main causes of dissatisfaction of its customers and taking this information as the starting point to find and attack every root cause of those problems.
With this strategy, they have managed to save costs by 1.7 trillion dollars annually, in reducing attention to claims and compensations to affected clients.
What does this experience tell us? Profit is in the third step! Steps 1 and 2 only add cost to you if you don't walk the whole way.
Therefore, an imperfect method of listening to the customer's voice is preferable, but one that allows you to start plugging wells with it, rather than seeking to listen to the customer's voice with absolute fidelity, but staying halfway there.
