Understanding the Impact of Voice of the Customer

Happy customers…what does it take to truly make them happy? Many organizations struggle with answering this question, but in today’s competitive business environment, organizations have do at least do a better job of listening to their customers in order to thrive. That’s why effective customer feedback strategies are so important, and using Voice of the Customer techniques is a great way to get there.

What is Voice of the Customer (VOC)?
It is an in-depth process that is used to gather customer requirements and feedback in order to provide customers with best-in-class services and/or products.

Voice of the Customer Works!
A study conducted by the Aberdeen Group in 2014 shows that companies that have VOC programs outperform all others by as much as 22% across nine categories, including annual company revenue and customer win-back rate. When organizations have these programs in place, knowing what customers want becomes more second nature, and products can be more easily created to meet these expectations.
Whether the focus is using VOC techniques to determine customer satisfaction levels with current products/services, capturing feedback to develop new products and/or services or ideally using both approaches, consistent use of VOC principles works.

What Happens When You Don't Use VOC...
How many of you have been involved in New Product Development (NPD) efforts and have experienced a newly launched product failing in the market? I’m sure it wasn’t a pretty picture. Perhaps the breakdown was due to changing customer demands. Or the product may not have functioned as the customer intended. In either case, a lot of resources were likely wasted to achieve mediocre results...poor sales and ROI. There's a good chance that this failure could have been avoided if VOC activities has properly occurred during NPD efforts. That is why capturing VOC is so important!
Here are some other examples of bad outcomes:

• Mounting customer complaints stemming from poor product quality
  
• High levels of customer churn
• Wasted resources

What Happens When You Do…
Many of these problems can be avoided when a VOC process is properly integrated into an organization. That way, a standard methodology and tools to capture customer feedback are at each employees' finger tips. Consistently gathering valuable feedback becomes more of an everyday experience when employees know how and when to use them. When this consistently occurs, great things can happen:

• Greater alignment of products/services with customer needs for improved profitability
• Increased customer retention
• Improved products/services that attract new customers
• Increased customer engagement

The Bottom Line
Today’s competitive environment requires an ever increasing need to listen to what customers want and expect from companies. To do otherwise can spell disaster. When VOC techniques are consistently used by an organization's employees, companies will have genuine customer feedback from which to make decisions during NPD and service delivery cycles. Making your customers happy will no longer a guessing game, and who doesn’t want that?