Driving Transformational Change through the Voice of the Customer

Customer experience: It’s something we’re all mindful of, but few have truly mastered. Part of the reason for that comes from organizations not developing a clear VoC program that drives home the value that the customer experience brings across all facets of the business.

With consumer expectations of the customer experience growing, retailers are increasingly faced with an even greater need to deliver an exceptional, personalized experience. While new technologies such as beacons and highly tailored apps are great and can complement the strategy, there are four areas businesses must keep in mind to build a customer experience program that drives the right type of change, impacts the bottom line and changes the organizational culture. These areas are: vision, design, engagement and action.

1. Vision: An effective customer experience (CX) vision needs to be tangible, particularly for employees who aren’t based in-store and don’t understand how their role impacts the customer experience. For example, a company’s vision could concentrate on hitting the top spot in its industry by a specific date, and identify key steps in the customer journey to concentrate on. With a vision like this, organizations are able to explain how each team can impact one or more of those touchpoints to improve the customer experience, giving them a sense of ownership.

2. Design: CX design is about listening to the right people, using the right channels and the right touchpoints. Once these voices are integrated with other business insights, you begin to understand the action you need to take. The best advice for the design phase is to develop a framework on which you can build your overall program. By creating a library of questions to choose from at each touchpoint and ensuring consistency across all areas, you’ll be able to prioritize actions across touchpoints, delivering immediate results. For example, beacons throughout your store could prompt quick questions to better navigate a shopper to the item they are looking for or to a better deal.

3. Engagement: Engaging employees with your CX program is critical. The way to engage them is not purely through posters and communications programs. Instead, find simple ways to show your people how to do the right thing and ensure it’s fun or rewarding for them to do so.

4. Action: This is where many programs can least afford to fail since actions drive the change businesses are striving for. The main reasons why programs fail are: businesses get lost in the details, the CX team leaders won’t relinquish control, or the focus of the program is lost. Put in place the right insights and measurement framework and allow teams to move forward and do the right thing.

As technology continues to evolve and more solutions are introduced that enable organizations to provide customized customer approaches, the need for a strong VoC program is more essential than ever. It’s important for organizations to keep in mind these four pillars to drive transformational change if they want to see true value from these programs. 

Claire Sporton is Vice-President, Customer Experience Management at Confirmit