How to Build a Connected Cross-Channel CX Program with VoC
How to Build a Connected Cross-Channel CX Program with VoC
Seven Voice of the Customer strategies you should employ to drive desired business outcomes
Focus on Cross-Channel Customer Experiences and Journeys
Your customers now interact with you via a huge range of different channels and touchpoints. The exact journey they take to complete (or not, as the case may be) each task can therefore take an even bigger range of paths.
How to Win in The "Age of the Customer"
In today’s market, you compete primarily on the basis of Customer Experience (CX). A great CX will lead to increased revenue and decreased operational costs. A poor CX will lead to customer churn and eroded margins.
Call it whatever you want – “the Experience Economy”, “the Age of the Customer” – but the world we live in has changed rapidly and continues to do so. The customer is now unquestionably king.
A consistent, seamless and enriching customer journey is critical to overall customer experience
Source: Aberdeen Group3
and broader business outcomes. In a recent survey by Forrester on behalf of our partner Contact Solutions, 85% said that providing a unified customer engagement across channels and 94% said improving customers’ cross-channel experiences was a high or medium priority.1
So how can you meet this considerable challenge head on? Voice of the Customer (VoC) can be a key driver for success, providing your customers
Customer experience drives three types of customer loyalty, which
in turn drive customer retention, wallet share, and recommendations. What’s more, improving CX can slash costs. The result: higher revenue and increased profitability.”
Forrester4
with an outlet to tell you what they’re thinking and feeling. However, what’s most important is the ability to analyze, size and prioritize this information before being actioned in an efficient, timely and effective manner. This ebook explains seven VoC strategies that help you do exactly that, resulting in effective cross-channel CX.
81%
of marketers say they expect to be competing mostly or completely on the basis of CX in the near future2
Strategy 1: Capture Customer Feedback Across All Interactions and Touchpoints
Capturing an accurate picture of your VoC across the numerous channels that you operate is hard. Your website, mobile apps, contact center, social media interaction and brick-and-mortar network are likely to be managed by different teams within your organization.
But none of that matters to your customers. They consider each of these channels a representation of your brand in equal measure. If you are unable to provide what they’re looking for, they will go elsewhere.
Voice of the Customer in the form of customer feedback has long been recognized as a route to improved CX. This makes complete sense: you probably have a decent idea of your customers’ preferences regarding their experience but the only way to get a 100% accurate perception is by actually enabling them to tell you what they think about it.
However, few do this effectively with the same consistency across each and every interaction. In other words, they listen but in a disconnected way. To provide enriching omnichannel CX, you need to listen to your customers consistently across all channels, interactions and touchpoints. Only then can you understand the experience and journeys that they encounter.
There are numerous methodologies available to do this but – crucially – you need to bring all this information together to ensure you get the full picture. Then you can really diagnose which parts of your experiences are falling short and – conversely – bright spots that can be replicated in other parts of your organization.
Although far from an easy challenge, it’s also far from impossible if you allocate resources correctly and implement the necessary processes.
94%
of digital leaders say that improving customers’ cross-channel experiences is a high or medium priority6
(T)he Best-in-Class…are far more likely to master using multiple channels to deliver consistent and personalized interactions. In return, they enjoy superior results across KPIs such as customer satisfaction.”
Aberdeen Group5
Strategy 2: Capture Different Types of VoC Feedback
To gain a thorough understanding of what your customers need, ensure you factor a range of different types of feedback into your analysis that incorporate voice and text collection techniques. This gives you the complete picture, providing you with insight on all aspects of your customer experience to drive discernible and tangible business results.
In particular, you should seek to capture:
Direct Feedback: Feedback direct from your customer in a format intended for this purpose (e.g. emailed, SMS or IVR survey, opt-in feedback either on or offline etc.)
Indirect Feedback: Feedback about you but not directed at you in a format intended specifically for this purpose (e.g. social media comments, contact center/live chat logs, inbound emails etc.)
Inferred Feedback: What customers would say about their experience if they were asked at any given moment (e.g. session replay on web sessions, IVR logs in contact center etc.)
Structured Feedback: Feedback from different customers in a rigid and consistent format that can easily be turned into quantitative measurement (e.g. multiple choice answers to a survey question).
Unstructured Feedback: Feedback from your customers in their own words. This is critical to capturing and understanding customer emotion (i.e. how your experience makes people feel) while providing a level of detail typically unattainable through more structured means.
Diagnostic Feedback: Feedback captured “in-the-moment” about a very specific point of the experience or interaction. The ability of customers to provide feedback in their own words is critical and enables you to capture highly actionable information. This enables you to identify and diagnose very specific problems affecting key make-or-break “moments of truth” (for example, website/app abandonment in digital or issue resolution in the contact center).
Evaluative Feedback: Feedback that factors the entirety of a customer’s experience or overall perception of your brand (e.g. a periodic survey every quarter or survey immediately after an interaction). Many companies use this data to gather broader overall metrics, such as NPS, CSAT and other similar measures.
A number of these types of feedback will intersect with each other. However, this combination of different types of VoC insight enables you to identify broader trends, while diagnosing the reasons behind them. The more comprehensive your VoC program is, the better you’re equipped to understand why customers behave the way they do and how you can then change these behaviors to drive desired business outcomes.
Firms need to establish or identify key customer listening posts across channels and departments and then collect feedback through methods like surveys, social media, emails, online comment cards, and calls.”
Forrester7
Ways of improving your organization’s understanding of the CX...include using technology that can collect direct, indirect and inferred customer feedback through all customer interaction channels and facilitate real-time decision making, based on that feedback.”
Gartner8
Strategy 3: Harness Operational and Behavioral Context to Accurately Size CX Issues
Your VoC offers highly valuable insight in its own right, providing clear direction on how to move the needle on your customer experience.
Your organization doubtless captures numerous other sources of behavioral and performance-related information across channels. For example, web analytics and session replay recordings directly related to your digital experience, call handling performance data in your contact center, location-specific sales or footfall data and so on. This equally, if analyzed and acted upon in the right way, can have a far–reaching and comprehensive impact.
However, combining these two types of data sources can result in even bigger improvements.
Specifically, cross-referencing VoC comments and feedback against broader operational information can be extremely powerful. Essentially, VoC provides the “why” behind the “what”. This operational data and behavioral insight identifies trends, while VoC enables CX professionals to see what is causing them.
For example, establish whether a customer problem on your site is specifically related to a particular page, breadcrumb trail, browser, operating system or device. Apply this to your contact center: customer feedback identifies a problem but your ability to tie this to an individual interaction via operational data will enable you to establish whether the issue is specific to a team, location, agent and so on.
You can then adjust your operational processes and training strategies accordingly to better meet customer need.
To help stakeholders figure out what to do, CX pros need to go beyond merely reporting VoC data by source. Instead, they need to help stakeholders see the complete picture painted by multiple data sources.”
Forrester9
Nothing gets stakeholders' attention more than showing them the number of customers affected by an issue or the amount of money that's at stake as a result.”
Forrester10
Strategy 4: Seek Employee Input For Additional Context
(T)o succeed in creating happy customers, firms must start with boosting employee productivity and performance…”
Aberdeen Research12
“Voice of the Employee (VoE)” is becoming an increasingly prevalent and commonly-used term. But it’s yet another valuable type of input because it can shape a successful employee engagement program, which is key to gaining the organization-wide buy-in necessary to drive improved customer experience.
In the same way as Voice of the Customer, your VoE should be captured using a range of methodologies. Assuming you gain an accurate picture of employee sentiment, you can adjust support structures, operational processes, training or career development programs (and whatever else they identify as sub-optimal) to make improvements.
This simple act of listening and action demonstrates commitment and can go a long way to shaping and re-shaping perception. But continually investing in this process over time really reaffirms your position as a business that cares about its employees.
Two direct consequences typically result: your employees become more engaged in their jobs and less likely to seek new opportunities. Tenure therefore increases and you become more productive and effective as a business.
Also remember that your staff are the ones on the frontline interacting with your customers day-in day-out. Each employee is in essence a purveyor of your brand. So not only is it critical that you ensure they are fulfilled in what they do and their morale remains high for this reason, they can also provide exceptional insight into what your customers are thinking.
Tapping into employee knowledge to help find solutions for customer issues increases both the quality of the recommendations as well as stakeholder buy-in.”
Forrester11
Strategy 5: Automate Manual Data Analysis for More Precise Action
Although the data you’ve captured by this point is incredibly useful, there is likely to be a lot of it so it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Conceptually, you have all the information at your disposal to positively impact customer experience and move the needle on key business performance metrics.
But without the ability to bring it all together and interpret and analyze it properly, you won’t be able to size issues, identify key trends and most important of all prioritize action.
For this reason, you need some type of mechanism to uncover “hidden gems” and turn this insight into something meaningful.
Hiring a team of analysts is one potential expensive route. Otherwise, you should consider a technology solution that incorporates speech and text analytics that can quickly and effectively analyze all this data to determine the specific part of your experience requiring attention.
Customizable data visualizations – that quickly convert this information into easily digestible and actionable format – can be a huge benefit in this respect.
You should also have a very clear idea of the intended objectives of your VoC program. This should be front and center when it comes to your analysis of the data at your disposal. Be laser focused on identifying insight that enables you to achieve your planned business outcomes.
Role-based dashboards are a critical element of advanced VoC programs — helping tailor data and insights in a more digestible way for a specific audience.”
Forrester13
ADDITIONAL ANALYST INSIGHT: Watch this on-demand webcast featuring Gartner analyst Jim Davies to find out how to act on your VoC to achieve your business objectives
Is your VoC data analysis automated?
Strategy 6: Democratize Your Customer Data for Cross-Channel Action
“In a world increasingly built around collaboration, CX outcomes tend to diminish when marketing or any other single department attempts to lead and execute CX alone.”
Gartner14
So you’ve now captured and analyzed all this VoC data and now you need to ensure you act upon it in a way that drives improvements against your key business metrics.
Your organization is likely large and complex so facilitating this action will probably require the input of different stakeholders and teams, particularly if it spans channels. With this in mind, you need to think about how you can democratize your customer data to ensure you get the right information into the right hands with the right context to take action. This enables for far effective prioritization.
As well as positioning your entire organization for success, this approach also fosters information sharing and collaboration across your business.
Breaking down silos is a big challenge within CX circles and with good reason: it’s really hard. But delivering value through the timely sharing of highly relevant and useful insight can go some way to bridging gaps.
For example, you may identify a problem in your contact center through digital channels. This makes sense: the natural first inclination for many customers when they have an issue with your experience is to go to your website.
Conversely, maybe your contact center has established a great upsell technique that would work well on digital channels. Regardless, you need to be able to quickly share this information across your teams. Clearly, a manual process can be time consuming and expensive so companies typically look to automate as much as possible.
48%
of digital leaders say the main barrier for preventing distribution of customer data across channels is silos and lack of visibility across groups15
Strategy 7: Enrich Your Experience by Closing Both the Inner and Outer Loop
When thinking about how best to act on customer feedback to ultimately “close the loop” to resolution, there are - according to Bain & Company - two very specific elements that should be addressed:
1) The Inner Loop:
How you resolve the issue with the individual customer(s) affected to turn a negative into a positive and enhance the overall interaction and experience to the best of your abilities.
“Organizations have been collecting feedback from customers for decades. What's new is the speed of response and the breadth of channels through which feedback is collected. The shift is to multichannel, real-time, closed-loop handling of the voice of the customer (VoC).”
Gartner16
2) The Outer Loop:
The broader strategic action you take to fix the problem and reduce the probability of it reoccurring in the first place. Typically, this action is more aimed at driving longer-term success.
For your “closed loop” processes to be effective, therefore, you need to consider the following questions:
How will you drive accountability?
Consider assigning executive sponsors and ensure the teams involved establish and stick to a regular cadence of meetings and work sessions. This ensures consistency across your organization and that they are always reviewing information and creating and modifying tactical plans against long-term objectives.
How will you change operations?
Most companies are pretty good at building reactive quick fix-based triage processes but many fall short when it comes leveraging feedback for longer-term proactive and holistic strategies such as product/service enhancements, policy changes and large-scale investments.
What will you do to change your culture?
Creating a culture of closing the loop on customer feedback is imperative for success. Building incentive-based bonuses rewarding this type of action can certainly be an effective albeit costly method, but building a culture that drives these behaviors is far more powerful. Some companies display customer feedback in prominent locations around their office – such as common eating areas and lobbies – to emphasize commitment to listening to customers and connecting CX to employee roles. However, empowering your staff to act on customer data – while not easy – is one of the biggest cultural changes you can make.
References
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“Is Your Digital Transformation Strategy Driving Seamless Customer Journeys?”, a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Contact Solutions, April 2017; https://www.opinionlab.com/resources/whitepapers/forrester-research-is-your-digital-transformation-driving-seamless-customer-journeys/
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Chris Pemberton, Key Findings From the Gartner Customer Experience Survey, March 16, 2018, Gartner, Inc.; https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/key-findings-from-the-gartner-customer-experience-survey/
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Omer Minkara, “Customer Journey Mapping: Lead the Way to Advocacy”, November 2016, Aberdeen Group.
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Harley Manning, Rick Parrish, David Truog, Scott Ross & Laura Glazer, Improving CX Through Business Discipline Drives Growth: The Vision Report In The CX Transformation Playbook, June 19, 2017, Forrester Research Inc.; https://www.forrester.com/report/Improving+CX+Through+Business+Discipline+Drives+Growth/-/E-RES137906
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Omer Minkara, Omni-Channel Customer Care: How to Deliver Context-Driven Experiences, October 2017, Aberdeen Group
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“Is Your Digital Transformation Strategy Driving Seamless Customer Journeys?”, a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Contact Solutions, April 2017; https://www.opinionlab.com/resources/whitepapers/forrester-research-is-your-digital-transformation-driving-seamless-customer-journeys/
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Faith Adams, How to Build Your Voice of the Customer Program, December 22, 2017, Forrester Research Inc.; https://www.forrester.com/report/How+To+Build+Your+Voice+Of+The+Customer+Program/-/E-RES92881
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Ed Thompson, Seven Types of Customer Experience Project, Gartner, Inc, February 8, 2018; https://www.gartner.com/doc/3854675
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Faith Adams, How to Drive Action With Your Voice Of The Customer Program, February 2, 2018, Forrester Research Inc.; https://www.forrester.com/report/How+To+Drive+Action+With+Your+Voice+Of+The+Customer+Program/-/E-RES117051
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Faith Adams, How to Drive Action With Your Voice Of The Customer Program, February 2, 2018, Forrester Research Inc.; https://www.forrester.com/report/How+To+Drive+Action+With+Your+Voice+Of+The+Customer+Program/-/E-RES117051
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Faith Adams, How to Drive Action With Your Voice Of The Customer Program, February 2, 2018, Forrester Research Inc.; https://www.forrester.com/report/How+To+Drive+Action+With+Your+Voice+Of+The+Customer+Program/-/E-RES117051
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Omer Minkara, Connect Employee Engagement & Customer Satisfaction: Unified Communications in the Contact Center, March 2018
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Faith Adams, How to Drive Action With Your Voice Of The Customer Program, February 2, 2018, Forrester Research Inc.; https://www.forrester.com/report/How+To+Drive+Action+With+Your+Voice+Of+The+Customer+Program/-/E-RES117051
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Chris Pemberton, Key Findings From the Gartner Customer Experience Survey, March 16, 2018, Gartner, Inc.; https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/key-findings-from-the-gartner-customer-experience-survey/
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“Is Your Digital Transformation Strategy Driving Seamless Customer Journeys?”, a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Contact Solutions, April 2017; https://www.opinionlab.com/resources/whitepapers/forrester-research-is-your-digital-transformation-driving-seamless-customer-journeys/
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Ed Thompson, Seven Types of Customer Experience Project, Gartner, Inc, February 8, 2018; https://www.gartner.com/doc/3854675
