10 steps to creating an effective VoC programme

Download our step-by-step Voice of the Customer Guide here: www.mycustomer.com/VOCGuide

1. Audit Establish all the data sources you have for feedback, what vendors you are using, what kind of data you are getting from those vendors, and how those vendors communicate.

2. Get senior buy-in Do you have an executive sponsor? You'll need one to ensure your VoC programme becomes a business-wide initiative. If you don't build a businesscase and win over business units and their budget holders, it's a guaranteed recipe for failure.

3. Set goals Your metrics should go beyond standard customer satisfaction measures such as NPS and CSAT, to include commercial measures such as average customer spend, share of wallet, account profitability, etc.

4. Get mapping This is where you’ll find out how customers experience your company. It’s not an easy task, but mapping their journeys will give you an idea of all the touchpoints customers interact with, on and off-line, and help you frame the areas where your VoC programme should gather insight.

5. Design to fit Work out where, in your business, feedback gathering will sit, who will gather it and who will deliver insights. How are these insights going to be actioned?

6. Choose a vendor For meaty VoC programmes, the chances are you’ll need a specialist to help bring some clarity to the complexity of the project. Shop around, ask questions, make sure every source of feedback can be catered for.

7. Consider employees Frontline team members have an incredible depth of knowledge about what frustrates and delights your customers. Make sure you have mechanisms inplace for capturing their views and suggestions too.

8. Capture data Time to turn on the taps. Make sure you collect information from across your organisation – add VoC data to ERP and CRM platforms, employee feedback systems and external benchmarking data. Ensure you test and refine every state of the data capture process.

9. Measure success Hopefully you've defined your success criteria up front and are able to capture hard, factual ROI data at regular intervals. Measurements such as customer effort and satisfaction are easy to implement and measure, and can be extremely revealing early on.

10. Share results The critical component of VoC is sharing results with key stakeholders and leaders. As with step 5, what action are you going to take as a result of your insights? Then it’s all about returning to refine and repeat the process. There should be no finish line with VoC!

For the full instruction manual to the why, what and how of running a VoC programme, download our guide here:

www.mycustomer.com/VOCGuide