Voice of the customer (VoC) programs have been popular from the moment that businesses first started having customers and in recent years the formality of these programs has increased and books have been written and many conference agendas populated with experts on the subject.
VoC is dead and social is the reason.
Paul Greenberg recently noted at the Enterprise 2.0 event that business technology is not undergoing a technology revolution, the revolution is one based in communication and as a result business is being forced to adapt and innovate.
Companies of all sizes are directly connecting with individual consumers and are now able to scale these interactions. The result of this is that methods built around sampling and proxy are no longer necessary or productive. Why would you collect data that you have to interpret, extrapolate, filter, and subject to latency when employees can directly tap into customer communities for direct and immediate engagement?
To be clear, voice of the customer is not an obsolete concept… Voice of the Customer programs are obsolete and will increasingly be co-opted and replaced by customer communities.
This is one of the more interesting consequences of the mass market adoption of social networks, they serve to break down the barriers that exist between customers and employees. Whether or not the firewall exists doesn’t matter, the fact remains that employees are becoming accustomed to interacting directly with customers regardless of whether they are in the customer service org or something entirely different.
Companies are themselves recognizing that their competitive strategy requires being attuned to customer needs and engagement, a point that Josh Bernoff recently made quite well in an outstanding research piece called Competitive Strategy in the Age of the Customer.
Bernoff’s key points are that competitive advantage no longer continue to derive from backoffice technology focused on productivity and efficiency but from customer facing technology that delivers customer insights which can then be acted upon from a market and product perspective.
Companies that obsess about customers end up investing in technology differently than other companies because they build their business around the one piece of intellectual property that cannot be replicated or commoditized, customer insight. As a result, Forrester is recommending that companies budget according to the following priorities:
1) invest in real-time insight to build products that customers will embrace.
2) Spend more on customer experience and customer service to build relationships.
3) Fund sales channels that deliver intelligence about customers, not just the push.
4) Shift marketing from one-way ads into useful content and interactive marketing.
(Cross-posted @ Jeff Nolan - Venture Chronicles)
I agree, VoC is dead, but BoC (Behavior of the Customer) is not.
I couldn’t agree more. If I may add one additional point to Forrester’s 4 bullet points would be to add ways to engage with customers easier, based on insights. See the problem is that insights are great, but many companies fail to convert these “actionable insights” into actually doing something. Take real-time customer satisfaction indices, feedback, and even social media engagement metrics. While these KPIs might be real-time, they cannot provide a way for a company to understand the dips or ups in them and a way to act on that information.
yes, very good point. Customers signal intentions to companies but if there is no receiver for the signal, a business action that activates, then it’s a lost opportunity. I think you are also suggesting that signals are very noisy and lack an aggregate view… I agree.
I agree with the point from Jaime about the failure to convert findings from voice of customer feedback into action. Raising customer expectations that ‘something will be done’ only to have no response or change just reinforces the customer’s perception of ‘business as usual / not really interested’.
However, I think there is a simple distinction here between “insight” and “information”. I don’t remember who it was that drew the distinction between these, but it is one that we apply to our work with clients – Insight is information that gets acted on; Information is simply the findings from any feedback.
The main purpose of the new tools that Jeff talks about in the main article is to enable organisations to take action where possible or necessary easily, and to be able to sift through the myriad topics that arise from Voice of Customer feedback to see what does need action.
Far from VoC being dead, I think it is only at the earliest stages of its development – with the still the earliest glimmerings of any revolution in companies using the insight to effect change. Whilst customers continue to respond with “Wow, I never thought you would read that stuff” at the point when companies make targeted follow-ups, we know that VoC has a long way to go.
What is a real danger is the over-use of the phrase VoC itself. Like CRM before it, it has already been so abused in terms of what has been described as VoC that it risks losing any credibility, ie, it has been used to describe just about any survey, interview, research, panel or conversation that an organisation has with customers, often without any actual ‘voice’ component.