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Achieving customer experience excellence is a tough and challenging process for any mobile provider, but the most important step is a simple one: listen to your customer. If you understand that the success of your company hinges on listening to the voice of the customer, you have already laid a firm foundation. The next step is to plant the four pillars of a successful VoC program – volume of feedback, quality, insight and operational focus.
1. Volume of feedback: Take a census approach to achieve the highest response rates
Securing the highest possible volume of responses is crucial. You want to hear from as many customers who have had an interaction with your organization as possible if you want a view that is representative of your customer base. So, rather than legacy surveys and sampling, it makes sense to adopt a census approach, which can increase response rates by up to 20-times.
The next step is to differentiate between customers who report positive experiences and those whose experience was less favorable. The details of positive experiences can be fed back for coaching and development of customer-facing employees (whether in store, online or via the contact center). And for the less pleased customers, learning about their experiences gives you the opportunity to reach out to them and address their issues before they have the chance to consider a competitor and/or cancel their service.
2. Quality: Achieving a quantity of quality customer feedback
Of course, volume is nothing without quality. A high number of inaccurate responses or low number of accurate responses will not deliver the level of confidence and insight upon which a mobile provider can base truly informed decisions.
The quality of response can be correlated with the time lag between the interaction and the provider’s request for feedback on it. The closer in time the request is made to the interaction, the more accurate the response will be. The aim should be to request feedback within 24 hours, but some companies do so as quickly as 15 minutes after the interaction. This ensures that the interaction is fresh in the customers’ minds, allowing them to reveal more about what they liked and didn’t like, and to share their actual emotional response, which often dulls with the passing of time.
If you wait days, weeks or months before approaching your customers, they are less likely to respond at all, let alone in an accurate manner.
3. Insight and operational focus: The keys to positive impact
To achieve a quantity of quality feedback, you must have an engaging process for gathering feedback from your customers. However, simply measuring the customer experience will achieve little in terms of improvement. The real gains are achieved by embracing VoC within your business. Here is a typical example of how this approach works in practice.
A customer (Julia) finishes a call with an advisor from her mobile provider. Just a few minutes later, she receives a personalized text message (the VoC solution automatically triggers and sends the request) acknowledging her call and asking her to answer four simple questions. She can see that the survey is short and easy, so she is happy to type in her comments and send the response. On immediate receipt of Julia’s feedback, the VoC system automatically analyses the comments and a chain of actions begins taking place across the organization.
Julia mentioned that she found the person she spoke with very helpful, so this information is relayed to the advisor who handled the call. It can also be shared with the team leader in the contact center, who can review the call as part of the company’s regular quality monitoring and performance management program. Julia also stated that there had been a problem with the payment system. This information is aggregated with other feedback about the payment system and shared with the relevant department within the organization, which is then empowered to investigate and resolve any process or technology problems.
Finally, Julia mentioned the name of a competitor and stated that she is looking to take her business elsewhere. This response automatically red-flags Julia as an “at risk customer,” and an alert is sent to the customer retention team in real-time, urgently warning them to make contact and proactively work to prevent her from churning. Simultaneously, the competitor reference is forwarded to the marketing team so they can review the competitor’s offer and decide whether they a counter-offer should be implemented.
Conclusion
By placing the four pillars of VoC upon a foundation of customer-centricity, you create a framework in which the voice of the customer can be heard, listened to and acted upon. I recently came across the following comment from a company that has been using VoC since 2008:
“If customer-centricity and service excellence is our strategy, then we need all of the information possible to measure and effectively manage it.”
This approach to VoC delivers the highest quantity of quality customer insights, which consistently enables the right action to be taken at the right time, in order to have the best possible outcome for the mobile provider and the customer experience.
