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Actionable Voice of the Customer Program
Creating a customer feedback program that enables you to take action on regular cadence
Jackie Golden
May 03, 2024
Voice of the Customer (VOC) Programs
Customers have increased expectations for companies, and failure to satisfy customers will cause them to turn to your competitors. Consider these stats:
85% of business buyers expect sales reps to demonstrate a firm understanding of their business.
77% of consumers view brands more favorably if they seek out and apply customer feedback.
86% of consumers will leave a brand after only two or three bad experiences.
To offer an exceptional customer experience, you need to collect and address customers’ needs and expectations.
So much customer data is available today. Customer surveys, interviews, in-product data, website traffic and many other customer data analytics to evaluate and try to gleam some insights into “Whats Working and “Not Working” in your software company strategy. How do you take the customer information in the right context to understand their perception and perspective in a way that gives the leadership team the right understanding of what to do with the information?
We are all aware of how easy it is to take any data set and create analytics to tell whatever story we want to tell. However, when we don’t take the time to understand the customer data set and review the integrity of the data and understand what is in the dataset, then the analytics may not provide the right insights. This leads to invalid conclusions and bad business decisions.
To offer an exceptional customer experience, you need to collect and address customers’ needs and expectations. The best way to gather targeted insights about your customers is through a voice of customer analysis.
How should you build a Voice of the Customer Program that helps you to make the right business decisions and understand the right actions that should be taken to drive the target results?
VOC Feedback Loop
The best practice process for a VOC program has four stages
Gather Customer Data
Evaluate Customer Data
Summarize Action Plan
Customer Confirmation
1. Gather Customer Data
There are four types of Customer Data:
Ease of Use
Product or Service Value
Business or Personal Impact
Loyalty
Ease of Use Feedback
Customers can love a software solution because of the problems it solves and the innovation it brings to their processes. They can also decide not use a software solution because it is too hard to use, frustrating and not intuitive. A solution can also be considered at risk to be replaced if the services do not provide value and/or are not responsive.
Within the software company, the Product Management team usually leads conducting ease of use surveys across the customer base. Many Product teams add the survey in the product with an automatic request to users upon login once a quarter.
There are many ways to collect information on how the customer perceives the ease of use of software and services. Here are some examples of the East of Use Survey questions to ask your customers:
How easy is the product to use?
How easy is the navigation to use?
How easy is the online self-help center to use or find the information needed?
How easy is it to build a report or configure a process?
etc.
The usability metrics that are recommended to track in the product to help the product team review the ease of use by the user community are:
Time Success Rate
Time on Task
Error Rate
CSAT
These usability metrics are helpful to track how users are able to complete certain tasks and how long it takes them. If the product management team has designed the software to make certain tasks and processes easier, faster and more efficient and it is taking customers too long to complete them in the software, they can use these metrics to see the areas the users are having the most difficulty. The Product team can also use the data to reach out to these customers and ask them to participate in their Beta program and shed some light on why it takes so long to complete a task that should be easier to complete.
Product or Service Value Feedback
With so many SaaS solutions on the market, it is easy for customers to decide to switch over to another product and try other solutions. It is helpful that the software is easy to use and intuitive but if the customer doesn’t realize value, they could decide to switch.
It’s important to track the value the customer is realizing in using your software to help justify the annual spend on the solution. If the solution is highly integrated within a critical business process and/or frequent operational process then it becomes easier to prove the value of the solution.
There are several ways to track the value and prove the business impact.
Baseline KPIs associated with the business process and show the progress over time.
Interview customers asking them to quantify the business impact as
% Productivity improvement from a process automation
% or $ Cost Savings
% or $ increase in Revenue
% Reduction in Errors
Reduction in # of Days for a process or cycle time
etc.
Track KPIs within the product and share the progress in a report or dashboard showing the cost savings over the investment each year, which will show the ROI.
These value metrics can be baselined and tracked to develop the ROI story for each customer and shared as the customer success story which can be used in your Sales and Marketing presentations as well as references.
Business or Personal Impact Survey
The customers measure value in other ways when perhaps they are not able to track specific metrics or KPIs depending on the type of software and the problems it solves.
For example, with the Workfront solution in the early days, we didn’t have specific metrics for tracking work productivity. However, customers would provide testimonies, quotes and references confirming the business impact for having visibility to key projects across their organizations and the efficiency the collaboration provided. For the project managers, they would share their personal impact in being able to do their job better with greater quality and excellence to deliver their projects on time and on budget consistently using Workfront.
These surveys can be sent with more specific questions around the areas of the product that can provide these types of business and personal impact.
Has the solution provided automation for X process?
Has the solution reduced the amount of time you spend on X process?
Has the solution improved your data visibility and ability to make better business decision?
Have you been able to collaborate easier across various organizations?
Has the solution improved your data quality and/or reduced the error rates?
etc.
Collecting this type of feedback from customers is a good starting point as you continue to improve your in product data collection and reporting capabilities to show the business value and ROI.
Loyalty Feedback
Gathering the customer’s perception on what they think of your brand, products and services is key for all departments within the software company to understand. I recommend a monthly meeting to review all customer feedback including all surveys, interviews, testimonies and business reviews.
The last type of survey and customer feedback that is important for Marketing and Product to have a pulse on is the customer’s loyalty to your brand and products. The real question around loyalty has to do with how likely are they to buy additional products and refer your company to friends and other colleagues.
The Product Marketing team usually drives these types of surveys. The surveys will ask questions like:
NPS - How likely are you to recommend the company or product to friends and colleagues? If not, Why?
How likely are you to buy additional new products, whether we build or buy the solution? If not, why?
How likely are you to attend our User Conference or speak at the conference to share your story?
Are you interested in being on our Advisory board?
Would you share your thoughts on our community site?
Would you host a regional user conference and present your success story to prospects?
Do you like our Brand?
Do you think our Company is innovative?
Do you follow our thought leadership blog, newsletter, podcast, etc.?
many other questions can be asked to check on how loyal they are to your brand
2. Evaluate Customer Data
Now that you have collected your customer data in the various categories, you can begin to analyze the trends and patterns in the data.
I like using various BI tools to bring all the data together and utilize some key attributes to summarize the data by:
Target Market or Market Segments
Industry or Process
ARR
Customer
The next step is to standardize and cleanse the data to make sure you have apples and apples. Most data analysts will do this as part of their best practices data analysis process, however, I have found that when I begin to review the summarize reports and dashboards some of the data may not make sense. I then begin reviewing the raw data to see where the data inconsistencies are and share that with the data analyst or business operations person so they can program audit reports to find the data errors and inconsistencies to ensure we have a good data set at all times.
Once you have a good data set, the fun begins where you start to find the patterns, trends and priorities that the customers are sharing across the different categories. The reports and dashboards are broken up into each of the four data categories. Within each category, we evaluate the top issues, requests or concerns by the attributes above and find the 80/20 rule and document the top actions we can take to address the items that will impact the majority of the customers.
3. Creating a VOC Action Plan to drive the changes
Once you have created a regular rhythm for how and when you collect these various types of customer feedback, you will then want to create your action plan.
It is very important for survey questions to be specific enough to be actionable. As you design the questions in each survey, ask yourself what actions would you take based on the answers. For example, Yes, No answers are only actionable if the question is very specific. Another example is the NPS question: Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague? If the answer is Yes, great. If the answer is No, you don’t know why unless you ask a few more specific follow up questions. In designing the questions, have follow up questions to “No” answers, so you can define an action plan from the customers’ answers.
There are two things to consider before taking action:
What are the patterns and trends emerging from the data by customer groups?
Is the feedback significantly different based on a market segment?
As you analyze the customer feedback data, look for patterns and trends that represent the 80/20 rule, otherwise, you could find yourself taking actions on the exceptions to the rule, rather than the rule. It is also more impactful to the customer base when you can summarize the actions into those that will be most helpful to the majority of the customers. Also be careful when looking at ARR not to get pulled into taking action for just one customer that has a high ARR and is requiring something more custom that other customers will NOT benefit from.
I recommend scheduling a monthly meeting with your leadership team to review all the customer feedback data from all the VOC sources. To review the feedback, create a dashboard with all the data using PowerBI, Tabloid or other BI tools. This makes it easier to share your summarized conclusions and show the trends and patterns and why you believe these are the right actions to take and the priorities in which to execute.
Here are some of the categories to organized the customer feedback into:
Product Enhancements
Product Bug fixes
Ease of Use and UX requests
Education
Support
Implementation
Online resources and updates
Advisory Services
With each category, you will be able to review the specific feedback grouped by various segments and summarize the information into a few key corrective actions that can be taken to address the issues or requests.
Asking the leadership team to help prioritize the action items in each category will help to plan out how to tackle and resolve the issues in the next quarter or two. These can become part of the quarterly goals and objectives to improve the customer experience and the customer’s perception of your company and products.
In the case of the Product Enhancements, Ease of Use, UX and Bug fix categories, I recommend a monthly meeting with the Product Management team to review the customer feedback and provide detailed insights with customer use cases and business impact.
The remaining categories can be included into the CS current and future quarterly goals. The action items can be divided amongst the various teams to address and then reach out to the customers who provided feedback and ask them to review the changes and confirm their issues or requests were addressed.
4. Obtaining Customer Confirmation
The last step in the VOC process is to ask the customers for their confirmation that the action taken has improved their experience and perception of your product and service.
I am a fan of doing this in a more personal way by reaching out directly to a set of customers that provided the most helpful feedback and scheduling a call. It allows us to review what we did and demonstrate the changes and get more insightful feedback that we hit the mark. If we didn’t resolve their issue as they expected, it provides the opportunity to ask more questions and get to a better understanding of what was expected.
You can also send follow up surveys asking for feedback on the changes that were made using the same best practices as described above.
Whichever way you choose is fine as long as you take this last step to confirm your action plan worked and you are continuing to improve the customers’ confidence in your product and services and driving them to become a loyal, raving fan.
Summary
As you design and roll out your VOC program, you can always start small with a few surveys on some critical areas. It is common to start with surveys and NPS to get feedback on the customer’s perception of the product. That is definitely most important for a software company. However, shortly after you establish your product feedback, it is just as important to get feedback on your services that support the customers’ ability to operationalized the solution.
Creating quarterly action plans from the feedback in each category will ensure you actually do something to address their concerns and requests. This will be the process that will ensure you act as a customer centered company and make the innovations and changes to lead the way in your market.
The last and most critical part of a VOC program is to verify the changes made with customers and get their confirmation.
The motto I live by “The Customer’s Perception is our Reality”.