Here’s a question for you: Who in your organization receives the results and feedback from your Voice of the Customer program? The C-Suite? Your customer service or customer success team?
If your answer isn’t “everyone,” you are shortchanging your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program—and the potential return on investment.
The benefit of a well-executed VoC program is the impact it can have in every corner of your business. Unfortunately, in many cases, the results are kept to a few people or a few teams, and this leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.
That’s not to say everyone should get immediate access to everything that comes back as part of the program. Rather, it’s about creating a culture where customer feedback becomes a regular part of the conversation in every department, even the ones you wouldn’t initially expect to find value in the results.
What to do with customer feedback
If it’s working properly, your Voice of the Customer program should be providing a feedback loop that guides decisions across your organization.
For example, the Sales department can benefit greatly from reading customer feedback. They’ll learn what value drivers resonate most with customers – and can use this knowledge to refine the sales process.
Marketing is another department that should play a significant role in your Voice of the Customer program. That’s because feedback shared in your customer satisfaction surveys can validate your corporate positioning or uncover opportunities to improve your message. Marketing will also want to use this information as they build successful customer retention marketing programs.
But think about the feedback that transcends a single department. For example, almost any customer feedback endeavor will uncover competitive intelligence, which is immensely valuable for the Sales team so they get a clearer picture of the always shifting competitive dynamics.
It stands to reason that Marketing would also thirst for these insights, to tweak messaging, devise specific competitor comparison messaging or consider shifts in how and where they invest to garner greater awareness with potential customers. Product teams can use the knowledge gleaned to prioritize the addition of new features or services, to close gaps that may exist compared with other solutions.
Sharing customer feedback across all levels of the organization
Sharing the feedback (and, more importantly, the findings and recommendations) should involve a robust effort to socialize relevant insights to just about every part of the organization. This way, every department can use the feedback as input in their decision making and align their objectives and priorities accordingly, while working from the same set of feedback.
At Satrix Solutions, we often prepare several versions of analyses based on the data, tailoring the presentation of information for different departments, from sales and marketing to product teams and service staff, based on what’s important to them.
We have a few tips for making the most of what your customers have to say.
1. Ensure the findings and insights are shared and socialized with all business leaders
This entails converting the feedback data into compelling visualizations, findings, and recommendations that are relevant to each executive. People are more likely to act if they are told a clear and concise story that helps them to understand what it means and what they can do about it. This is where having a feedback partner like Satrix Solutions is beneficial — we can customize the findings to speak directly to each department head based on what they need to know.
2. Get all employees on board
Customer feedback isn’t just important for directors and C-suites—your entire organization benefits from this data. Sharing high-level insights, action plans, customer stories, and offering kudos are a great way to build employee morale. It goes a long way towards creating a culture where every employee feels valued, understands how they contribute to the organization’s success, and feels a sense of ownership in the outcome of the customer experience.
You may even consider introducing an employee reward or recognition program as another way to give visibility to employees who are called by customers for providing exceptional service. Not only does it connect the employee to the company’s values, other employees also become motivated to go above and beyond to earn their own recognition.
3. Create a championship team
Decisions made based on customer feedback should not be made on a one-off basis. At the end of the day, these decisions affect the entire organization in some way, shape or form. By establishing a core committee of representatives from different departments, you can ensure that the conversation around customer feedback never hits the back burner. Charge this group with meeting on feedback regularly, actioning the findings, researching root cause activities, and reporting back to the organization.
The importance of “closing the loop”
There’s no better feedback on how you’re performing than what your customers can tell you. When customers take the time to share their feedback with you, you owe it to them—and your organization at large—to not only pay attention to what they’re saying, but also find ways to act on it in a timely fashion.
By closing the feedback loop within your organization and sharing the right information with the right people, you will become the company who actually listens and acts on customer feedback – a move that earns loyalty, drives profitable revenue, and keeps you on the path to continuous improvement.