I have an issue with the VoC thing
Many large companies are busy tapping into the VoC. In principle this is a great thing to do because the majority of companies do not have a good enough understanding of their customers. In practice, I am left feeling that we will see a repeat of the technology centred CRM love fest: these companies will collectively spend billions, the software companies will get fat and customer satisfaction will stay pretty much the same. So what is my issue with the VoC thing?
A simplified look at the VoC process and issues
First, let’s take a look at the VoC process:
- Determine listening posts;
- Set up listening posts (platforms, tools, people);
- Collect and consolidate the data;
- Interpret (make sense of) the data;
- Sell the interpretation of the data to the various Barons inside the enterprise;
- Get the Barons to take action in their respective areas; and
- Monitor/assess the impact on customers (and the business).
If you take a deep look into this you will notice an array of issues: First, when it comes to surveys how do you know that you are asking the right questions and not ‘leading the witness’? Second, how do you get access to all the customers that don’t want to complete surveys and make complaints? Third, how can you be sure that the data you have collected is information and not noise? Fourth, how do you know that your customer insight team is interpreting the data correctly? And so on…..
The real issue: VoC can act as a barrier to connecting and empathising with the customers
These issues hide a much more important issue that VoC is a rational solution to an emotional issue. What do I mean? The challenge is to get the Baron’s out of their offices and shoes and experience the world by walking in their customer’s shoes.
Put differently, the challenge is to get the Baron’s to emotionally connect with their customers by experiencing what these customer experience. And if you accept this then you will get that VoC programme gives these Baron’s the illusion that they can and do understand customers by reading the reports produced by the customer insight teams.
The problem with this intellectual understanding is that it is purely intellectual. Intellectual understanding is dangerous because it leaves us thinking we have got it when we have not got it. What do I mean?
I mean that we have not get it emotionally. That we are not touched, moved, inspired to take action because of having experienced our customer’s lives. There is a whole body of neuroscience research that shows that the seat of all human action is the emotions and that we can feel/experience what other human beings feel/experience through mirror neurons. To empathise with our fellow human beings we simply have to connect with them in the context of their day-to-day lives and then let the mirror neurons do the work.
What happens when an industry has no empathy for its customers
Why is that important? Frankly, if the Baron’s cannot or do not empathise with their customers then you end up treating your customers the way that the UK banks treat their customers. Upon reading this article two paragraphs caught my attention:
“The fine reflects BOS’s serious failure to treat vulnerable customers fairly,” said Tracey McDermott, the acting director of enforcement at the FSA. “The firm’s failure to ensure it had a robust complaint-handling process in place led to a significant number of complaints being rejected when they should have been upheld.”
“We have fallen short of the high standards of service our customers should be able to expect of us and we apologize,” said Ray Milne, the risk director at Bank of Scotland. “We are in the process of contacting affected customers and will pay compensation where it is due.”
It is not hard to treat customers fairly. The failure to do so by the banks and hide behind platitudes is simply a reflection of the gulf between the Baron’s who make policy and the customers who are impacted by the policy.
How do you cultivate empathy?
Empathy is the route to the human soul and any person who strives to get a meaningful insight into customers lives has to excel at empathy. So how do you cultivate empathy? I urge you to watch and listen attentively to the following TED video: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html
Just in case you do not have the time here is a key extract from this presentation:
“Step outside of your tiny little world.
Step inside of the tiny little world of somebody else.
And then do it again, and do it again, and do it again.
And suddenly all of these tiny little worlds they come together in this complex web.
And they build a big complex world.
And suddenly without realizing it
you’re seeing the world differently.
Everything has changed.”
To sum it al up
To exaggerate I would say that an ounce of empathy is worth a mountain of VoC data. Yet, I do not have fame to my name so I will let one of the worlds renowned business strategists (Kenichi Ohmae) say the final words:
“Personally, I would much rather talk with three homemakers for two hours each on their feelings about, say, washing machines than conduct a 1,000 person survey on the same topic. I get much better insight and perspective on what customers are really looking for.”
Your point is valid, but what do you suggest? I do not fully agree that its a waste of time and money. Its important for cross-functional team to learn and speak to end users – the folks that contribute to revenues. What is your proposal for acquiring information that customers want to share with you?
This made me think…
It would be great for Barons as you describe them to empathise with customers.It would be brilliant if it were possible to get into the shoes and heads of customers and truly gain insights into their behaviour.
The problem is surely that it just isn’t possible to have that synoptic ideal..we are forced to adopt strategies that allow us the best fit.
VoC is not a stand alone solution.Any customer feedback has to be tempered with a variety of approaches.There is little point in just gathering information and noise it has to be filtered to distil that intelligence.
Completing surveys does not always mean that customers are complaining – lets not forget that for many feed back systems the intention is to gather praise.These in themselves are faulty mechanisms but are useful tools in providing facets of the overall picture.
One of the best ways to to get good VoC insights is to target your opposition and ask them for feed back,this normally gets some comments about your own offering.
What is your opinion about more active social media monitoring? Yes, I am coming from a biased perspective since we have Pulse Analytics, but the goal is to provide all the aggregation and sentiment analysis you describe as well as supporting near real-time response. So if that voice gets cranky, you can respond quickly to turn around the client relationship.
I definitely like the approach that “there is a conversation about your brand whether you are part of that discussion or not”. We want to capture and measure that discussion’s sentiment, but then support becoming a credible and polite contributor to that discussion.
Would entirely agree with what Angus says above, in so far as VoC programmes certainly having their place and their uses, but it’s not realistically going to help as a stand alone option. You get the data, but you need to understand what drives that data and dig deeper into the areas that are highlighted in it.
Customers who go out of their way to fill in a survey or leave a review tend to be either very angry and very happy, but that leaves an huge gulf of people in between the two who need to be heard from.
Where mystery customers play their part is that businesses can get feedback from a specific demographic and you get the substance behind the emotion.
Finally, with regards to the barons (if we have to call them that?!) getting into the customers shoes, this is a practise that should be encouraged but again doesn’t work as a stand alone option. Mainly due to the fact that it doesn’t allow for Objectivity. It is the natural thing to make excuses and defend the practises and systems that you put in place. Do you remember how defensive you got last time someone criticised your business? No one likes to be told that their baby is ugly.
Brian
Good point well made.
Social media monitoring is precisely where companies need to be.
Real time feedback that expresses the sentiment should give a brand permission to put issues that are getting out of hand back in perspective and to reward customers with added offers perhaps where appropriate.
Cranky can be good in some instances because the responsive can be more positive than the negativity of the original tirade.