360° Voice of Customer: Key Verticals For Success

As a marketing leader, I must ensure my products and services fulfill customer needs. While I’m an awfully good guesser, the only prognostication I personally should ever attempt is during March Madness. Don’t leave it to March Madness-style guessing when you’re focusing on the best products and services; instead, ask the customer! You can do this in a number of ways, and we’ll talk through several verticals today. A complete slate of key verticals will help build a robust 360° voice of customer (VOC) program.

360° VOC Feedback Categories

Before the discussion on key verticals, it’s important to specify a separation between first-person and third-person data collection. First-person data collection involves data (voice) directly from the customer. Third-person data collection involves data (voice) being relayed by an intermediary. For example, a company associate may state that customers are requesting a certain product feature. While third-person data is useful and can often serve as quicker, directional kind of information, first-person information provides the true voice as opposed to an echo.

Why is that important? Do you remember The Telephone Game? In The Telephone Game, a person at a beginning of a chain shares information by whispering into the next person’s ear. By the end of the game, the information has usually changed–sometimes wildly! There will always be a place for third-person data which can provide speedy insights. However, for voice purity, first-person data is preferable.

As a second separation, target audience, customer prospects, current customers, and former customers can all provide different levels of insights due to their different positions in the customer lifecycle. Here are some examples of kinds of insights each group can provide:

• Target Audience – This group may not be aware of a product, service, or company. In some ways, this group may provide the least biased insights which can help in areas like awareness planning, product/service features, and branding.
• Customer Prospects – This group of potential customers are somewhere in the acquisition funnel and can provide insights into hesitation, conversion, and interests among other areas.
• Current Customers – Current customers currently purchase a company’s products and/or services and should be among the most intimately familiar with current offerings. They also can be the easiest to reach for feedback. This group can contain customers ranging from casual to loyal. Consequently, their insights can also vary widely.
• Former Customers – Former customers are an extremely interesting group because they previously bought a company’s products/services but stopped. Insights they can provide include what shifted them away from being customers and their previous level of loyalty. The best opportunity to obtain feedback from this group is when they are leaving their association with a business.

360° VOC Key Verticals

Product / Service Development Voice

• Marketing research surveys – Topical surveys to obtain answers to specific questions from your customers and potential customers. A combination of quantitative and qualitative responses with demographic profile data secure statistical proof about respondents’ views.
• Customer “beta” testing – Product/service testing completed by end users that results in feedback to drive improvements prior to a formal launch.
• Focus groups – A small group of people brought together for a limited period to provide topical feedback, most often in a qualitative manner.
• Advisory councils – Forums created for key customers/accounts which enable informal feedback, often in group settings, and help offer guidance on strategic direction. These councils can also feature occasional direct surveys, depending on how they are implemented.

Customer Service / Product Voice

• Post-service surveys – Surveys prompted after service, whether immediately after service or with an optional time-constrained delay. These surveys can come through Web chat, phone, or video service and often enable Net Promoter Scores, customer satisfaction scores, and service associate ratings.
• Post-purchase surveys – Surveys prompted after purchase, whether immediately after purchase or with an optional time-constrained delay, that enable the purchaser to provide feedback on the purchase experience.
• Service transcripts – Word-for-word dialogue of a service instance that can be data-mined for insights. A chat transcript should be generated immediately. A phone transcript, if generated through natural language processing, may contain some errors due to accent, speaker volume, semantics, and more.
• Product reviews – Written summaries and numerical ratings of a product which often serve as user-generated content to describe user thoughts on a product or service. Reviews can be used publicly, often as a source of social proof to generate more sales.
• Exit surveys – Surveys prompted after a person leaves a service and ceases being a customer. As an example, they often appear briefly during an email unsubscribe request.

Third-Person Voice

• Employee feedback (customer-facing staff) – Employee feedback from front-line staff, customer success staff, and sales/business development team members that can significantly help a business instinctively know what corrections to make to acquire new customers and retain current customers.
• Employee feedback (diverse staff) – Employee feedback from members of diverse communities that can help build stronger inclusiveness into products and services. Diverse communities include black, Latinx, LGBTQ+, Asian-American and Pacific Islander, people with disabilities, and more.
• “Alpha” testing – Product/service testing completed internally before moving to “beta” testing with end users. Feedback drives improvements, and internal testers should be thinking for the end user during their testing. In this way, alpha testers become end user advocates.
• Secret shopping – Test shopping experiences completed by people hired to make purchases and/or inquiries and share notes about positive, negative, or neutral experiences.
• Ethnographic studies – Studies which involve observing customer behavior and following up with questions about the behavior. These studies involve third-person interpretation of actions but also recording interviews with subjects. Appropriate ethnographic studies can take from days to years and can even entail living in the same manner as subjects!
• Journey mapping – Experience diagrams built in a focus group-style with internal experts to describe problems (pain points) and key moments (moments that matter) for customers. Optimally, the group also includes customer representatives to provide direct feedback and complete the picture.

Digital Voice

• Web surveys – Surveys prompted on a Website to offer brief feedback on the digital experience, often appearing once every iterative number of page hits.
• Mobile app surveys – Surveys prompted on a mobile app to offer brief feedback on the digital app experience.
• Social media sentiment – Aggregation of social media comments to determine feelings of people on social media toward a brand, product, and/or service. Volume, subject matter, and duration are all important facets. While social media posts may be directed at a brand, they do not need to be and can instead be indirect.
• Forums / blog posts and comments – Thoughts and opinions posted online by customers and potential customers that provide insights into frames of mind and needs. While forums and blogs can be earned, they can also be owned by a company (customer success communities, for example). Like social media sentiment, this can either be direct or indirect feedback.

Overall, the grouping of voice of customer methods is comprised in the following table, including whether the method is better suited for quantitative or qualitative data, whether the feedback is direct from the customer or indirect through an intermediary, and which customer type provides the feedback:

VOC Method	Quantitative	Qualitative	Feedback Level	Customer Type
Marketing research surveys	X	X	Direct	All
Customer “beta” testing		X	Direct	Current Customer
Focus groups		X	Direct	All
Advisory councils	X	X	Direct	Current Customer
Post-service surveys	X	X	Direct	Current Customer
Post-purchase surveys	X	X	Direct	Current Customer
Service transcripts		X	Direct	Prospect + Current Customers
Product reviews	X	X	Direct	Current Customer
Exit surveys	X	X	Direct	Former Customer
Employee feedback (customer-facing staff)		X	Indirect	n/a
Employee feedback (diverse staff)		X	Indirect	n/a
“Alpha” testing		X	Indirect	n/a
Secret shopping	X	X	Indirect	n/a
Ethnographic study		X	Direct + Indirect	All
Journey mapping		X	Direct + Indirect	All
Web surveys	X	X	Direct	Prospect + Current Customers
Mobile app surveys	X	X	Direct	Current Customer
Social media sentiment		X	Direct	All
Forums / blog posts and comments		X	Direct	All

Linking Key 360° VOC Verticals

The above is a robust program, but it’s also a program generating a lot of insights from a lot of different sources in several different verticals. A program like this can have limited impact if an organization does not take time to organize the insights. Insight planning and integration begets additional insights, and good planning questions, validates, broadens, and deepens customer understanding. Several concepts can help you do this important work (not an exhaustive list):

• Insights Journey Mapping – Leverage journey mapping experience to map steps in the customer journey and isolate times when feedback is optimal and appropriate. This work can provide a logical insights journey map to place verticals appropriately and drive the best insights across the business.
• Global Identifiers – Linking feedback with unique customer identification numbers/codes can help to ensure customers’ individual experiences are linked. This is especially helpful in tracking customer views on concepts like satisfaction at an individual customer level. Known as a global ID, these identifiers can help within a business unit or across an entire enterprise.
• Methodology Fit – Linking voice of customer methodologies through natural fits can also be a useful measure. For example, digital experience feedback on Websites and mobile apps could naturally connect as management works toward an integrated digital experience.
• Thematic – If specific themes appear in feedback, insights leaders can search for related words in open-ended qualitative questions across other verticals. Leaders can also craft questions around those themes in appropriate quantitative and qualitative feedback methods. Both will broaden insights for specific themes.
• Focused Conversation – Many feedback methods enable quick feedback from customers. Leverage data collected from those methods to create focused conversations in more intensive voice of customer research options. Methods that may be more suited to take advantage of these kinds of conversations include focus groups, advisory councils, and ethnographic studies.
• Time Delineated – As a final method to link verticals, track 360° voice of customer results across time. The most reasonable way to do this is using the same questions and quantitatively determining changes in views. However, qualitative statements should also change over time and indicate shifts in views.

Impact of Voice Fatigue

One problem that an insights leader may face in implementation of these program components is voice fatigue (or feedback fatigue)–the tiring mentality a customer experiences when asked for feedback too often. Not only is this a negative customer experience, but it also can result in fewer and less precise insights as customers decide to share less and pay less attention in their answers.

Those are results that marketing insights leaders cannot afford! As a general rule, the more invasive, time-consuming, and high frequency the requests, the more likely someone will experience voice fatigue. Here are some key tips to avoid voice fatigue:

• Leverage feedback already collected and published by others.
• Think through how much feedback is necessary to reach a statistical level of significance and/or make business decisions.
• Keep feedback requests short and simple to complete.
• Allow the user to skip questions (if not critical).
• Consider not soliciting feedback a second time if the customer hasn’t responded to an initial request.
• Program auto-prompted surveys to only appear on an iterative basis (once every 5,000 times, for instance).
• Reserve more intensive feedback methods for the best customers with whom a business has strong business relationships.
• Enable open-ended question-and-answer opportunities so the customer can share their true voice, unconstrained by the business’ interpretation of what matters.

Are Insights Actionable?

One key question to keep in mind while designing a 360° voice of customer program is whether or not the insights being collected are actionable. If insights are not actionable, program effectiveness is limited. Management may have a better idea of where the company’s products and services stand in customers’ minds. However, the goal should not just be to find current standing (baseline). Instead, the true goal should be to continuously improve based on the results. As management implements improvements, quantitative results should also improve demonstrably across time. (Of course, some of these results may also be tempered by competitor improvements!)

One key method of ensuring actionable insights is to present recommendations and ideas on how to capitalize on insights. Directly asking for approval and resources to execute on the recommendations and ideas will help ensure a decision is made. If a rejection of a recommendation/idea occurs, monitoring future insights to check for the same feedback is a method to successfully reiterate not only the feedback but the continued pattern.

A second key method to ensure that 360° voice of customer feedback is actionable is to create dedicated groups to address insights. These can even be setup as business councils that meet regularly and are empowered to act. Providing a flow of insights into these kinds of groups has the added benefit of creating cultural buy-in and inclusion into 360° voice of customer programming.

A final piece of advice is to prioritize actionable insights. If an insight can be used to make an easy improvement, clearly show that ease. Complexity, financial impact (expense & revenue), speed to execute, and legal and compliance impact among many other factors could contribute to this prioritization.

360° Voice of Customer Final Thoughts

360° voice of customer feedback is an extremely large topic, and organizing your program via participation across all four main verticals can generate a lot of customer insights. Equally important is the work to integrate the verticals and build a foundation to act upon insights. Through all of this work, one cannot lose sight of voice fatigue and how to obtain research while minimizing the risks of voice fatigue. Combined, these items are all big, complex, and important pieces of overall program management.

But when you’re talking about your customers, the hard work is worth it–both for them and, ultimately, your company.