I have always believed that going directly to your customers (i.e., collecting the voice of the customer) for answers to difficult questions is the only way to get the correct answer quickly. For me, this makes incredible sense. How come people continuously make assumptions about what their customers need want, care about, and how they want to be treated? It just baffles me.
Let me share three examples with you:
- A Customer Service Vice President decided it was time to start surveying her customers because the Sales team was reporting that the customers were unhappy with the performance of her service team. Her objective was to understand how the customers felt after a service engineer went on-site to perform a repair. With only that information, she signed up for a Survey Monkey account and wrote a survey asking about their experience. After a few months, she analyzed all the results she had received, detected some areas with low CSAT scores, and implemented correction action. A few more months of surveying showed a genuine increase in CSAT for the transactions, but our beleaguered VP was still getting buried in complaints from the Sales team. She needed help!
- The Services Marketing Director of a $500M high-tech company is not generating enough service contract sales and profits. He creates a high-end contract full of “benefits” and prices accordingly. He then had his contract sellers focus on trying to sell this new offering. The result? Few takers of the new contract and an alarming decline in sales of the old standby. He needs help!
- The HR Benefits Vice President modified the company’s benefits package to give employees more flexibility while saving the company money. When the new plan was announced, there was so much employee push-back that the company was forced to pull the new plan, continue with the older one, and scramble like crazy to make up for the loss of cost savings in the new budget year. He also needs help!
The common theme here is that people make changes that affect other people without understanding what is important to their target customers and, more importantly, how much these customers will value the proposed change. If I had little faith in human nature, I would say that this behavior smacks of hubris or arrogance. Instead, I think it smacks of not understanding that just because we have an arms-length relationship with people does not mean we know how they will react in any particular situation. In other words, we cannot talk for someone else unless we are in the same situation as they are, with the same pressures, needs, and constraints. So, the way around these limitations is to collect the voice of the customer.
Going back to the three examples I gave, let’s look at the cause of these ongoing issues:
Example 1 – The Customer Transactional Survey
Most likely, the scores were improving but the customer feedback about the issues remained because the survey did not address the areas of customer concern where they had low satisfaction levels.
Example 2 – The Services Marketing Director
Most likely, the new contract had few takers because the additional features and benefits were not valuable to the customers. And, because the sellers were pushing this expensive offering, the customers decided not to purchase anything.
Example 3 – The HR Benefits Vice President
Because the new plan did not include the same levels of coverage as the employees currently enjoy, they were instantly dissatisfied. And if their payroll deduction also increased, the stage was set for a mutiny.
And the solution is…ask the people. After all, they didn’t name it the voice of the customer for nothing!
If your targets know what they want at least better than you, why not ask? The feedback you receive will help you make better decisions and strengthen the relationship between the two groups of people. I know because that is what I do in my business. And the voice of the customer is always right.
Related article: Understanding Desired Business Outcomes and KPIs Is A Must
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