Organizations collect a multitude of customer feedback—CSAT surveys, social reviews, insurance claims, voice-to-text conversions of customer orders, customer emails, to name a few.  Understanding and acting on all this textual data at scale can be complicated and costly. How should an organization build its Voice of the Customer playbook that offers practical strategies to use customer data to build loyalty, introduce products consumers want, and market to the right audience?

Contributor

• • Duane Lyons, Practice Lead, Wavicle Data Solutions

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul:
Welcome listeners, this is Sanjog Aul, your host, and the topic for conversation is How to Build a Voice of the Customer Playbook? Organizations gather customer feedback in quite a few ways: CSAT surveys, social reviews, insurance claims, voice-to-text conversions of customer orders, and customer emails. Understanding and acting on all this textual data at scale can get complicated and cost a lot of time and money. So how should an organization go about building its voice of the customer playbook that offers practical strategies to use customer data to build loyalty, introduce products that consumers want, and market to the right audience? To discuss this, I have with me Duane Lyons. Duane is a Practice Lead at Wavicle Data Solutions, a data analytics consulting firm that provides cloud data and analytics solutions to help companies improve their business results. Hello, Duane. Thank you for joining us.

Duane Lyons:
Thanks for having me.

Duane Lyons:
Sure, and thanks. That’s a good question. You’re absolutely correct in that there are a lot of terms and it can be confusing. When I think about voice of the customer for me that really focuses on collecting, analyzing, and acting on the direct customer feedback that you’re receiving about your brand, your products, your physical locations, if you’re a retailer or restaurant, for example, as well as feedback either on or from your employees as well, and it enables you to make improved product, marketing, and operational decision. Now customer 360, which was one of the terms that you threw out, that’s more of a holistic concept of having a complete picture of all of the information you may have about a customer, transactional data, like what they’ve purchased and what they’ve been offered and what they’ve responded to, as well as customer feedback, and customer feedback would just be one of the pieces of information that would be part of a customer 360 solution. Now that said, very few companies at this point are able to successfully integrate customer feedback into a 360 solution,

Duane Lyons:
and then I think you also mentioned customer journeys. Customer journeys is more of a holistic view of what are all those steps in the lifecycle of a customer relationship, from retention to churn, right? Each one of those steps look like, and Voice of Customer can interface with that in a number of ways. One is that you figure out specifically at what points in a journey that you want to solicit feedback, and then secondly, you can use customer feedback to either optimize the journey or actually make changes to it, and then specific to Voice of Customer, there are a lot of sources. This information can be collected through client satisfaction or CSAT surveys, could be collected from social media, customer contact centers. Emails, chat, and restaurants, for example, it can even be sourced from the two-way conversations that occur through a drive-through.

Sanjog Aul:
Do you see voice of the customer as a standalone capability, or does it fit into a broader ecosystem of customer-centric capability?

Duane Lyons:
That’s another good question, and the short answer with an explanation is that it depends. So voice of customer can definitely stand alone, and when it’s used standalone, you can really use it to do things like making improvements, like reducing the time needed to complete a purchase transaction, either in a store or online or through a drive through at a restaurant. You can use it to address, say, training or performance issues with your staff or your cleanliness of your locations or your safety related issues that are brought up by consumers or for example, being able to improve order accuracy, especially say in the fast food restaurant industry. Now more strategically, if you’re still using it standalone, you can use it to help identify maybe new product ideas or limited time offers. You can also use it to understand if your marketing messaging is or isn’t working, and how well it’s resonating with customers. Now, when we take a step back and say, what if we’re not using it standalone, but we’re using it as part of a broader capability, a common scenario could be to integrate it with marketing initiatives, especially within the digital space.

Duane Lyons:
In that scenario, voice of customer data can be paired with transactional data or loyalty program data, and then you can actually start, for example, using it to micro-segment customers and target them with offers based on their preferences and behavior or you could actually use voice of customer data to just fine tune your messaging and your offers for broader segments.

Sanjog Aul:
What steps are crucial to driving a successful voice of the customer program?

Duane Lyons:
So we view it as having 3 distinct pillars, and that first pillar is the ability to collect the information. For example, collect the voice of customer data. Are you conducting surveys as part of every purchase transaction? Are you capturing social data that’s being posted about your brands or your products? Are you capturing emails and chats through an inbound call center or support center? And another big part of the collecting part is how do you structure those surveys? So ideally, you’re going to play a balance between structured questions where you can answer with anything from highly satisfied to highly dissatisfied, or 5 stars to 1 stars, as well as textual feedback, because textual feedback allows you to capture feedback for rapidly changing business conditions, which I’ll go into more detail later with an example, and then lastly, related to collecting, are you collecting enough data to make it statistically relevant for decision-making? Or is it just something that’s anecdotal in nature, which is still valuable? Now, when we think about the analyze part of this, which is really the next pillar, now that you’ve collected the information, how do you analyze it? To analyze that customer feedback most effectively, you really need to be able to integrate multiple sources and identify common metrics that you can use to analyze the data regardless of where it came from. Whether it came from social or CSAT or from a call center. In addition, you want to look at the data in terms of sentiment. Was it positive? Was it negative? Was it neutral? And you’ll also want to assign it to categories.

Duane Lyons:
When you’re thinking about millions and millions of customer comments, it’s impossible to manually look through it and develop any meaningful insights at scale. So you want to be able to do certain things automated that allow you to kind of look for that needle in the haystack, so to speak. So things like sentiment analysis and the assignment of all the comments to categories is critically important, and then one other thing we want to highlight, and we’ll go into a more detailed example as well, is when you analyze that data, it’s important to understand that customers provide complex feedback once in a while, or very frequently, and it’s important to leverage NLP or natural language processing capabilities to break those comments they’re making down into sell comments, and analyze each one of them separately, and as I mentioned earlier, look at that in more detail later, but by being able to kind of break it out into more detail, we’re able to understand more granularly what they’re saying. Is it positive or negative? And what they’re talking about.

Duane Lyons:
The last pillar to talk about is being able to take action, and that’s admittedly still a big area of opportunity for many organizations., and the goal there is to be able to take all this information and share it out through the organization across functions, whether it’s operations, marketing, supply chain, and then being able to push it out to the store, the branch, or the restaurant level, and then the goal is to be able to automate that workflow and then push that actionable insight and/or visualizations directly into the tools being used in the frontline.

Sanjog Aul:
Let’s take a quick break, listeners. When we come back, let’s dig deeper to learn about the challenges and pitfalls companies face when using voice of the customer data. Please stay tuned, we’ll be right back.

Speaker C:
Wavicle Data Solutions is proud to sponsor this program. Learn how Active Insights, Wavicle’s advanced text analytics solution, improves the speed, completeness, and accuracy of voice of customer feedback analysis up to 10 times faster and 70% more accurately. Enabling your teams to identify customer feedback trends in near real-time and drive meaningful action. To learn more, visit

Duane Lyons:
wavicledata.com/activeinsights. This is CTN Brandcast on CIO Talk Network.

Sanjog Aul:
Welcome back, listeners. So, Duane it sounds like many companies can improve upon how they act on the data. Are there any other challenges or pitfalls companies face when using voice of the customer data?

Duane Lyons:
Yeah, definitely. Something that’s as simple as just installing Microsoft Office in your ready to use it, but one of the biggest challenges I think that we see with organizations is that there are many sources of voice of customer data, and there’s a huge volume of that data. For example, one of our clients, just from their customer satisfaction process, collects over 100 million surveys annually, with about two thirds of them including textual comments, and that’s not even including the data they get from social. So if you don’t have the right data infrastructure or tools, it’s really difficult actually, it’s impossible to analyze such large amounts of information and be able to find that needle in the haystack. Beyond the sheer amount of data, this information is often collected by various tools specific to the channels, for example, like social listening tools.

Duane Lyons:
So you may end up with a scenario where you have one tool used for social data, another tool used for CSAT data, maybe yet another tool used for analyzing what’s going on in your call center, and as a global company, you may also be using different tools in different countries. So that’s another challenge too, is just the diversity of the source systems that are out there, and so really the biggest challenge is just how do you bring all this data together and be able to analyze it so you can act on it?

Sanjog Aul:
So what are your learnings from multiple voice of the customer initiatives?

Duane Lyons:
Sure. It’s a great question, and from a process standpoint, it’s really important. To understand that comment at a more granular level and break it out into what we refer to as sub-comments, and I spoke about that a little bit earlier, and I’ll actually walk through an example of that for a restaurant industry example. So I’m going to start with an example comment that I might get from a customer. It says, “I ordered a burger. It was good, but the fries were cold.” Well, the reality is that’s not just one comment.

Duane Lyons:
There’s really three unique comments. So the first thing you got to do is you got to break that down into the sub-comments. So the sub-comments are the first one is, “I ordered a burger.” That one is a very factual comment. It’s neutral sentiment because it’s just stating what I did, and if we think about what it is that the person is talking about, the category would be order process or order accuracy. Second sub-comment in the original comment was, “It was delicious.” Well, That’s obviously a positive comment, but we don’t know what it is. So we have to first figure out that it is actually the hamburger, and we know the topic that we’re talking about is food taste

Duane Lyons:
and then the last example, or the last sub-comment, excuse me, was, but the fries were cold. Well, that’s a negative comment and it’s referring to a different topic, which is food temperature. So being able to analyze that comment, break it down into the sub-comments before we start attributing it and applying tags to it is critical, because if we would have tried to do that at overall level, we would have probably gotten very generic or different results. So that’s, I think, one thing that’s really important is make sure that you’re using best in class capabilities to analyze those comments. I think another thing is that you never know what’s going to happen, especially in 2020. So I unexpected events, unfortunately, like a pandemic occurs, and voice of the customer solution is a great way to quickly pivot to understand how customers are feeling about their experience in your location and what they expect from you.

Duane Lyons:
So for example, a let’s say a company has a customer satisfaction process that includes structured questions only. Well, prior to the pandemic, it would have been very unlikely that you would have had standard questions where you’d be asking about employee compliance with PPE or Is everybody observing social distancing when they’re at your location? But that’s obviously critically important to customers if they’re going to continue interacting with your brand, and it’s just more fundamentally important for safety purposes. So by having an ability to analyze these text comments and do it with cutting-edge NLP capabilities, it’s very easy to take a solution and without modifications, start using it to look for PPE, right? So in that scenario, something that client was able to use to quickly understand where they were and weren’t having PPE issues, and then two, the other I think would be that sometimes the business metrics you have within your organization, how about a certain business process and how well it is or isn’t performing, isn’t always the same as what your customers believe. So a great example might be the length of time it takes customers to order an item and stand in your line in your retail or restaurant location, or how long it takes them to get through a drive-thru. Your data might be suggesting to you that you’re processing orders faster, you’re getting people through the line faster, and you probably are, but if that’s not in line with what the customer perception is, then you still have an issue. I think those are probably the two biggest ahas that I’ve developed over time, especially in 2020.

Sanjog Aul:
So, Duane, what’s your recommended voice of the customer playbook for an organization interested in exploring this space?

Duane Lyons:
Sure. So I there’s an interesting quote that we sometimes refer back to from J. Willard Marriott that said, it’s the little things that make the big things possible, and only close attention to these fine details of any operation make the operational first class or something similar to that, right? So if you want to establish a voice of customer playbook, really use those little details that matter to your customers and act on them to really kind of improve their experience. So as far as kind of how that playbook works, I would suggest if you think about the three pillars that we talked about previously, really focus on understanding your level of maturity within each of those three pillars. So for example, ask yourself some critical questions. So for example, if you haven’t started a voice of customer program yet, what are the crucial metrics you want to be able to measure? And what channels do you want to collect them from? That’ll allow you to figure out how you should structure your surveys, what questions you want to ask, what information you want to collect. I think another best practice, which I probably sound a little bit like a broken record here, but Don’t think about just structured questions,

Duane Lyons:
also think about inclusion of text-based analytics to allow customers to just tell you about whatever they want to talk about, and then finally, I think it’s also important maybe ask yourself a question of how easy is it to act on, right? Do we deliver easy to use intuitive dashboards that are specific to the roles or the personas in the organization? Or even more sophisticated, do we actually take the information and the insights and push it to people so that they don’t have to actually go and essentially even connect to a dashboard, and then lastly, I think it’s also critical to get buy in from executives across multiple departments and use that customer feedback as a key driver for making decisions on how to manage the business, market to your customers, and improve operations and product decisions.

Sanjog Aul:
Once again, thank you, Duane, for sharing your thoughts and insights about how an organization can build A Practical Voice of the Customer Playbook. Thank you. And listeners, I invite you to find related conversations on our website at ciotalknetwork.com.