Five key capabilities to drive value from your ‘Voice of Customer’ program
While investment in customer experience (CX) technology continues to grow, many companies aren’t capitalizing on the extensive and often profound insights that are being generated.1 Regardless of an organization’s size or industry, Voice of Customer (VoC) programs that primarily focus on data and technology will prove unsuccessful. Instead, they need to take a holistic approach that draws insights from the data and embeds a customer-centric decision-making process across the organization.
“Organizations need a VoC program that goes beyond data and platforms and converts insights into customer-centric action.”
- Scott Lieberman, Principal, US Customer Advisory & Financial Services Lead
Without this holistic approach, there is typically a disconnect between the insights provided and business decisions being made. As a result, organizations end up with a lot of data with little effective action. Organizations need to design and operate a programmatic approach to VoC that goes beyond data and platforms and empowers organizations and employees to convert insights into action.
A surprisingly low percentage of organizations are satisfied with their VoC programs. In fact, a full 47% of VoC and CX leaders rated the maturity of their measurement programs as “low” or “very low.” 2 Taking a programmatic approach to VoC will drive maturity and help to maximize the ROI of the program.
Below we take a look at this approach and the five foundational VoC capabilities that enable organizations to drive insights to action.
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1. Establish strategic governance and alignment
Organizations need a robust governance approach to operationalize the use of customer feedback, including unambiguous executive support – financially and otherwise – to act on feedback. VoC programs must be strategically aligned with broader organizational goals and embedded across business functions – not just within CX – to enable mobilization around common CX objectives.
A VoC program should include a team of stakeholders across different departments who own key components of the end-to-end customer experience, including those working in call centers, operations, fulfillment, sales, and marketing.3
The challenge with CX measurement
Fewer than 60% of CX professionals say that their organization can meaningfully act on the data, and only 40% think that stakeholders are confident in the CX metrics.2
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2. Select and integrate customer feedback
Organizations should adopt a tiered measurement approach to feedback selection, centered around customer journeys as the key to linking discrete interactions to relationship metrics (e.g., Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)). Overall business outcomes should inform the type of structured and unstructured feedback that’s collected across the end-to-end customer journey.
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3. Design and control for integrative technology
Integration of operational, financial and customer (VoC) data enables decision making based on a holistic view of the customer across business functions. In mature organizations, VoC platforms are integrated with other cross-functional platforms such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems or customer service and support technology. This facilitates the consolidation of otherwise siloed customer data and feedback into one source.
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4. Define how insights are reported and responded to
A critical element of a successful VoC program is ensuring that the insights gathered from and about your customers are surfaced at the right time to relevant stakeholders. What’s more, employees must be – and feel – empowered to use insights to affect customer-centric change.
To create an organization that’s empowered to deliver on CX needs, cross-functional teams need to be trained on how to:
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5. Determine how customer feedback can be leveraged for data analysis and measurement
Only a quarter of leaders say that feedback is used to inform all decisions that affect customers.4 Once employees feel empowered to use insights, they can leverage centralized data across all customer touchpoints to rapidly analyze customer data and define future CX initiatives that will maximize economic value and ROI. With the appropriate tools, for example customer centric dashboards, cross-functional teams can design and prioritize initiatives based on perceived impact on key performance indicators (KPIs).
Delivering best-in-class customer experience through your VoC program means thinking beyond data and platforms. It means taking a holistic, programmatic approach to VoC that converts insights into action and drives value.
After the five foundational VoC capabilities are established, they must be operationalized in a cyclical insight-to-impact operating model to drive meaningful change. KPMG’s Insight to Impact operating model (see below) encompasses five key phases: (1) monitoring (2) analyzing (3) distributing (4) acting (5) measuring and optimizing.
The operating model is designed to support:
1. Monitor
Continuous observation of real time feedback and metrics
2. Analyze
Collaborative analysis of identified insights
3. Distribute
Socialization and alignment on what to do
4. Act
Implementation and value tracking of actions taken
5. Measure and Optimize
Quantification of financial impact and refinement of CX approach
Customer feedback must be taken seriously and integrated into every aspect of a company's operations. It's not just about listening, but about leveraging those insights to drive transformative change. With the KPMG Customer Advisory holistic approach, organizations can cultivate a customer-centric culture that permeates every department, empowering employees to proactively act upon feedback and deliver exceptional experiences.
Swetha Ramjee Kumar,
Managing Director, KPMG Customer Experience and VOC Lead
At every step of the journey, we deliver insights that help organizations make decisions with precision and confidence. Together, we’ll turn opportunities into tangible, transformative results. For example, for one of our clients, we drove an +8-point uplift in NPS by implementing a customer-centric VoC program. This enabled our client to be customer-centric and better analyze and action on customer feedback. We helped another client secure continued investment in CX across the organization by developing a prioritization framework and cost-benefit economics model to quantify the financial value of NPS improvements.
KPMG Customer Advisory helps some of the world's leading marketing, sales and service professionals make the right technology and operational investments that deliver meaningful, sustained growth. KPMG demonstrates value with VoC program strategy and execution and has quantified ROI of VoC and CX investments for clients across industries.
Results from the 2022 US Customer Experience Excellence Report
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