This CX Mini Masterclass explains the concept of the Voice of Customer (VOC) Feedback Loop and why this is important for customer journey optimization. It’s one thing to map the customer journey, it’s another to improve customer experiences on an ongoing basis. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, defines the VOC Feedback Loop and shares some practical tips for implementing a framework for continual journey optimization. If you’re looking for guidance on how to move journey management from haphazard to gold standard, then this episode is for you.
A framework for customer journey optimization
As an organization progresses up the CX maturity curve and customer experience moves from being a “project” to a permanent fixture within the way of doing business, a key component is establishing a mechanism for ongoing management and improvement of the customer journey. This framework is known as the VOC feedback loop (also sometimes called an insights-to action feedback loop or customer journey optimization).
The underlying idea is that organizations must have an ongoing, sustainable process for unearthing insights about where to improve the journey, prioritizing solutions, implementing change and measuring the impact. This process is continual. As journey improvements are implemented, it creates an opportunity for measuring results and listening to how customers respond. This in turn creates insights that might lead to future improvements, hence the term “feedback loop” and not “improvement process”.
The VOC Feedback Loop is not to be confused with Closed Loop Feedback, which is the process of getting back to a customer, after they’ve provided feedback about their experience. For more detail on Closed Loop Feedback, be sure to check out episode 42.
Why this matters
When an organization launches a customer insights initiative or maps the journey for the first time, this undoubtedly highlights opportunities to improve experiences. The natural reaction is for the organization to establish a project or a task force to identify, prioritize and implement possible solutions. This can be an effective way to raise the profile of the customer journey, but the challenge with ongoing sustainability is twofold.
First, the list of identified improvements is often overwhelmingly long, so much so that it’s not really suitable for a 3, 6, 9 maybe even an 18-month project. The second challenge is that the journey and underlying needs of customers aren’t stagnant. They’re ever-evolving. If a CX team were to do customer research or map the customer journey today, 6 months later there would be new needs and issues. Why? Because products, services and customers are always changing.
For these reasons, CX leaders can’t expect to just map the customer journey every few years, come up with a big list of fix-it items, go to work on those and call it good. Ultimately, to establish sustainability and realize the business benefits of customer journey optimization, there needs to be a Voice of Customer Feedback Loop so that issues with the customer journey are constantly being scrutinized, solutions developed and improvements deployed.
Tips for an effective VOC Feedback Loop
As with most things, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for ongoing customer journey optimization. That said, there are best practices that CX teams can adapt to their context:
For all phases of the VOC Feedback Loop, consistency is key.
Transcript
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Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.
If you’re a returning listener, thanks and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.
This is episode 75, a bit of a milestone for the program. It’s also the second episode of March 2020. Today, we’re going to talk about voice of customer feedback loops, what these are, and why they’re important for any organization that wants to improve customer experience. It’s one thing to map the customer journey, it’s another thing to manage and improve the customer journey on an ongoing basis.
That’s where the rubber really meets the road. Yet, establishing the right framework is something I’ve seen many organizations struggle with. So today, I’m going to cover an overview of the concept and some dos and don’ts. If you’re looking for guidance and ideas on how to move customer journey management from haphazard to gold standard, then this episode is for you.
As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and here’s something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. As an organization progresses up the customer experience maturity curve, and customer experience moves from being a project to a permanent fixture within the way of doing business, a key component is establishing a mechanism for ongoing management and improvement of the customer journey. Otherwise known as the Voice of Customer Feedback Loop.
I sometimes call this an Insights to Action Feedback Loop. But the idea is to create a continuum from customer insights to new ideas about where to improve the journey, to actual implementation of vetted and approved customer journey improvements. Note that this is not the same as Closed Loop Feedback. Closed Loop Feedback, which I covered in episode 42, is getting back to a customer after they’ve provided feedback about their experience.
Usually, this entails letting the customer know that they’ve been heard, the actions that have been taken or will be taken, and if appropriate, some form of resolution. Once again, we have customer experience terminology that sounds very close, but is actually pretty different. If you’re struggling to differentiate between the two, you can think of a Closed Loop Feedback as an intervention at a micro level that impacts one customer and their experience. The Voice of Customer Feedback Loop is a macro approach to managing large quantities of customer insights from different sources and turning these into journey improvements that impact many customers.
When an organization launches a Customer Insights Initiative or maps the journey for the first time, it undoubtedly highlights opportunities to improve experiences. The natural reaction is for the organization to establish a project or maybe a task force to identify, prioritize, and implement possible solutions. All of this is great. I’m rarely going to voice concern about efforts to improve the journey, but the challenge here is twofold.
First, the list of identified improvements is often overwhelmingly long. So prepare yourself for that if you’re embarking on your organization’s maiden voyage for journey mapping. Usually, this list of improvements is so long that it’s not really suitable for a 3, 6, 9, maybe even an 18 month project. The second challenge is that the journey and underlying needs of customers aren’t stagnant.
They’re ever evolving. If you were to do customer journey research or to map the customer journey today, six months later, there will be new needs and issues because products, services, and customers themselves are always changing. For these reasons, we can’t expect to just map the journey every few years, come up with a big list of fix-it items, go to work on those, and call it good. No.
Customer experience leaders can use that approach to initially raise the profile of customer experience and journey management. But ultimately, to establish sustainability and realize the business benefits of customer experience management, there needs to be a voice of customer feedback loop, so that issues with the customer journey are constantly being scrutinized, solutions are being developed, and improvements are being deployed. Now that we’ve covered a broad definition of the voice of customer feedback loop and why we should care about it, I’d like to share some tips and suggestions for establishing an effective and sustainable feedback loop. Let’s start with insights.
My suggestion here would be to establish an ongoing process for aggregating customer insights from across the organization. That’s generally the global best practice. You might have raised awareness about customer issues through a once-off effort, but to make this sustainable, you need to be continually sourcing, consolidating, and reviewing voice of customer data. Voice of customer is a huge topic unto itself.
I’ll refer you back to episodes 39 through 42 for more detail. And, the answer to where to get this data will be different for every organization. But the point is, you’ll need to establish a process for gathering an array of insights about the customer journey. To keep this going, insights analysis will need clear ownership and someone to champion the message.
I’ve seen this be most successfully implemented as a key job responsibility for someone like an insights manager. Next, is development and prioritization of journey improvements. Here, you need both governance and creativity. Cross-functional participation in the process will be key, as will a regular structure for evaluating issues and developing solutions.
I’ve seen some organizations successfully implement customer councils or steering committees whose responsibility is managing journey improvements. They can be creative problem solvers, the gatekeepers, and the taskmasters all rolled into one. The key here is to get a respected senior leader to chair this and to remain committed, and also to establish a regular cadence for the governance group to convene. Journey improvements are rarely relegated to one silo within the business, so you need to have cross-functional representation.
This also is a major best practice for this. Your steerco or governance group should have a clear mandate and objective. Perhaps that’s as simple as improving the customer journey to enhance customer lifetime value. But whatever it is, a clear objective will be the guiding light for all decisions and how you measure success.
As solutions are vetted, they should be prioritized based on impact to the journey and to the business. Again, that’s a big topic on its own, and I dedicated episode 54 to an approach for prioritizing journey improvements. But the bottom line is to ensure that you have some prioritization process in place that ensures you’re putting your efforts where they will have the biggest impact, both in terms of return on investment and creating a better journey. The next step of the feedback loop is implementing the journey improvements themselves.
You can leverage the same leader-led governance to establish accountability and planning for implementation of journey fixes. If your organization has a project management office, perhaps you can plug into that for expertise and project management support. It’s important that customer experience management as a whole not be treated like a project or a program. But individual journey improvement opportunities can definitely be tackled in this way.
I’d also urge you to borrow a page from Design Thinking and ensure that as you prototype and deploy improvements to the customer journey, that you also plan for phases of listening, testing, and refinement. After journey improvements are implemented, it’s time to measure the results and the impact. If journey improvements are crafted with a clear goal in mind, then measuring success will be fairly straightforward. I’d recommend establishing metrics that are in line with your objectives.
If the goal of your Voice of Customer Feedback Loop is to improve the journey or customer lifetime value, then you’ll want to measure things like retention, growth of customer base, and profit per customer. Plus, whatever factors influence these. As with the management of the insights phase of things, your measurement approach will require clear ownership and a regular cadence. Often, this takes the form of some monthly or quarterly reporting that is part of someone’s job responsibilities to create.
These measurements become your success stories back to the rest of the business. So don’t forget to factor in return on investment, customer testimonials, and whatever else will resonate with your stakeholder audience. Remember that consistency is key. So establish a regular cadence for communicating this back to the organization.
And finally, changes in metrics and measurement will probably raise new questions, catalyzing hypotheses that may become items for voice of customer research. And this is where we see that the loop continues back to where we started. Voice of customer feedback loops are complex. There are a lot of moving pieces, and it’s clear that governance, consistency, and stakeholder management all play important roles.
It’s not surprising that customer experience teams find it challenging to establish a voice of customer feedback loop. But I hope that this episode, and the others mentioned along the way, provides some helpful food for thought. How does your organization manage its voice of customer feedback loop? Do you have any best practices you’d like to share?
I’d love to hear about it. If you’re looking for help establishing a voice of customer feedback loop, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message.
My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying this show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another episode.
Want to keep learning about CX?
If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.
Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email.
