“Customers want to talk, and businesses want to listen — but to do so successfully, companies have to overcome the challenges that threaten to drown out the Voice of the Customer.”
– Questback
As a CEO or C-suite executive, are you serious about listening to and acting on customer insights and feedback? Do you have intentional processes in place that ensure you stay in touch with the voice of your customer?
In the experience economy we operate in today, having a formal initiative in place to capture customer insights and stories is no longer an option. It’s an absolute requirement for doing business. And in this economy, the only competitive advantage companies have is the ability to deliver a superior customer experience. This reminds me of what Jack Welch once famously said …
“We have only two sources of competitive advantage: the ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition, and the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition.”
So, we will ask you again: Are you serious about listening to and acting on customer insights and feedback? Well, we have prepared a quick checklist to assess your executive team’s commitment to elevating and activating the voice of your customer across your business. Take a minute to honestly answer these questions…
__ Our C-suite and executive team leverages VoC insights to drive the way our company’s strategy evolves, the way our culture evolves and how we serve our customers.
__ We have defined processes through which real customer insights and stories are captured, packaged and shared to elevate VoC in our culture.
__ Our leaders have agreed to use real customer insights and stories to consistently increase understanding of and empathy for customers across our employee population.
__ We have identified specific areas of the business that are responsible for collecting, analyzing and acting on VoC insights.
__ We have identified the VoC insights that are captured across multiple dimensions of the customer experience.
__ We have defined how VoC insights and customer experience stories are used to drive daily, monthly, quarterly and annual decisions and strategies in specific areas of the business.
__ We have a process by which we leverage real customer experience stories in the sales process to connect with prospective buyers and grow our business.
Our executive team has agreed upon, and we have documented answers to, the following questions:
__ Why is VoC important to our long-term business success?
__ How will we elevate VoC and real customer experience stories in our culture?
__ How are we going to use VoC insights to improve the way we do business?
__ How will we measure success?
How did you do? The truth is, if you want to compete in today’s experience economy, you need answers to these questions. You also need to ensure that your organization has formal methods through which leaders listen to and act on customer feedback and insights. Why? Because in the future, only those companies that implement a repeatable process for capturing and activating real customer insights and stories will be in the position to deliver a superior customer experience. And only those executives who truly understand and stay in front of rapidly changing customer requirements will survive.
The ability to capture and share real customer experience stories is a true difference maker in business today. So much so, that OnMessage spun off a completely separate company 100% focused on helping organizations capture and share real customer experience stories on a continuous basis. That company is StoryDimensions. To learn more about StoryDimensions, visit www.storydimensions.com.
