It seems, for a few years at least, that listening to the voice of the customer (voc) was forgotten as we focussed on technology led research and ‘one-to-one’ marketing and personalisation.
Somewhere along the way we lost sight of the need to truly understand our customers and their needs; to drive customer retention strategies and promote repeat purchase. As we face growing economic uncertainty, increasingly companies are re-discovering the power or a formal (or informal) voc programme…
At it’s best a voc programme demands that the whole organisation is attuned, at all business touch points, to what your customers think and feel, how they use and respond to your company, your products and services, and those of your competitors. It is more than a ‘once a year’ review or loyalty survey.
To truly drive innovation and product development the implementation of a voc programme needs to incorporate the following:
- Going beyond validation. To simply validate what you think you already know will not create a shift in your perceptions and the strategies that you will need to adopt to move your business forward. To create a paradigm shift, you need to adopt in-depth, open-ended questions with considerable follow up. Seek to ask ‘why’, ‘give me an example’ or ‘how do you measure that’ and start by getting the customer to articulate their unmet needs. This so called ‘pain’ or ‘unrealised pleasure’ is the information you need to realise real innovation.
- Understand your customers or your customers business. What is important to them? How can they gain leverage over their competitors or peers? What changes are happening in their industry (or locality) that will disrupt them? By collaborating in this way you can uncover issues that are (not yet) causing pain and create new ways to solve them with a better product, outcome and / or lower cost.
- Learn from your pioneering customers. So called ‘lead users’ are often the early adopters of new products and services. Requests and ideas that may seem out of the ordinary may lead you to product applications and service improvements that you didn’t anticipate.
- Involve your customers. Identify and recruit customer representatives in the design process. Involving them early and giving them a reason to participate (unlimited support post launch?) could secure their contribution and your first referral account.
