Running a Voice of the Customer program can seem simple on the surface. Teams collect both direct and indirect feedback, look for trends in the data, and present them.
However, a truly strong VoC program digs deep into what customers truly need beyond the surface-level insights.
The key to success is to look beyond the numbers, according to Maggie Gentry, director of experience analytics at Community Health Network, a non-profit health system with more than 200 locations. It’s not just enough to chase metrics — companies need to think about how the trends they’re seeing manifest in actual outcomes.
“Several years ago, we just said, "Hey, these are low scores. Chase your low scores, and improve them.’” Gentry told CX Dive. “But that's not reality, right? So we said, ‘OK, what are the things that are most correlated with the patient experience, and how do we concentrate on those?”
CX teams need to find ways to look beyond the happiest and angriest customers, collect data outside customers’ most immediate concerns, and incorporate employee feedback. Presentation matters, too — other teams want insights, not a deluge of data.
Listen beyond the key moments
It’s tempting for a VoC program to highlight the biggest complaints or highest praise customers offer, but this can be a potentially misleading approach.
“If you're designing your entire marketing and brand plan around the canaries in the coal mine, you end up being a bit too reactive,” Kieron Mathews, managing director of market research and insights at consulting firm West Monroe, told CX Dive.
Brands can use a dashboard to identify when something is going extremely right or wrong, but that shouldn’t be the entirety of any VoC operation, according to Mathews. Focusing on drama leaves many potential customers out of the CX loop.
Instead, brands should aim to collect information from a representative sample of all customers, according to Mathews. This can be as simple as complementing surveys and social media listening with polls designed to bring in a representative sample of all customers.
The easiest way to get those customers in the middle to comment is with incentives, according to Mathews. This can be vouchers, cash or, say, a Starbucks gift card. The goal is to get the customers who don’t necessarily feel strongly about the brand, but are happy to trade some time and information for the right reward.
“You don't have to be sad, you don't have to be delighted,” Mathews said. “You just want Starbucks.”
Once companies have the feedback, they need to figure out how it can be applied to what the company is offering, Gentry said. “What are folks telling us? How can we adapt and pivot to meet some of those needs?”
A hospital in the Community Health Network heard that wait times were an issue in the emergency department, according to Gentry. It began setting expectations for patients, offering estimates rather than leaving people in the dark.
The changes have resulted in double-digit improvements in metrics around the overall experience, safety and trust, according to Gentry. The listening-related improvements have also correlated with operational improvements, including shorter lengths of stay and less likelihood to readmit. As a result, the initiative has been well-received by clinicians as well as patients.
“Experience data used to be seen as soft data, and now it is becoming hard data because everybody has experiences,” Gentry said. “The fact that we're able to correlate and create causational relationships between experience and outcomes really helped create buy-in on our side.”
Cast a wide net for feedback
It’s easy for CX teams to listen for customer feedback on topics that are top of mind for the business. However, they need to ensure they don’t miss important details beyond their immediate concerns.
A VoC program starts from the view of the customer, not the brand, Mathews said. “Otherwise, your organization measures what it cares about, and then you tend to walk in the wrong direction.”
Surveys following a purchase or a customer service call have their place, but they can lead to hyperfocused results, according to Mathews. Companies care about how their websites or support experiences come across, but those are just two out of many, many potential touchpoints where shoppers interact with the brand.
“Often moments that matter to the customer are different,” Mathews said. “The VoCs we do are much broader. They don't even involve necessitating a touch point to have occurred.”
Community Health Network listens for ways that it can meet customer’s needs by acting with intentionality, according to Gentry. The goal isn’t to patch up a bad experience after enough complaints pile up, but rather to integrate customer feedback into the day-to-day experience design process.
“It's a core operating capability, not a side function,” Gentry said. “Intentionality is about anticipating the needs. Not waiting for the friction to occur. It's designing interactions that feel seamless because someone thought through them upfront instead of reacting to them.”
Develop of holistic view of the business
Customers only tell one side of the story. A VoC program can benefit when it incorporates information from employees as well.
This is especially true in healthcare, which is about people treating people, which means it’s important to listen to employees as well as customers, according to Gentry. Paying attention to both sides can help a listening program find insights that would otherwise remain hidden.
“A satisfied or engaged employee trickles down to a satisfied patient, or one that perceives their experience to be better, and creating that causational link has been fascinating,” Gentry said. “The outcome of it, and the driver of it, is my team works together, and that bubbles up on both the caregiver side and the experience side.”
Patients can tell when caregivers aren’t working together, which can affect healthcare outcomes, and the process applies to customer service as well, according to Gentry. No one listens to customers as often as frontline employees, making them a great source of insight into how customers feel.
“I think it's important not only to monitor the patient side but also the employee or caregiver side to really get the crux of either a great experience, so let's highlight what's going really well here, or where there’s a poor experience and where we can make improvement,” Gentry said.
Presentation brings everything together
Regardless of how much data you collect, it’s important for the CX team to present it correctly, according to Mathews.
When it comes time to present, leaders need to condense all of that feedback — direct and indirect, from customers and from employees — and offer the insight rather than the data, Mathews said. Otherwise, “it’s death by bar chart.”
“[Economist] Theodore Levitt talked about how people don't want to buy a drill bit. They want to buy a hole in the wall,” Mathews said. “The data is the drill bit. And if you get the drill bit and you just give it to a client, they look at the drill bit and say, ‘So what?’”
Instead of going over all the questions, find the interesting details they present, Mathews said. Divide the responses into groups. Look where detractors and advocates offer complete differing answers. Look for questions where everyone agrees.
It can be hard to care about data by yourself, according to Mathews. To combat this, West Monroe holds “data parties” where two or three people work together to find the most interesting and useful conclusions contained within a dataset.
The end goal is a small, highly distilled list of customer insights that teams can present to the rest of the business without immediately losing interest.
“We've got loads of data, but the quality of the analysis is almost always defined by the cutting room floor,” Mathews said. “So take all of that away, and there might only be four key data points out of 400.”
