January 11, 2008
Retail TouchPoints: Keeping Your Ear Tuned to the Voice of the Customer
By John Gaffney, Contributing Editor
Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of a current article from the Retail TouchPoints website, presented here for discussion.
Despite the hypercompetitive marketplace in retail and the presence of more analytical tools than ever before, there are very few radical changes in the retail business – but I’ve seen one lately. In fact, one of the truly game-changing developments in retailing comes in changes in the voice of the customer (VOC).
The VOC comes over the phone, internet and on the sales floor. Those are obvious places, but when you look a little deeper, retailers need to be aware of what the voice of the customer sounds like on the rest of the planet. How to do that? Here’s how I recommend keeping your ear to the ground:
Spend a Day in the Contact Center: Jeff Bezos at Amazon still does it once a quarter. It is a fairly obvious place to listen to customer complaints, but the VOC at the contact center can speak to pricing, operations, channel partners, inventory, and marketing activities. The VOC that tells a company that there’s a new product line out there that might be hot is a much more valuable message in the long-term than the first-call resolution of a complaint.
Read Your Reviews: Some of these companies have been around for a while such as PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice. Go to the sites that allow customers to influence each other. Retailers might find out that safety issues are more important than pricing for toys and kids’ furniture. You might find out that return policies are also critical. You might learn that some major brands you partner with aren’t listening to the VOC.
Get Your Head Out of Wall Street: The VOC is not the VOS (Voice of the Shareholder) or the VOA (Voice of the Analyst). If you neglect employee training or cut costs on inventory management systems, the voice of the customers will reflect that negatively. But the analyst that looks only at numbers will applaud. I would argue that because it has so many platforms, the voice of the customer is a more important one than Wall Street could ever be.
Change Competitive Shopping: It’s a multichannel world. Shop a competitor online and offline. Call their contact center. Talk to a competitor’s employee. See what they look like on Facebook (you’ll find 1-800-Flowers there). See what they look like on email. In fact, I think it’s a good exercise to shop retailers outside of your business.
Identify the Influencers: Social media has elevated a few customers to the point where their value is higher because their opinion is influential. I’m not talking about Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal here. Some retail customers are more active on blogs, message boards, and review sites than others. Retailers need to know who these people are and how to make them happy. In this case, the VOC can be louder for some.
Current retail touchpoint structure allows for more places to hear the VOC. Bottom line: work hard to hear it and hear it often. Don’t confuse quarterly numbers, regardless of their ups and downs, to be the VOC.
Discussion Questions: What do you think are the best ways to hear the voice of the customer (VOC)? Which of the recommendations in the article do you find to be the most promising for retail management looking to understand the VOC?
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Poll
“Know your customers” isn’t as easy as it might appear. Yet there are numerous ways to ensure the voice of the customer is heard by management. My favorite is MBWA–manage by walking around. Talk with your customers and ask your people to do the same. Other methods include:
1-customer focus groups and consumer advisory committees;
2-ten minute “stand up” huddles for associates to focus on a particular topic or customer comments from the previous day;
3-mystery shoppers and online customer surveys;
4-toll-free hotline, email responses, in-store customer comment cards, and
5-(the often forgotten) associate focus meetings and feedback mechanisms.
Having the CEO regularly talk with customers in the stores and in the contact center and “hear their pain” can make a huge difference in moving the organization forward in its customer approach. Regular and timely summaries of top customer issues, including actual customer quotes, are essential.
In addition, having a Vice President in charge of making sure management is aware of customer feedback and being the voice of the “consumer on the inside” makes a tremendous difference, but only if all top management views the consumer commitment as a top priority.
A wise boss early in my career taught me “10×10 and 30×30”–be in ten stores before the tenth day of the month, and be in at least thirty every month.
Make sure they’re not all your stores. While you’re there be sure to look at what’s not happening, what’s moved from where it should be, and what’s left behind. That “garbage” left in the shopping basket might be the hand written list of all the items the consumer was buying in your competitors’ stores.
Get out of meetings and your office and experience the real world.
This is an area where small and independent retailers have a real advantage over the Big Boys. They are much closer to the customer, regularly on the floor, talking to customers, observing customers, learning who the regular core customers are and what they are responding to.
This contact is no substitute for well developed quantitative analysis of POS data, but a fundamental complement. It adds color to the data analysis, it adds nuance, it enables a merchant to focus their efforts and truly serve their niche, and their customers, skillfully and with true retail flair.
Here’s an idea that costs nothing: use Google Alerts to tell you every time your business (and your competition) is mentioned on the internet. Here’s an idea that costs a little: use customer suggestion boxes and comment cards in the stores. Here’s an idea that costs a little more than that: staff a toll-free phone line for customer comments and put the number on your receipts, invoices, and on signs in the stores, as well as the web site.
Will the Voice of the Customer messages go to empowered folks? Or will the messages get lost in the sauce? That’s the real challenge. Ask yourself: when was the last time the Voice of the Customer led promptly to a policy change? How often does that happen?
Voice of the Customer is a key concept for marketing in any organization and is particularly critical for retailers. I have conducted seminars on marketing for non-marketers to instill in them the idea that everyone is a marketer, not just those who have the title. It is not just the marketing and sales people, but those in accounting, shipping, or even those who just answer the telephone. Anyone who ever has a touchpoint with a customer can contribute, positively or negatively, to the customer experience and learn how to make it better.
I may be too Old School to answer this question, but, the answer is simple: SPEND MORE TIME WITH THEM! Really, is there anything more important than them???? Drop what you’re doing (H.R. doesn’t really need you in that conference room) and get out there and talk to people!
Obviously, this can be handled in many ways, from physically being in the stores, ringing up sales (where I once met the CEO of Wild Oats) to doing regional ‘shop alongs’ and town hall meetings and ethnography to reading their comments EVERY day.
Regarding this, back in the day, we used to say “JFDI” (which was pre-Just Do It)…and that mentality, on this topic, still works.
These are all good platforms, but how many customers even know they exist? I think that only the most internet savvy customers are the ones currently involved in any kind of feedback.
If you want to get a true read of your company’s customers, inform them of where they can go on the internet to chat about your stores. Then create a chat room and offer incentives for creative ideas to make their shopping experience better. But make sure their suggestions ACTUALLY DO GET implemented and are not just treated as fluff. If they feel like their voices are being heard, then that’s a good thing.
Identifying the Influencers is a key driver, and encompasses all the other factors. Continuous review of all the mentioned above are key to staying in tune with the VOC.
It’s been said before, “customers are in control;” those that embrace, listen and execute consistently and timely will be the standard. BTW, Those individuals that are most directly responsible for presenting your brand on a regular basis to your customers (your front line employees) do more to promote (or negate) your brand than many other influencers, hence training and development are critical to creating “raving fans.”
Ever the contrarian, I think that the Voice of the Customer is overrated. I’d much rather focus on the footprints of the customer–and the cash trail that he/she leaves behind.
Sure, it’s nice to hear what the customer has to say, but it is dwarfed in importance by the behavioral data that retailers have at the fingertips (and tend to ignore). It is more essential for retailers to figure out how to draw genuine value from the data they already have before spending much time/effort/money collecting and interpreting additional data.
To me, Voice of the Customer initiatives are often an excuse that firms use to avoid dealing with behavioral data. This is a mistake.
I’m with Doron and Lee–nothing is more important than to spend time on the sales floor, personally speaking to both customer and employees. They actually LIKE sharing their opinions and being heard…we just don’t do enough of it! And, as Doron mentioned, the key is to tune into your “gut antenna” and try to identify the golden nuggets of insights and body language that can lead to positive response.
What ever happened to ‘real’ customer contact? It seems to me that teaching your associates to converse with customers, to focus on certain instructive and helpful talking points, and then to converse with the associates is the key to a wealth of knowledge that comes from what seems to be a completely forgotten method.
Certainly, spending time in your customer contact center is good–but once a quarter? That’s more than a lifetime in this industry. Reading your reviews is helpful also, but one must consider the real value when doing this type of activity. Certainly it all has value.
Focusing on ‘Alpha’ customers might be important and valuable but it disregards the overwhelming number of your customers if you follow the 80/20 rule regarding ‘Alpha’ type customers. It also makes the assumption that your focus upon them might improve their business with you. But what about the other 80 percent? It seems to me that the mining for growth and improvement comes from this lot. That is, how do I make those in the 80% part of the 20%?
My thought has always been that you are only doing something right for the 20% and your growth is likely maxed out there. Learning and improving for the other 80% creates sustainable growth. That is done by creating conversation with those customers whom you aren’t fully servicing. Done right and valuing their feedback can provide the information necessary to innovate and expand your share.
However, no matter what the source is, no matter what the group of customers is, the secret is you actually have to do something with the information and feedback you get and act upon it. You have to want the answer and be willing to do something with it. Otherwise, its just noise.
Now I have some new acronyms to throw around! Any retail manager or executive worth his/her salt must know that VOC is the most important priority! Any executive or manager or associate that doesn’t understand or embrace the importance of listening to the customer should leave retail and find work in the automotive business.
I like this article but this is stuff that must be in the new hire package that the employee gets on their first day. One suggestion that I have seen work is to make sure that the store manager can spread around the back office workload and spend some time on the floor (or dare I say, behind the cash?); the purest way to get the pulse of the customer is by talking to them. Understanding body language is a major piece to the customer service puzzle. It is almost like I am psychic when I walk down the aisles of my client’s stores. Engagement will get the customers talking and may reveal a lot that the manager doesn’t know.
The article highlights some basic steps every person in business, retail or brand, should be doing. Many members of management, as the article says, pay too much time listening to Wall Street and investors and not enough to consumers. If your consumers are happy, they will tell others (the best form of advertising) and business will grow.
Is this a radically new concept? No.
Management only has to make this a clear priority and budget the time necessary to do it.
A customer advisory board is missing from this list. Technology has made it possible to build a virtual community online, which means what was once prohibitively expensive is now possible: identify your alpha customers–the ones that spend a lot of money, write reviews, take all the customer surveys, know their store’s manager personally–all the things that show that these people are passionately engaged with your company.
Put them together in an online virtual space where they can talk about what they like and don’t like about your company. Show them ideas you have for customer service innovations, product line innovations, whatever–and then listen to what they have to say. These are the kind of people that are already highly engaged, and would LOVE to be involved more. They’ll give you the down and dirty and the love you need to help keep a pulse on customer satisfaction.
The only thing to remember is that they’re alpha’s, and not representative of the customer base as a whole–but that’s what all those surveys are for, anyway. Alpha customers will help give voice to the story behind the survey numbers.
There should be no argument that VOC has become an increasingly important metric in measuring customer opinion and retailers’ health. But VOC is not new. What is new is the number of ways for that voice to be heard and for you, the retailer, to listen. Unfortunately, at exactly the time that retail executives need to be most focused on VOC, they are being constantly harried by VOA (voice of the analyst) and VOS (voice of the shareholders), leaving little if any time for VOC focus.
Retail CEOs and other senior executives must take the leadership role in returning their focus to the customer. This is done through a combination of methods:
New-tech: email, blogs, message boards, other social media, marketing analytics that measure customer behaviors, etc.
Old-tech: MBWA, sitting in the call center, customer focus groups, employee focus groups, competition shopping (on & off-line), reading customer comments, etc.
Ultimately, though, a real VOC strategy must reside at the top of the strategic plan with energy, time, and training invested in that strategy every week of every year–not just when business is tough. None of these methods, old or new tech, will be both implemented and used for decision making unless the CEO makes VOC the top priority.
Don’t forget why retail exists: to provide goods and services for customers. Not to enrich stockholders and management. The enrichment is the byproduct of happy customers.
VOC starts with truly listening to customers. We have found that a well-crafted and moderated focus group can be a very valuable path to follow. Too many organizations believe they “know” what customers want and need–until a neutral focus group reveals some true feelings.
I agree with many of the comments previously included in this discussion–it is absolutely impossible to hear the voice of the customer sitting in a board room.
Our latest work with retailers has uncovered the value of creating multiple real-time, or near real-time VOC “listening posts.”
Scalable and relatively inexpensive, yet customized feedback mechanisms may include web-based customer satisfaction surveys, complemented with phone-based IVR surveys–both of which are opt-in for customers to utilize.
Post-transaction live agent telephone follow-up surveys are also invaluable for companies with higher customer lifetime value, including banking, luxury brands and healthcare providers.
In developing a long-term VOC strategy, it is wise to remain mindful of also capturing the voice of the often overlooked internal customer: employees.
More Discussions
Has Same-Day Delivery Become an Expectation Across Retail?
Are expectations around retail delivery speed in flux?OpenAI Names the Infrastructure Standard for Agentic Commerce
Will OpenAI or Google (or another entity) set the gold standard for agentic commerce?Is Five Below Poised For Even Greater Growth?
Five Below is hitting serious growth numbers. Can this trend continue?
“Know your customers” isn’t as easy as it might appear. Yet there are numerous ways to ensure the voice of the customer is heard by management. My favorite is MBWA–manage by walking around. Talk with your customers and ask your people to do the same. Other methods include:
1-customer focus groups and consumer advisory committees;
2-ten minute “stand up” huddles for associates to focus on a particular topic or customer comments from the previous day;
3-mystery shoppers and online customer surveys;
4-toll-free hotline, email responses, in-store customer comment cards, and
5-(the often forgotten) associate focus meetings and feedback mechanisms.
Having the CEO regularly talk with customers in the stores and in the contact center and “hear their pain” can make a huge difference in moving the organization forward in its customer approach. Regular and timely summaries of top customer issues, including actual customer quotes, are essential.
In addition, having a Vice President in charge of making sure management is aware of customer feedback and being the voice of the “consumer on the inside” makes a tremendous difference, but only if all top management views the consumer commitment as a top priority.
A wise boss early in my career taught me “10×10 and 30×30”–be in ten stores before the tenth day of the month, and be in at least thirty every month.
Make sure they’re not all your stores. While you’re there be sure to look at what’s not happening, what’s moved from where it should be, and what’s left behind. That “garbage” left in the shopping basket might be the hand written list of all the items the consumer was buying in your competitors’ stores.
Get out of meetings and your office and experience the real world.
This is an area where small and independent retailers have a real advantage over the Big Boys. They are much closer to the customer, regularly on the floor, talking to customers, observing customers, learning who the regular core customers are and what they are responding to.
This contact is no substitute for well developed quantitative analysis of POS data, but a fundamental complement. It adds color to the data analysis, it adds nuance, it enables a merchant to focus their efforts and truly serve their niche, and their customers, skillfully and with true retail flair.
Here’s an idea that costs nothing: use Google Alerts to tell you every time your business (and your competition) is mentioned on the internet. Here’s an idea that costs a little: use customer suggestion boxes and comment cards in the stores. Here’s an idea that costs a little more than that: staff a toll-free phone line for customer comments and put the number on your receipts, invoices, and on signs in the stores, as well as the web site.
Will the Voice of the Customer messages go to empowered folks? Or will the messages get lost in the sauce? That’s the real challenge. Ask yourself: when was the last time the Voice of the Customer led promptly to a policy change? How often does that happen?
Voice of the Customer is a key concept for marketing in any organization and is particularly critical for retailers. I have conducted seminars on marketing for non-marketers to instill in them the idea that everyone is a marketer, not just those who have the title. It is not just the marketing and sales people, but those in accounting, shipping, or even those who just answer the telephone. Anyone who ever has a touchpoint with a customer can contribute, positively or negatively, to the customer experience and learn how to make it better.
I may be too Old School to answer this question, but, the answer is simple: SPEND MORE TIME WITH THEM! Really, is there anything more important than them???? Drop what you’re doing (H.R. doesn’t really need you in that conference room) and get out there and talk to people!
Obviously, this can be handled in many ways, from physically being in the stores, ringing up sales (where I once met the CEO of Wild Oats) to doing regional ‘shop alongs’ and town hall meetings and ethnography to reading their comments EVERY day.
Regarding this, back in the day, we used to say “JFDI” (which was pre-Just Do It)…and that mentality, on this topic, still works.
These are all good platforms, but how many customers even know they exist? I think that only the most internet savvy customers are the ones currently involved in any kind of feedback.
If you want to get a true read of your company’s customers, inform them of where they can go on the internet to chat about your stores. Then create a chat room and offer incentives for creative ideas to make their shopping experience better. But make sure their suggestions ACTUALLY DO GET implemented and are not just treated as fluff. If they feel like their voices are being heard, then that’s a good thing.
Identifying the Influencers is a key driver, and encompasses all the other factors. Continuous review of all the mentioned above are key to staying in tune with the VOC.
It’s been said before, “customers are in control;” those that embrace, listen and execute consistently and timely will be the standard. BTW, Those individuals that are most directly responsible for presenting your brand on a regular basis to your customers (your front line employees) do more to promote (or negate) your brand than many other influencers, hence training and development are critical to creating “raving fans.”
Ever the contrarian, I think that the Voice of the Customer is overrated. I’d much rather focus on the footprints of the customer–and the cash trail that he/she leaves behind.
Sure, it’s nice to hear what the customer has to say, but it is dwarfed in importance by the behavioral data that retailers have at the fingertips (and tend to ignore). It is more essential for retailers to figure out how to draw genuine value from the data they already have before spending much time/effort/money collecting and interpreting additional data.
To me, Voice of the Customer initiatives are often an excuse that firms use to avoid dealing with behavioral data. This is a mistake.
I’m with Doron and Lee–nothing is more important than to spend time on the sales floor, personally speaking to both customer and employees. They actually LIKE sharing their opinions and being heard…we just don’t do enough of it! And, as Doron mentioned, the key is to tune into your “gut antenna” and try to identify the golden nuggets of insights and body language that can lead to positive response.
What ever happened to ‘real’ customer contact? It seems to me that teaching your associates to converse with customers, to focus on certain instructive and helpful talking points, and then to converse with the associates is the key to a wealth of knowledge that comes from what seems to be a completely forgotten method.
Certainly, spending time in your customer contact center is good–but once a quarter? That’s more than a lifetime in this industry. Reading your reviews is helpful also, but one must consider the real value when doing this type of activity. Certainly it all has value.
Focusing on ‘Alpha’ customers might be important and valuable but it disregards the overwhelming number of your customers if you follow the 80/20 rule regarding ‘Alpha’ type customers. It also makes the assumption that your focus upon them might improve their business with you. But what about the other 80 percent? It seems to me that the mining for growth and improvement comes from this lot. That is, how do I make those in the 80% part of the 20%?
My thought has always been that you are only doing something right for the 20% and your growth is likely maxed out there. Learning and improving for the other 80% creates sustainable growth. That is done by creating conversation with those customers whom you aren’t fully servicing. Done right and valuing their feedback can provide the information necessary to innovate and expand your share.
However, no matter what the source is, no matter what the group of customers is, the secret is you actually have to do something with the information and feedback you get and act upon it. You have to want the answer and be willing to do something with it. Otherwise, its just noise.
Now I have some new acronyms to throw around! Any retail manager or executive worth his/her salt must know that VOC is the most important priority! Any executive or manager or associate that doesn’t understand or embrace the importance of listening to the customer should leave retail and find work in the automotive business.
I like this article but this is stuff that must be in the new hire package that the employee gets on their first day. One suggestion that I have seen work is to make sure that the store manager can spread around the back office workload and spend some time on the floor (or dare I say, behind the cash?); the purest way to get the pulse of the customer is by talking to them. Understanding body language is a major piece to the customer service puzzle. It is almost like I am psychic when I walk down the aisles of my client’s stores. Engagement will get the customers talking and may reveal a lot that the manager doesn’t know.
The article highlights some basic steps every person in business, retail or brand, should be doing. Many members of management, as the article says, pay too much time listening to Wall Street and investors and not enough to consumers. If your consumers are happy, they will tell others (the best form of advertising) and business will grow.
Is this a radically new concept? No.
Management only has to make this a clear priority and budget the time necessary to do it.
A customer advisory board is missing from this list. Technology has made it possible to build a virtual community online, which means what was once prohibitively expensive is now possible: identify your alpha customers–the ones that spend a lot of money, write reviews, take all the customer surveys, know their store’s manager personally–all the things that show that these people are passionately engaged with your company.
Put them together in an online virtual space where they can talk about what they like and don’t like about your company. Show them ideas you have for customer service innovations, product line innovations, whatever–and then listen to what they have to say. These are the kind of people that are already highly engaged, and would LOVE to be involved more. They’ll give you the down and dirty and the love you need to help keep a pulse on customer satisfaction.
The only thing to remember is that they’re alpha’s, and not representative of the customer base as a whole–but that’s what all those surveys are for, anyway. Alpha customers will help give voice to the story behind the survey numbers.
There should be no argument that VOC has become an increasingly important metric in measuring customer opinion and retailers’ health. But VOC is not new. What is new is the number of ways for that voice to be heard and for you, the retailer, to listen. Unfortunately, at exactly the time that retail executives need to be most focused on VOC, they are being constantly harried by VOA (voice of the analyst) and VOS (voice of the shareholders), leaving little if any time for VOC focus.
Retail CEOs and other senior executives must take the leadership role in returning their focus to the customer. This is done through a combination of methods:
New-tech: email, blogs, message boards, other social media, marketing analytics that measure customer behaviors, etc.
Old-tech: MBWA, sitting in the call center, customer focus groups, employee focus groups, competition shopping (on & off-line), reading customer comments, etc.
Ultimately, though, a real VOC strategy must reside at the top of the strategic plan with energy, time, and training invested in that strategy every week of every year–not just when business is tough. None of these methods, old or new tech, will be both implemented and used for decision making unless the CEO makes VOC the top priority.
Don’t forget why retail exists: to provide goods and services for customers. Not to enrich stockholders and management. The enrichment is the byproduct of happy customers.
VOC starts with truly listening to customers. We have found that a well-crafted and moderated focus group can be a very valuable path to follow. Too many organizations believe they “know” what customers want and need–until a neutral focus group reveals some true feelings.
I agree with many of the comments previously included in this discussion–it is absolutely impossible to hear the voice of the customer sitting in a board room.
Our latest work with retailers has uncovered the value of creating multiple real-time, or near real-time VOC “listening posts.”
Scalable and relatively inexpensive, yet customized feedback mechanisms may include web-based customer satisfaction surveys, complemented with phone-based IVR surveys–both of which are opt-in for customers to utilize.
Post-transaction live agent telephone follow-up surveys are also invaluable for companies with higher customer lifetime value, including banking, luxury brands and healthcare providers.
In developing a long-term VOC strategy, it is wise to remain mindful of also capturing the voice of the often overlooked internal customer: employees.