If you spend half an hour Googling ‘Voice of the Customer business impact’, you’ll no doubt stumble across the much discussed link between customer advocacy (often referenced in terms of Net Promoter Score™) & bottom-line revenue. Regardless of whose study you read, you’ll get an impressive, and perhaps surprising looking figure. If you consider Forrester’s differentiation between the stock market returns of customer experience ‘leaders’ and ‘laggards’ – it becomes very difficult to dispute the headline relationship between customer centricity and downstream business success.
We also talk regularly about customer retention – using VoC to be able to save & recover the ongoing spend of a significant bucket of customers who would have otherwise churned. We can also secure operational efficiencies, minimize spend on legacy market research initiatives & fix broken processes – all common sources of Voice of the Customer ROI.
One element that I feel is often overlooked, however, is employee engagement. Deploying the right kind of Voice of the Customer program has the potential to galvanize & transform how many customer-facing employees look at their role and their contribution to the organization. It is essential from an early stage to break down pre-existing barriers surrounding measuring VoC – most commonly that the solution becomes a complaints tool to beat employees up with. On the contrary, across the NICE Fizzback client base, between 70 and 80% of all customer feedback received is positive – and a large proportion of that is employee-centric. What we’re left with is a huge body of rich, motivational material for an employee base – with the power to make them feel valued & their efforts appreciated.
Take the following example – this NICE Fizzback retail client tracks employee engagement on a quarterly basis. A quick comparison of engagement scores pre and post VoC implementation offers a telling story. Across the landscape of VoC performance, engagement improved following the implementation of a VoC program. Furthermore, we see a stronger uplift in employee engagement in those retail stores securing the biggest NPS™ gains across the first 6 months of the program. What we see here is a beneficial and mutually reinforcing relationship between employee engagement & customer advocacy – and deploying the correct blend of technology and supporting services to ensure a best practice VoC solution is helping our clients to transform both the customer experience as well as the employee experience.
Andy Robson
For more info on NICE Fizzback please visit www.fizzback.com