In my role helping leading global organizations to craft and operationalize Voice of the Customer (VoC) solutions, one of the most commonly established and desired use cases is the ability to performance manage the organizational hierarchy on the perceptions and ratings of the customers they serve.
In Forrester’s 2012 book Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business, two of their six key practices to customer centricity – Governance & Culture - have their roots in this sphere; utilizing technology and services to be able to confidently performance manage employees by the Voice of the Customer. A robust end-to-end technology solution and surrounding program provides the VoC governance which, in turn, establishes a platform for the taking the longer-term view to customer-centric cultural change within an organization. The theory is sound.
When we talk about VoC Performance Management, we’re quick to talk about the basic requirements - sufficient quantity and quality of Voice of the Customer input. Quantity – this ensures that we are able to say with statistical confidence that individual A is outperforming individual B in the eyes of the customer. This requires that we meet certain volume thresholds.
With regards to quality, we’re able to balance a number of metrics and incorporate metadata from unstructured verbatim comments to add flavor to the numbers. Easy. But what of stability? Robust VoC Performance Management cannot be achieved with mere quantity and quality of VoC. There has to be stability and this is the role of quota management – also known in the industry as capping and smoothing. Quota management is the ugly sister of advanced analytics and adaptive surveying – it’s not as sexy a concept, but boy is it an important cog.
There are a multitude of factors governing its success including contact capture rates, survey response rates, total customer base and net customer acquisition and churn. It is the result of so many moving parts that the only way to succeed is by applying industry best practice during the implementation & engage in an ongoing refinement exercise to ensure that volumes are kept at an optimum level.
Without quota management, VoC volumes have a tendency to fluctuate in a cyclical fashion around a given survey’s de-dupe rules for avoiding survey fatigue. This drives period-by-period uncertainty and undermines the governance element of the Voice of the Customer within an organization.
Whilst it’s not a concept to win a VoC sales pitch or transform an organization in silo – the role of quota management in establishing a robust and valuable VoC Performance Management cannot be underestimated. And it’s importance will only increase as the depth and breadth of VoC solutions continues to spread across the enterprise.
Andrew Robson
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