Voice of Customer

Ignoring Voice of Customers is the price you don’t want to pay!

In today’s era of immediacy, uncertainty and fluctuation, it is clear and more than ever that consumers are more demanding compared to the traditional business framework. With the transformation happening with the emerging COVID 19, it is becoming rather difficult for many managers and business leaders to manage the consumer behaviours and predict their Lifetime value and retention rates.

Many organizations for the past decade invested in technology and invented processes to understand further about their customer’s expectation, needs and preferences and hence introduced many VoC projects and programs to close the loop between the organizational strategic objectives, production lines, and customers perceptions and illustrated in the below graph.

The conceptual part of VoC deals specifically with it a descriptive term that defines a process or merely an approach that captures customers’ requirements. In a practical and strategic sense, VoC is more than this! Organizations that benefited from VoC such as Apple, Zappos, and even Zoom during the crises managed to increase their sales through converting the VoC concept to product development techniques that categorize the customers’ 5 essential needs in hierarchical approach through prioritizing those needs based on importance, influence and strategic impact on the organizational sustainability.

Why VoC is the single most strategic activity that organizations need to consider in a disruptive environment?

Answering this question is simple! Companies in the future cannot operate without data, as a matter of fact, data knowledge and data literacy is becoming a core competency to the future workforce, a skill that organizations cannot do without!

Whether we are talking about Big Data or Small Data employees and organizations, need to know what it means to their business regardless of the type of business, industry or nature.

The same ethos applies for private and even governmental organizations, profit or nonprofit organization VoC importance remains the same.

As such, VoC is a data research strategy that serves all entities to discover what their customers think of them, their business, products, services and distribution channels.

Having discussed so, this suggests including VoC as the strategic business process that allows organizations to analyze their customers, assess their feedback and opinions, test the perceived value offerings, and measure the actual customer experiences at every touchpoint. Strategizing VoC will have a direct impact on organizational sustainability and business continuity as it will aid the organization to have innovative solutions that can create more vital impressions!

As a strategic activity, the VoC is as an essential step in customer success and a considerable critical component designed to drive the organizational efforts to deliver value through capturing customers insights, close the service gaps and prioritize improvement plans while keeping customers engaged and happy!

Why is Voice of the Customer important Now more than ever?

The Supply chain is changing a lot and post-pandemic we will witness more migration to downstream channels, and it will become very compelling to organizations to control costs which means less focus on upstream business models. Companies acquainted on the upstream model will be facing new challenges impacting their business performance, especially those associated with the customers’ needs, wants and preferences. The downstream transformation will also play a motivator for many entities to join the competition with much smaller and more manageable business models. As such, overlooking the strategic role of VoC will have an inverse relationship with CLTV and Customer Retention Rates. If organizations underestimated VoC, they would be with no strategy whatsoever that can allow them to have market sustainability and will waste valuable opportunities and surely will expect to see increasing churn rates!

VoC will provide the future organization with the ability to:

• Improve innovation through shifting from traditional 4Ps towards the modern marketing mix (people, process, programs, performance) & the imperative 4 As (Accessibility, Affordability, Acceptability, Awareness)
• Estimating future demands
• Anticipating consumer behaviour
• Perform better Market Intelligence
• Financial Projections
• Evaluation of the marketing tactics
• Brand expansion or downsizing
• Product extension

As demonstrated above, there are more into the VoC than sending a blunt survey!

Organizations that will truly invest in VoC Programs will be able to have robust data that improve their processes and brand positioning. They will be able to mitigate rough situations for their future customers and get immediate value.

To know more about how VoC is the organizational Landscape stay tuned with publication of the next article!

Author
Mahmoud Iskandarani
CEO & Managing Partner- LeapToSuccess