As a customer experience savvy professional, you’ve likely heard of Voice of the Customer. But have you considered measuring Voice of the Process? In this episode, Ian Golding explains why business performance, and even VoC, do not properly quantify the true benefit of a customer experience strategy, and how to adjust.
Hi, this is Ian Golding, Global Customer Experience Specialist, bringing you episode 28 of Unforgettable, the series that’s all about delivering great customer experiences.
Customer-centric organizations recognize perhaps the most important competency in the aspiration of becoming sustainably customer-centric is measurement. Measurement, for customer-centric organizations, is about a number of different things: it is about measuring success based on your understanding of not just what the business wants, but of what the customer wants.
Too many organizations around the world are measuring the success of customer experience on business performance. And if the numbers go in the right direction, people pat themselves on the back and say we’re doing a pretty good job. And if numbers go down, organizations tend to panic. If an organization wants to measure customer experience success effectively, it should combine its measurement of what the business wants with an understanding of three voices: voice of the customer, voice of the employee, and voice of the process.
Many organizations around the world are measuring some form of VoC using metrics like net promoter score, customer satisfaction, or customer effort to do so. Measuring VoC on its own is not robust enough because too many organizations are not measuring voice of the customer as an accurate representation of the end-to-end customer journey and/or customers within it. It’s important to create a check and balance with voice of the customer by also replicating the principle and measuring voice of the employee.
Voice of the customer represents the customer’s perception of your end-to-end customer journey. Voice of the employee represents the employee perception of the customer journey. The principle is that the way your people feel about the experience should not be radically different from the way your customers feel about the experience.
This brings us to the third, and most important of all three voices—voice of the process. This represents how capable your business processes are at bringing your customer journey to life. Your business process is representative of everything that you do as an organization every day to deliver your products and services to the customer. The principle of voice of the process is that if you measure what you do and you get better at what you do in alignment with the customer journey, you will be able to predict that your customers are ultimately going to get happier.
Measurement is a critically important competency when it comes to the subject of customer experience. If we want to understand the real benefit of a customer experience strategy, we need to recognize that improving the experience is as much about taking cost out as it is putting the experience in. Not only should we be looking at understanding the effect on generating a revenue and profit, but delivering consistently better customer experiences will also save huge sums of money.