Voice of Customer and Beyond

The Next Ten Years

Voice of Customer in 2014 and beyond….

www.thenextten.org

http://www.thenextte.org/

© The Next Ten Years Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

NextTen believe that the most successful companies over the next 5 years will be those that align everything they do to the outcomes they achieve for the customer.

When companies plan for tomorrow, irrespective whether it is driven by a desire to grow and dominate or turn around and survive, change strategies are usually defined with innovation and service/operations excellence as the driving headlines.

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Customer Experience leaders outperform the market

The NextTen aim is to help you to identify and deliver new ways to build a customer strategy and uncover innovation driven outcomes that customers’ themselves are often not even aware are possible. We combine this with a structured and rapid execution of change, to align your organisation, its strategies, structures, core activities and metrics to deliver competitive differentiation and sustained business performance impact. This is “Outside-In” driven innovation and it is the most advanced change approach available to the market.


Voice of Customer

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As organizations strive to become more customer-centric, they recognize that real customer orientation requires active listening to the marketplace. However the noise around voice of the customer is growing and we will see an increase in the impact of VoC strategies on customer engagement and loyalty. Not surprisingly, organisations are all fighting for their piece of the VoC revenue pie.

We are in the midst of a customer revolution. The customer of today has unlimited access to information to create informed purchasing decisions. Customers have unrivalled access to communication channels to ensure their views are known… But who is really listening?

Not listening to customers is one the most common ways that businesses lose sales and revenues. In many organisations today, the job of actually listening to the customer fails and often very limited people in the organisation have access to the Voice of Customer, by why are we restricting this insight to a select few? As the innovation velocity of an organisation becomes a crucial competitive differentiator, it is highly important that innovation becomes the responsibility of us all.

Big Data is the entire buzz, but bigger is not necessarily better. Insights, not data, drive customer-centricity. Therefore it is great to have a Voice of Customer campaign but the true affectivity is how you will use it. For organisations wanting to truly soar with their customer experience, Voice of Customer is a great place to start.

Organisations have so much to gain from implementing Voice of Customer and so little to lose. What are you waiting for?


Applying Voice of Customer

VoC, is a lot more than just surveying your customers. When applying a VoC strategy the feedback needs to drive changes in the organization that can accurately be measured via profitability, customer retention, spend per customer, reduced churn etc.

VoC is the starting point for creating a more customer centric organization.

When implementing a VoC strategy the following high level steps are applied:

1. Understanding all points of customer interaction to identify Moments of Truth for the customer2. Optimizing (e.g. removing non-contributory work) and aligning (to Successful Customer Outcome)

the customer journey (if appropriate). This typically results a significantly improved customer experience delivered through a smaller number of interactions.

3. Understanding the best channel to survey the customer at each particular moment of truth e.g. email survey, SMS survey, online chat survey, IVR/Call Centre survey etc.

4. Building relevant surveys that link to each specific process within the organization 5. Designing survey triggers that achieve specific sample sizes (sample size is hugely important in VoC

as organizations use the information to make strategic decisions within the business, if the correct sample size is not achieved the information collected would not be accurate enough)

6. Implementation of survey distribution and automated collection 7. Continuous analysis and review of customer feedback as well as immediate action on negative

feedback 8. Process optimization based on various reviews including VoC


Next Generation VoC

Until recently VoC has always focused on the voice of the customer as the primary driver of service and process excellence. This has always missed the important element of employee and stakeholder feedback.

A modern VoC program needs to include Voice of Employee and Stakeholder as well. The reason for this is that the employees and stakeholders understand the bottlenecks and hurdles that they face on a daily basis when servicing the customer.

By obtaining a full understanding of each process in the organization from the customer, employee and stakeholder’s view it is a lot easier to optimize all elements of a process in order to improve the customer experience, streamline internal operations and maximize return.


Basic checklist for a full VoC program and solution

When implementing a VoC program it is essential to make sure that basic elements are present (in your product selected as well as the stages of the project):

Full understanding of customer journeys throughout the organization

Impact understanding of service delivery (if service delivery breaks down at any point in your business, what areas of customer experience and moments of truth does this affect?)


Is your VoC tool flexible enough to grow with you and guide your project. Basic functionality to look for would be: Multi channel feedback. You need to be able to get feedback via all channels that your customers

interact with you i.e. IVR in the call center, Email, Online, SMS, Mobi, Kiosks (locations) etc. Escalation and escalation SLA. If a customer is not happy with the service they received your solution

needs to provide immediate escalations to the relevant department within your business for action. The escalations need to be tracked by internal SLAs to ensure every unhappy customer is addressed in one way or another

• Real time reporting and dash boarding. It must be possible to view all survey results in real time, identify and trend data over various time period and immediately act on feedback received Linking of data to third party information. All feedback must be linked to the employee that handled the customers interaction, the individual customer as well as the process that the customer was involved in. This gives breadth of data that will help to improve individual employees and processes as well as profile specific customers to identify promoters and detractors. When profiling a customer it is important to bring additional information into the profiling i.e. demographic information, product usage information, term of service etc. etc. This all adds to the big-data that will help to drive business development.

A corporate culture that is focused on customer centricity and understands the positive impact of a customer centric organization. This buy-in is essential as VoC is not a silver bullet, it is a process that ultimately links to a customer centric culture and way-of-business.

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Enhancing the Customer Journey before Automation

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Customer Experience Management with Advanced BPM is a new, quick to apply and powerful approach to dramatically improve a customer journey map plus any related processes before a VoC campaign is

applied. The objective is to impact business performance under every measure. Typically 30% impact on key performance indicators, identified in hours or days and deliverable within 3 months is typical. Most

organisations are still sitting on efficiency and cost reduction opportunities that traditional change approaches never identify. Further, the ability to innovate and create revenue and service opportunities are usually looked

at as separate initiatives. Why should they be? They are all part of Advanced BPM - the latest change methods designed to better support operations, customer centric change, governance and strategy than

anything that has gone previously.


Case Study: Multinational Insurance Company

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VOC software “Eyerys” dramatically increases return per member in a Multi-National Insurance Company

The client: The Smoke Customer Care Solutions client that was used for this case study is one of the top 10 insurance companies in Africa. The insurance company realised that they could no longer compete with price and product – all insurance companies started offering similar products at comparable prices. In order to continue to achieve regular and consistent growth for the shareholders the company needed to look for ways to improve their yield per member as well as attract new members with more than just a competitive pricing structure. By applying Eyerys multi-channel feedback, this goal is being realised.

© The Next Ten Years Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Page 10

The Challenge:

Member retention was becoming more and more difficult in the insurance industry; members could now easily access competitor information online and switch insurance companies within a few minutes if the service and offering that they expected from their current insurance company was not met. Increased costs to service members along with decreasing returns per member were having a negative effect on company performance.

The Solution: The call centre was seen as the largest member touch point; because of this it was essential to gather feedback from as many members that interacted in this environment as possible. A post call IVR survey was implement and offered to every member that called into the call centre. Various transactions that resulted in Moments of Truth were identified within the lifecycle of the member. Mobile and email surveys were distributed immediately (within 15 minutes) after every Moment of Truth that a member experience (business rules were applied to ensure that members were not over surveyed). Moments of truth include transactions such as:• Claims submission• New policy sign on etc.

© The Next Ten Years Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Page 11

Escalation criteria were set in order to identify members that were not happy with an individual transaction or interaction. This helped to identify the root cause of the poor service experience. Since implementing Eyerys the member lifecycle has increased by 5.5%. First Contact resolution has improved significantly and the average length to service members (across all touch points) has decreased by 12.3%.An interesting secondary result of the Eyerys implementation was the decrease in social media complaints by 26%.

Going forward: With the help of Eyerys the insurance company has managed to change the culture within the organisation to be more customer centric. By making every employee aware of the importance of customer experience within the business and also making them directly responsible for the satisfaction of every member the company has identified the “secret formula” to ensure the continued success and growth of the organisation.

“We specialise in helping companies to – cost effectively – listen to the voice of their customer at all points of interaction by utilising specifically designed technology. We apply our patented methodology to understand the root cause of potential service failure. Our drive to make a difference to customer service throughout the world, market leading technology and passion for delivering service over and above our clients’ expectations sets Smoke Customer Care Solutions apart”.


Advisory Testimonials

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“Thank you for teaching me something new, interesting and so very applicable to delivering the right customer experience. I will use what I learned wherever I work.” SVP Global Operations – Citibank

“Brilliant process education and insight. Great for both process engineers and business.” Trevlyn Chetty – Investec

“Mind shifting” M Maddala – Barclays Capital

“Well done. Loved the energy and ability to keep the process together.” D Coetsse – DPSA

“Absolutely fantastic and enlightening.” Aninka Marshall – Isuzu Australia

“Created a paradigm shift and a new perspective of viewing process.” Kwok Wend Long – NTU

“Very useful session and very interesting. It successfully demonstrates how doing things differently can make things better for you and your company.” Akmal Khan – Hewlett Packard

“Great professional speaker. Articulates very well. This was a pleasure.” Raven Jainaran – Investec

“Thank you for the training that will help us make that critical breakthrough.” Maria Mestre, SVP – Citibank

“Thank you for your incredible insights.” M Raj Citibank, VP – Jacksonville

“Well thought out workshop. Speaker used great examples and involved everyone. Well done.” Katie Sandham – Bord Gais Energy

Leadership & Management

Voice of Customer and Beyond