Last time I wrote about how we need to update our attitude and culture when it comes to Customer Insights. An overreliance on simply collecting and reporting KPIs is making all the information we’re gathering (and perhaps, if we even go this far, analyzing) pretty useless. That uselessness will reflect on the broader effort (insofar as there is one) to improve your Customers’ experiences. If our attitude toward Customer Insights and VoC is simply, “where are we (our numbers)?” then we’ll miss the opportunity to drive better CX: “Where do we want to go (our Customers’ experiences)?”
Too often when leaders (even CX leaders) seek to improve their Customer Insights approaches, they focus simply on better tactics: Can we improve the questions we ask on our surveys? Can we increase the response rate? Can we better segment and analyze the results we receive? Can we follow-up with some of the respondents? That last one at least moves us closer to where we’re trying to get.
But I think those who try this are really barking up the wrong tree. What they need is a perspective shift when it comes to VoC and Customer Insights, not just a tactical change.
Here’s a made-up scenario I use when I’m talking with clients about this issue: Say a member of your team (it doesn’t matter which group or function, how seasoned, or what her expertise is… let’s just say for argument’s sake that she’s not even in a Customer-facing role) is out of the office on break to pick up some lunch. She’s chosen to wear her branded polo shirt that day and, while she’s waiting for her order to come up, someone recognizes your logo and approaches her and asks if she works for your company. When she confirms, this person tells her how much he loves your company, but how, recently, he was having some problems navigating your website looking for something or another.
Now, let’s say this team member doesn’t work for the digital group nor is she in any way otherwise associated with the website nor its function. Would she know where to go to offer that feedback? Would it even occur to her to care to do so if there were a way to do it? As years go by, would her recollection of the incident reduce to simply, ‘that day the crazy guy came up to me at Panera complaining about the website’? Would she have even remembered the interaction later on at all?
A lot of the reason for nothing likely coming of this encounter is cultural: Why should she feel obligated to do the Customer Insights team’s work for them? Perhaps she’s not necessarily that dismissive or lazy, but surely she considers that to be ‘someone else’s job’, and likely it is. In reality, of course, she’s likely a bit more conscientious than that, and genuinely would like to offer this information to someone. But the same cultural environment that might foster a less engaged attitude toward being a conduit for such insights would also likely not have any method or system in place to collect them anyway.
Imagine now that your company truly embraces the culture of curiosity and continuous improvement. Everybody everywhere all the time is looking for a bit of negative feedback, frankly, so they can identify opportunities to get better. And with those opportunities identified, they… well, get better constantly. In this environment, that employee is eager, when she returns to work after lunch, to seek out someone from the digital team to share her experience. Maybe she’ll even try to replicate the trouble the Customer told her about so she can explain it in her own (non-tech) terms. When she finds someone from that team, he enthusiastically explores the problem himself and gets the issue into the backlog and things get churning. Now, this issue may not get resolved today (it may not rise to the level…there needs to be sober analysis done before action is taken, remember), but it’s on the radar.
What’s more, our friend probably didn’t need to seek out someone from the digital team, because, since this curious Customer Insights culture is weaved into the day-to-day of our company, there are probably already systems in place to gather and disseminate such information. Long ago, the digital team launched a feedback platform for all employees to pass on insights and impressions about the site. The contact center probably uses it a lot! (For that matter, this platform was likely instituted at the behest of the Customer Insights team, because, well…)
This is a classic example of how the culture (in this instance, it’s that culture of curiosity and continuous improvement) drives policy, procedures, processes, and systems to reinforce itself: If you’ve truly culturally internalized the real reason you should be interested in your Customers’ experiences, all will flow from that. All your CX team (to include the Customer Insights and Process Engineering teams) will have to do is coordinate the enthusiasm this will engender.
