COVID-19 has changed every aspect of life and has put business and the economy into the land of the unknown. It has forced a new way of working, a change in focus, and has altered the needs, goals, demands, and expectations for both employees and clients. A recalibration of how you leverage your teams; how you deliver and engage for your clients; what solutions you offer; and how you attack the market are essential to the success of your business. Customer service, revenue retention, and delivering value require a new way of thinking; the best resource to guide you during these uncertain times is your clients.
What is Voice of the Customer Assessments?
Voice of the Customer (VoC) assessment is a process during which you listen to your clients; it allows you to capture relevant information to strengthen the relationship and provide a solution to add value to their business. In-person interviews with clients can strengthen relationships, reduce costs, streamline processes, and allow you to truly understand your business. Trends will tend to emerge based on client size, industry, solution used, team aligned and provide a more granular level of your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
Where do automated tools and digital surveys fall short for B2B enterprises?
Digital survey customer feedback programs generate misleading results and fall short when trying to truly understand your clients, market opportunities, and relationship building. Semi-structured conversations with top clients provide flexibility that you cannot get through a standard a/b or ranking survey, both of which stifle the ability to create an actionable item plan to move the business forward.
When Private Equity, Venture Capital, and banks evaluate the opportunities and risk of any organization, they leverage an interview approach to understand the voice of the client and the needs of the industry. They want to hear firsthand what the clients are saying, the probability for retention and growth for their existing business, and truly understand what investment opportunities they could act on to better the position of the company that they are investing in. Online surveys only tell a portion of the story and require guesswork to put an action plan together.
Tips for getting the most out of your VoC program
Structure the client interviews so that you receive both qualitative and quantitative answers. This will allow you to capture and present your data in a format that is easy to convert into objective, number-based analysis. Combining this with the qualitative answers will provide the full story behind the numbers.
Create a loose questioning structure to keep the conversation moving forward. Use open questions and try to balance the speaking time in favor of the client.
Conduct interviews in person or via a virtual meeting platform; this will allow the surveyor to pick up on non-verbal cues.
Prior to the interviews, do research on the company, industry, news, press releases, and the evolution of the relationship between your organizations.
Use a third-party independent resource. Clients tend to be more transparent with people outside of the relationship; a third party is less defensive when receiving information, and they do not lead the client to the outcomes that the company wants to see.
Provide follow up to the clients on their responses and potential actions that the company will take. This validates that your company is listening to their evolving requirements and values the relationship that they have.
Listening intently to your clients allows you to deliver value to their company and to the market as a whole. Through this process there is an opportunity to learn more about your clients and their industry as well as the competitive landscape with the solutions you provide. It makes revenue more predictable, minimizes risks, and allows you to adapt to evolving client needs and can help support investment and change in processes based on the client’s voice. Establishing a regular schedule for client VoC interviews will strengthen the relationship with your clients, demonstrates your commitment and investment to the partnership and ultimately leads to a trusted advisor position.
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