The Power of an Effective Voice of the Customer Meeting

As the manager of customer experience for the company I currently work for, I am tasked with the voice of the customer program. There was a voice of the customer program started before I arrived six months ago. The program before was modest and primarily consisted of members of other departments listening to particularly nasty calls. The intent was to get people talking about the customer experience and if it made a couple people squirm in their seat all the better.

Over the weeks attendance fell off dramatically. The reason, the calls were too anecdotal and hard for others to understand the context of the call. Those that did still show up would ask "is this just an isolated incident? How many times does this really happen?"

Unfortunately, there were no answers. Customer Care could not quantify what activities were causing a bad customer experience. The management and reps knew what the problems were but communicating and getting others to listen was the challenge. There was no quality assurance team to evaluate calls and quantify issues. The customer survey program was very modest and nothing was being done with the feedback.

At the end of 2010, the company wanted to make significant steps to improve the relationship with our customers in 2011. Fortunately for me, that's where I come in. Of the many initiatives that I wanted to get aggressive in implementing was giving the voice of the customer more prominence in the organization. The biggest way to do that, make the voice of the customer meeting more effective.

Here are a few steps we've done in order to improve our voce of the customer meetings. Hopefully you find them helpful as well. I don't really run into too many best practices for conducting these meetings so we had to learn from mistakes and use common sense to put these together.

Have a theme

Whether it's the hot topic in the organization or simply just the top customer complaint have a theme. Attendees will appreciate if they know they will only be tackling one issue at a time. It makes solving the issue that much easier as well. Don't do consecutive meetings on the same subject. Even if there is one MAJOR problem in your company, break it up into smaller bites so you tackle it bit by bit.

Do not blind side attendees

Send your presentation and the details out a few days in advance. This will do two things. One, attendees can be prepared and do any research in advance of the meeting. Two, no one will be blind-sided if some of the findings hit a little too close to home for attendees. The goal should not be to air out a manager's dirty laundry. The goal is to solve the problem.

Make it meaningful

Accounting does not have time to regularly listen to customer calls. In order to help them see what customers feel about the billing process, you need them to see to how customers rate the billing process and why they rate it the way they do. If customers who are on particular billing program are extremely dissatisfied with it, it's far easier for accounting to see that from survey and quality assurance data. Now that you have their attention, play snippets of calls so they can hear the actual customer going through process they are so dissatisfied with. Now you can have a meaningful conversation about how to improve processes.

50% presenting findings/50% discussing solutions

If you have an hour for your voice of the customer meeting (try not to go longer), make sure that you present your findings in 30 minutes or less. You want to spend half of the meeting resolving the issue rather than trying to hammer your point home. You want to come away with clear action items and takeaways when the meeting ends. When our meeting was just an hour of listening to calls, no one walked out of the meeting having the slightest idea of what they needed to do. It was a quagmire of issues that created more questions than answers.

Set a follow up date and stick to it

If you can, conduct a voice of the customer meeting every two weeks. During the off week, have a follow up meeting on the action items from the previous week's meeting. It's so important to actually take action and resolve issues. It will vastly improve customer experience, make your organization more customer-centric, and make future voice of the customers more effective.

Conclusion

This is the format I am following with my meetings. I'm curious to hear how others do it but organizing them in this way seems to make sense for us.