Today’s businesses can interact with their customers across multiple channels, providing more opportunities than ever to meet customers’ demands. To ensure this remains an advantage, companies must ensure that all customer experiences are consistent. From the Internet to brick-and-mortar locations, each experience must tell the same story and create a cohesive whole.
If a business fails to create a consistent brand identity, its customers will be unable to truly engage with the brand and will be left with a disjointed series of individual experiences.
For businesses operating a voice of the customer program, the challenge extends even further. As well as maintaining brand identity across retail and service touchpoints, the channels organizations use to gather feedback must also reflect their brand effectively. This requires more than adding a logo to a customer-facing feedback form.
In most cases, key customer touchpoints are well established long before businesses build a VoC program. If the experiences offered during these interactions are consistent, it is easier to translate them across to the VoC program. However, if consistency is an issue across key touchpoints, as can often be the case, the customer experience management program is likely to offer another, slightly different, view of your business.
Follow these seven steps to build, or tweak, your VoC program and drive consistent customer experiences.
1. Design a customer journey map that represents key touchpoints from your customers’ point of view.
Use this map to establish when you need to ask customers for feedback and how. In certain industries, the touchpoints may be seemingly obvious. Insurers for instance, typically gravitate toward renewal events. Look closely to capture all demographics. If a customer opted not to renew, does your journey map include this event?
Ensure that multiple channels are available for each touchpoint and allow customers to select the one that best suits them.
2. Ensure consistent brand experience across all channels.
Regardless of how you approach customers for feedback, they should understand that it’s all part of a bigger picture. Your customers should have a uniform experience with your brand regardless of the way they choose to interact with you (in store, online, via mobile).
Don’t mistake consistency for a logo. Your customers should feel that each experience with you builds on previous experiences; this means delivering the same messages and keeping the same tone. If your brand is fun or sexy or geeky, make sure that carries through to your VoC program.
3. Consider giving your VoC program its own brand.
This may sound contradictory, but if you have customers who interact with you regularly, giving your VoC program its own identity may help it stand out. Customers will feel like they’re a part of something in which their feedback is valued. In addition, it’s a great way to enable employees to better understand and engage with the program, making it more than just a series of customer surveys.
4. Design channel-agnostic surveys to ensure success.
From the type of questions you ask, to the number of questions you pose, the way in which your customers interact with the survey must impact its content. Just because you designed your survey to be completed on a PC, doesn’t mean your customer isn’t reading it on a mobile device. Make sure your surveys have the ability to automatically and instantly detect how they’re being accessed and can be re-rendered accordingly.
5. Ask happy customers a couple of additional questions that will help inform other decisions.
If a customer was really pleased with an interaction, give him or her the opportunity to recommend your business to a friend, or ask a quick question that will improve your marketing campaigns. If the questions are relevant, and keep the same tone as your other interactions, you won’t damage the experience. Just be careful how you do it.
6. Limit the scope of your outreach.
If a customer has had a really good experience with you, don’t undermine it with a long, tedious, and irrelevant survey. Stick to questions that you’ll be able to use to make improvements. The questions should directly relate with the customer’s most recent or overall experience. Your VoC survey is another experience in its own right – make it count.
7. Keep your employees in the loop.
They need to know not only the various channels you use to communicate with customers, but any interactions that individual customers have had in the past. There are few things more likely to alienate customers than a contact center agent asking them questions they’ve already answered, or being unaware that the customer has already complained via another channel.
Customer experiences come in all shapes and sizes. Some are traditional, in a store, while others transpire via a mobile device. Don’t lose sight of this as you build and improve your VoC program.
When you do it right, the program won’t stand out as a survey. It will simply be one more in a series of solid, consistent experiences from your business – and a crucial one that will help you build your brand and drive your business forward.
Karine Del Moro is vice president of marketing at Confirmit (News - Alert) (www.confirmit.com).
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
