Why You Should Consider Owning the Voice of the Customer with Jeanne Hopkins

Overview

In her presentation, Jeanne explains why owning the voice of the customer is so crucial and defines what that means. She provides 5 reasons why we should consider voice of the customer meetings.

Speaker

Jeanne Hopkins is Chief Revenue Officer at OneScreen.ai, a company that makes it easier to buy and easier to sell real-world advertising. Jeanne is a speaker, author and mentor.

Quotes

“There’s a difference between writing to your customers and writing for your customers. The former assumes that you’re delivering a message that you feel is important, while the latter assumes that you’re delivering a message that benefits your customers.” 

“Meeting alone is not going to drive growth or enhance the customer experience. Cross functional leaders have to commit to taking action from these meetings.” 

Key Points

  1. The voice of the customer in terms of growth
  2. Voice customer programs reduce voluntary churn
  3. Considering the customers voice with result in greater feedback

Transcript

Hi everybody, it’s a quick little session on why you should consider owning
the voice of the customer.

It’s an important consideration in any marketing program and particularly in
demand generation to be able to show how closely you are aligned with the
actual customer. So, what I’d like to be able to talk to you a little bit is in
terms of growth, the voice of the customer meeting itself is really so that
customer facing teams like direct sales and direct sales bars channel,
customers success team tech, support can actually provide feedback directly to
the product tank team via a consistent cadence of communication.

The way I like to look at it is that its product managers get kind of hit
over the head quite a bit by the sales organization asking for all these unique
features and stuff in order to close a deal. But when you actually put all the
customer-facing team members on one side of a large table and the product team
on the other side, they can hear it in a consistent format and actually can
make some suggestions on what they want to do.

So, the only way that I can do this, the quickest and easiest way is three
reasons that we win as a company and three reasons that we lose. And what
you’re trying to do is to find the common ground the themes over month to month
so if you own this meeting, and make it no longer than 90 minutes, you have to
control the agenda very tightly, and ask people as the people on the call if
they have questions, I suggest you record this, you post it to your wiki. You
make sure that it’s understood but really you need to have alignment with the
actual product team. So, I asked you why?

Well, there’s five reasons that you should really consider a voice of the
customer meeting for your company. Number one is voice customer programs really
reduce voluntary churn. Voluntary churn is those things that are really
customer issues versus involuntary, which are usually payment issues. The
second one is that if you consider it, it’s important to increase revenue. So,
a lot of demand gen teams are really tied into increasing revenue, and you want
to fix that leaky bucket. If you cannot retain customers, you know, it’s clear
that you’re not going to be able to grow. Another way to be able to look at it
as well is that you want to make sure that your products are using the voice of
the customer feedback loops that you’re closely aligned with that particular
organization. You want to talk about ease of use features and platform
analytics.

If customers are really having issues using your product, this pain point or
these pain points will impact their feedback related to onboarding. Are they
adequately trained to use the product support? Are they getting the help they
need when they run into issues using the product? These are all important
considerations that you want to make part of your voice to the customer
meeting. Another way is that you will produce better content. As a result, you
will come out with so many ideas on things that need to be covered. There’s a
difference between writing to your customers and writing for your customers.
The former assumes that you’re delivering a message that you feel is important,
while the latter assumes that you’re delivering a message that benefits your
customers. The most compelling messages clearly are those that are written for
your customers. You can’t create content that resonates if you’re not out of
touch with the market you’re writing for. Or using marketing jargon. That
doesn’t mean anything to your customer and we’re all guilty of that I have to
say and then actioning on your voice of the customer data promotes brand
advocacy. It’s one thing to keep customers, it’s another thing to create
advocates for your brand or product.

And actually, this really only happens when companies build authentic
relationships with their customers and deliver on the promises they’ve made.
Granted, it’s a very high bar. How can companies deliver an exceptional
experience and build brand loyalty when there’s such a disconnect usually
between the company and the customer? Well, I believe voice of the customer
programs actually bridge this gap and empower companies with the information
they need to create the experiences customers crave. But it takes more than
just listening and understanding. customers actually want to see the impact of
their feedback and your feedback in a variety of different ways. So why is
this? Well, let’s talk about this.

We’re all forced as a marketer to play Whack a Mole daily to achieve
results. Yet by owning this single meeting, you’re able to unify a variety of
different departments across the board and that makes a huge difference.
Because actually, what are we usually coming up against? Well, it’s customer
acquisition versus retention costs, what are those individual costs? And I
argue that an NPS survey is simply not enough. creating compelling experiences
and driving customer set satisfaction really requires both. This is hard, deep
understanding and quick action. Most companies mean well, but few companies are
doing this well. It’s hard to do. And I like to be able to talk about product
marketing is really that intersection between product marketing and sales. And
if you’re lucky enough to have a product marketer on your team, this is the
person that probably should be owning the voice of the customer meeting in my
eyes and the reason for that is that we want to break down those silos between
departments and build that connective tissue between and across teams. Instead
of decisions made about what to build or what to market or how to best help
customers. Leveraging the voice of the customer meeting allows everyone to
operate from a comprehensive understanding of customer needs. That’s an
important consideration. But where are we really falling short?

And I got to tell you, we are it’s our nature to kind of hide what’s in the
closet. We’re programmed as a team as an organization as a discipline to drive
results and it’s difficult to hear that it’s your department or process that
needs to make a change. Make sure that everyone is brought into the idea that
the customer experience is everyone’s responsibility. It’s not tech support.
It’s not customer service. It’s the entire organization. And this meeting is
not about calling teams out. It’s about making better decisions with new
insights. How will you act and measure? We’ll commit to it. That’s the hardest
thing: the meeting alone is not going to drive growth or enhance the customer
experience. cross functional leaders have to commit to taking action from these
meetings. What changes will be made and how will those changes be measured
against customer feedback over time? How can we boost morale? Well, you know,
customer service team members are usually the hardest hit of all. So, you
really want to use customer feedback because it’s not all negative. It can be
very positive. Celebrate those strengths. If customers say that your team goes
above and beyond with customer support, celebrate it. Make sure that everybody
in the organization knows about it, whether it’s on a slack channel, whether
it’s in a team email, something to be able to show that you’re doing a great
job. Determine what lessons you can learn about what’s going well, and where
customers are placing the most valued to drive continuous improvements across
the organization.

Like to look at data sources, look at your internal and external data
sources. understand all the places your customers are always ready sharing
feedback with you on a daily basis. It’s a little difficult when you have these
silos because there’s some teams that oversee social media. There are some
teams that oversee customer service. But if you are able to have all these
people in one meeting, you can create that process for harnessing this data
chat, support or win loss notes in a meaningful way. Too often conversations
that we’re having with customers on a daily basis get overlooked. Every cop
conversation is really an opportunity to learn. I know that just sounds so
trite. Empower your teams. It’s a difficult concept to be able to give them the
authority, but also assign topics to those team members so that they can
uncover insights as you measure feedback across your unique data sources. And it’s
a good tool. There’s a great tool out there called loop LOOPVOC.com. It’s a
great product. I’ve used it before. And it gives you a standardized method that
you can tag each individual piece of feedback whether it’s a Google My Business
Review, a G2 review, things that are coming in from your system, whether it’s
Zendesk or whatever. And you can keep topics high level like support or pricing
and then create more granular topics within those primary topics as needed. The
idea is not to bash anybody to bash any individual. So I like to be able to say
that the processes that you create internally will have a direct impact on the
customer experience externally. Use this particular voice of the customer
meeting to draw a line in the sand. From this point forward, do what makes
sense. Listen to customers deeply, identify trends early, make changes quickly,
have conversations and follow up with results.

It’s not rocket science. It really isn’t. It’s a very simple meeting. But
sometimes the biggest problems require simple solutions to make your
organization a true rocket ship, something that we’re all trying to do. And I
asked you questions not why but it’s not it’s why not?