If the foundation of B2B business success today is the “customer experience”, how do we discern customers’ expectations for that experience? The logical place to start is with “Voice of Customer”. Unfortunately, the landscape is littered with a multitude of offerings and techniques all clustered under this one banner. Let’s throw on our orange jumpsuits and try to clean it up a bit.

So, to have any measurable value we have two key requirements for any Voice of Customer initiative:

1. Economic linkage: a good VOC model must include the ability to measure the impact of improving the customer experience. Identifying a long list of things customers would like is easy.       Prioritizing within that list those things we can afford to do is harder. Specifying not only what to do, but also how much to invest (based on how much the investment will net us) is hardest of all – but most vital.
2. Line of sight to action: a few years ago, a study showed that 50% of the Fortune 1000 spends $5M per year or more on some type of VOC. That’s at least $2.5B a year! Here’s the amazing part: 80% of the companies reported that they aren’t able to act effectively on the data. To align VOC with advancing the customer experience, we must go beyond conducting surveys and link the findings into meaningful actions that can be taken by employees and the organization. Why ask customers their opinion if we’re not going to visibly do something about it?

It is also helpful to understand there are fundamentally two types of VOC, both of which are necessary but each of which have a distinct purpose and function:

1. Transactional: Transactional VOC focuses on the experience of the customer at the actual point of interaction. This could be the experience a customer has with our call center; with our technician who delivers the service; with our distributor representative; or with the account manager who owns the relationship. At each interaction, the customer has expectations of service which can and should be measured. Typical transactional VOC techniques include:
   1. Transactional feedback surveys (e.g., end of call IVR; service visit questionnaires);
   2. Profiling and segmentation (demographic and psychographic information on each account; individual contact preferences and needs – captured via the account engagement process and managed through a database to leverage the knowledge into additional value-add to customers);
   3. Offering development (such as customer focus groups for new product development or user group engagements)
2. Strategic or Relationship:  While transactional VOC is a table stake, and required to achieve loyalty, it is not sufficient. A couple of years ago, Xerox discovered that 70% of customers who defected had reported themselves to be “satisfied” or “very satisfied” in a recent transactional survey. It’s clear we need to go beyond satisfaction to a deeper understanding of customer needs. Strategic VOC, therefore, focuses on overall relationship. Typical Strategic VOC techniques include:
   1. Account Based Loyalty research;
   2. Customer Advisory Boards;
   3. Executive Sponsorship Programs
   4. Competency Model Development
   5. Investigative / Buying Behavior and Defection Analysis

We frequently reference that customers are “our most valuable asset” (we wouldn’t have much of a business without them). So, give yourself a quick asset check:

• Tell me the three drivers of 80%+ of the buying behavior of your customers.
• Tell me the top four activities that your customers attach to each of these drivers.
• Tell me the top five corporate problems that you have that put customers at risk and rank them for me by projected economic impact.

Investing in customer relationships is about creating a corporate asset with measurable value.