Who owns the Voice of the Customer?

Traditionally, organizations have deployed Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs to get customer feedback so they can improve the experience and products they are delivering. In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the customer drives business growth and innovation, but many organizations are stuck in the past.

In these businesses VoC may still mean a survey pushed by the CX team to the customer after an interaction. But a singular focus on these programs and the idea that VoC belongs to the CX team blinds the business to the much more extensive customer data that exists across their organization, thanks to tools used by various departments that collect information without explicitly surveying customers. Put simply, these businesses are investing money and resources and wasting customer time in a program to gather feedback when they already have more valuable data within their organization.

By adopting advanced analytics, businesses gain valuable insights from a wealth of customer, financial, and operations data generated from marketing, sales, services, and other departments in the organization. This empowers them to proactively deliver the products, experiences, and journeys that individual customers want, while also making strategic sense for the organization.

Think about it: imagine being able to anticipate customers’ needs and resolve issues before they arise. This is the power of the third wave, which leverages technologies like AI, generative AI, and predictive analytics to personalize customer experiences at scale.

According to Stanford Swinton, founder of NPSx by Bain & Co: "The third wave shift starts with redefining the core problem that CX needs to solve for from one of improving customer sentiment to one of improving future customer value. This implies that every CX department must have the capability not just to understand drivers of customer sentiment, but to understand how those drivers will directly impact the customer value equation. In most cases that means CX departments are spending too much time and money on surveying customers and not nearly enough on predictive customer analytics."

But AI is not a magic wand, and there are several common issues with data that must be resolved before its full value can be unlocked.

Weak data management

It’s one thing to collect mountains of customer data and feedback, which is relatively simple with modern technology. It’s another thing to turn it into actionable insights that can be used to transform CX, improve operations, and innovate better products across the organization. Many businesses are unaware of all the data they collect and even those who are aware may lack the knowledge and processes that allow them to properly organize this data and leverage its power.

Organizational silos

While the CX team often owns the VoC survey program, they typically don’t own the data that’s collected elsewhere in the company. Each department may jealously guard its valuable data. Marketing amasses data from various campaigns. Sales gains data by interacting with prospects and customers. Finance collects customer data across their payment history and operations adds to its vault of data with each order.

When these organizational silos lock up customer data, there are no cross-company insights. This means, for example, that sales teams may not know of frustrations with a particular product that customer support is far too familiar with and continue to push the product, creating unhappy customers.

Lack of best practices and methodologies

Finding the best practices and methodologies to turn data into intelligence can be elusive. When it comes to customer insight practices, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work and what’s successful in one industry might fall flat in another.

While a business may look at best practices that have worked in other organizations as a starting point, it has to do the work to develop clear best practices tailored to its unique value proposition and customer base.

Incomplete customer journey measurement

Businesses may attempt to measure the customer journey by measuring cross-journeys. In cross-journeys, the business looks within single touchpoints, like a website visit, customer service call, or purchase, and attempts to understand the entire customer journey using that information.

But while cross-journey measurement might provide insight into the value a customer perceived in that interaction it does not provide a holistic view of the complex customer journey. The customer journey starts before they engage with the business and progresses through multiple channels through their purchase and post-sale relationship, and the ability to measure it holistically is fundamental to unlocking the power of customer data.

Addressing these challenges with the right processes and tools

Any organization that’s willing to invest the time to develop the right processes and adopt the right tools can overcome these challenges. Where they lack knowledgeable internal resources, external experts can help them bridge the gap and avoid further delay in gaining the full visibility their data can provide. Here are four steps to begin with and that resolve the issues discussed above.

1. Strengthen data management

Good data management is the foundation of customer intelligence. Done right, it helps pinpoint product delivery, internal process, and customer experience issues that cause or increase frustration and those that create delight.

A key element of good data management is data democratization, making all the customer insight data in every department available to everyone in the organization who can profit from leveraging the full customer picture in their decision-making. With good data management, AI can automate data analysis, identify hidden patterns, and predict customer churn, who will become an advocate, and future purchases.

Related content: Why data is the most underappreciated asset in your company

2. Eliminate silos

Data democratization requires both moving data out of silos and moving beyond the idea that VoC is owned by any single team. Treating data as an asset to be shared for the good of the organization instead of being hoarded in departments is as much a cultural change as it is a technical one. Leadership must deliberately create a new mindset that focuses on the value of data to the business and its customers when everyone can use it and build a collaborative culture that supports this mindset.

Thematic co-founder Alyona Medelyan said that Thematic has helped hundreds of companies understand their VoC data: "We find that companies that promote the insights across the organization on average grow faster than those who don't.

"The approach they use differs. Some chose to open up access to customer data fully, others use a centralized insights team that answers everyone's queries. The former approach, which we call democratization of insights, is becoming more common for two reasons:

• First, AI technology now makes it possible to answer questions about customer feedback and other data via a simple ChatGPT-like interface.
• Second, people are becoming more data-savvy, able to interpret visualizations and dashboards."

3. Develop tailored best practices

Adopting the right best practices, methodologies, and frameworks for the organization means having a customer experience team that can balance deep knowledge of their industry with a clear understanding of their specific customer needs, behaviors, and motivation. With this foundation, they can do the work of determining which industry best practices and methodologies they can adapt to their business and begin to develop frameworks for the unique specifications of their organization.

4. Measure the entire customer journey

To measure the entire customer journey, a business must be able to visualize that journey from a prospective customer’s first research visit to the website through their entire lifecycle. Organizations can choose from a number of good tools that can help them map and measure this journey. Starting with a journey mapping exercise to understand customer needs, attitudes, and behaviors and analyzing customer sentiment is a key part of the intelligence framework.

Voice of the Customer should be owned by everyone

It should be clear that the answer to “who owns the VoC?” is “everyone.” When VoC is isolated in the CX department a business is blind to its full potential, even with sophisticated AI tools. When VoC belongs to the whole company from marketing, sales, and service to product, finance, and operations, customer voice becomes the engine of business growth, increased loyalty, and product and service innovation.

Today, customers are more empowered than ever, and unlocking the full potential of their voice is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for every business.

Join speakers from TikTok, Shoe Carnival, Sprinklr and Verint at All Access: Voice of the Customer on February 20-21. 

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