We are now on Part Three in this four-part series on VoC success. Check out the first two keys now if you missed them earlier: 1. Get full executive sponsorship and 2. Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection. These two keys will drive your third key to VoC success.

Key to Success #3: Make Customer Feedback Data Actionable at the Location Level

Every location manager brings a unique skill set and level of maturity to their job. This creates slight variations in the leadership approach at each location and even each shift. These variations in leadership aren’t a problem in and of themselves—but when regular communication of key deliverables is lacking, it can lead to significant straying from the brand promise.

With clear communication of location-level deliverables, however, a wide variety of management styles can be equally successful in engaging employees and creating a great customer experience. The real problem, then, is that most traditional enterprise feedback management (EFM) reporting does not communicate the right things well, if at all.

Some reports may address only generic companywide talking points that don’t specifically apply to a single location. Others get down to local data but never make the figures understandable to those of us without a PhD in statistical analysis. Location managers simply don’t have the time or training to wade through piles of data tables and reports to get the answers they need.

Simplicity Is Quick, and Quick Is Empowering

The key is to empower location managers with tools that will help them to quickly identify local, branded needs, so they can take the necessary actions (in their own management style) to implement positive changes in the customer experience.

Take our Coach Local Dashboard for example. It was designed specifically for location managers to take the complexity out of customer feedback data, helping them to deliver consistent and memorable customer experiences. Through interactive visual cues, the dashboard eliminates the need to search through complex reports in search of customer experience improvement insights and leverages prescriptive reporting technology to set focus areas.

As a result, location managers can create, edit and execute action plans that address these challenges, as well as monitor and track progress against their goals toward encouraging return visits and increasing your brand strength.

The dashboard also facilitates social sharing of community-sourced content, giving location managers insight into a living best practices library of what’s working for the top-performing locations and how it could be applied to their team.

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Just one more key to go in this series on VoC success! Stay tuned for the final installment, where I will discuss the fourth and final key to VoC success: Use research and analysis to adapt to evolving program needs.

In part one of this four-part blog series, I discussed the first key to VoC success: Get full executive sponsorship. Today, I will focus on the second key.

Key to Success #2: Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection

Great VoC programs begin with your customers. The conversations you build with them help you better understand their experience with your brand. Because an experience is something that happens internally, conversation is currently the only way to gain insight into customer expectations—and how well you’re doing at meeting those expectations.

Listening to customers regularly and conversationally helps to identify the systemic trends and issues needing to be addressed to keep customers coming back. It can also help drive referrals and advocacy within customers’ circle of friends and followers.

The most common approach today for starting this customer conversation is sending out customer surveys through the devices and technology customers use, and in a language customers understand. This is a critical element to any successful VoC program; however, there is a rapidly growing source of untapped feedback circulating amongst consumers today that brands have yet to fully leverage:

Social media and online review sites

These channels are quickly becoming the preferred method for customers to voice opinions about their brand experiences. As a result, brands are presented with the challenge of continuously improving and delivering positive consumer experiences.

As a brand, you can only drive exceptional customer experiences through a deep understanding of the overall experience customers encounter at your locations. This means listening to customer feedback from any source available, and using it to drive improvements. Companies are using VoC solutions to gain the power and insight into their customer experiences through a combined “multichannel” feedback approach. This not only paints a more comprehensive picture of the customer experience; it can save time by eliminating the need to jumping from, and dig through, multiple reports.

With these solutions, all sources of customer comments—customer surveys, social media, online review sites, and other applicable feedback channels—are all aggregated into a single view giving brands the right information, at the right time, to drive the right changes to enhance the customer experience.

This previously untapped combination of actionable insights can identify the steps needed to deliver the experiences customers have come to expect in today’s world, resulting in increased return visits, improved brand loyalty, and active advocacy.

Stay tuned for the third part of this blog series—Make customer feedback data actionable at the location level—to learn how location managers can take the complexity out of customer feedback data to deliver consistent and memorable customer experiences at their restaurants, retail locations, grocery stores, and banks.

You’ve probably heard some version of Benjamin Franklin’s famous words, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” I propose an addendum to this list: negative customer feedback.

As much as we’d like to please every customer all of the time, it’s just not a realistic expectation. Negative feedback is inevitable. And that’s a good thing.

Every time a customer leaves negative feedback, they’re providing your brand with an opportunity to improve the customer experience and potentially earn their business for life. Brands that adopt this positive outlook on customer feedback will find success. Brands that do not will likely find themselves in a costly uphill battle with customer loyalty.

Cultivating lasting relationships with your customers can be a daunting proposition, but it’s a practice that your brand would be remiss not to do. Here are four tips for converting brand detractors into brand advocates:

1. Listen & Respond Publicly

Take time to listen to and understand negative customer reviews. Once you have a grasp of the issue at hand, respond publicly so the customer—and other customers—know that you are taking the issue seriously and making an effort to right the wrong. Customers value transparency.

2. Address Negative Comments Quickly

Time really is money when it comes to customer retention. Don’t let a customer issue fester. Resolve the problem as quickly as possible, “wow” the customer, and create a potential brand advocate for life.

3. Rectify the Situation (Even if It’s Not Your Fault)

Identify the type of customer you’re dealing with and interact with them accordingly. The customer is not always right, but by offering a sincere apology and reaching an amicable solution to the problem, your brand can win back at-risk customers.

4. Follow Up

See the resolution of the customer’s negative experience all the way to completion. Thank the customer for their feedback and ensure that they leave—and return—completely satisfied with your brand.

As much as it can feel like negative feedback is all your customers leave, the situation is not that bleak. In reality, customers are mostly positive in their brand sentiment. One study found that customers share positive brand experiences eight times more often than they do negative experiences.

Negative feedback can be a valuable resource for brands working toward delivering a greater customer experience. It’s less fatal than death, and it’s generally cheaper than taxes.

Developing and launching a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is no small feat. In fact, it’s a massive undertaking requiring a lot of thought. To do it, you and your team will have to figure out how to help your entire organization adopt and execute fundamental changes to improve the customer experience at every touchpoint, increase return visits, and create active brand advocates. This means investing serious time, money, and people in the right places.

Launching a program doesn’t guarantee much. To ensure you and your program see success, I recommend following the four key elements below:

1. Get full executive sponsorship
2. Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection
3. Make customer feedback data actionable at the location level
4. Use research and analysis to adapt to evolving program needs

I’ll cover the first key in this article, and the next three will follow in upcoming blog posts. So stay tuned.

Key to Success #1: Get Full Executive Sponsorship

With any organization-wide VoC program rollout, the most important aspect to its success is having committed executive sponsorship behind it. The rollout typically happens at the employee level, and ground-level employee engagement is much more likely when staff can see the excitement and benefit reinforced at the top of the organization.

What Executives Must Do to Effectively Sponsor and Support Your VoC Program

Create the VoC Program Vision

VoC programs have a lot of moving parts, and as the pace of the project speeds up, it’s easy for things to go astray. To keep people and departments synchronized in their efforts, the executive sponsor must clearly and regularly articulate (1) the reasons your organization is implementing the program, (2) what the end state will look like, and (3) the ways success will be defined.
If everyone has the same answers to these three questions, you will be able to more easily resolve inter-team conflicts, enable project activities prioritization, and ensure that everyone is working toward the same objective. If the executive sponsor doesn’t create a shared vision, each person will create their own—leading to program inconsistency and potential for failure.

Be a Vocal and Visible Champion

An executive VoC program sponsor who isn’t regularly seen or heard from is not really a sponsor at all. Sending the occasional email from the office or on the road is simply not enough; your program’s executive sponsor needs to be present for all levels of the organization and be seen as the number one supporter of the initiative.
On top of explaining benefits of the program to employees, your key executive must continuously reminding fellow executives why it is important to dedicate budget and people to the VoC program’s rollout and continued maintenance.

Remove Roadblocks

No matter how well-planned the project or how dedicated the team members, roadblocks will arise. It’s the sponsor’s job to spot and remove the roadblocks the team can’t remove for themselves. This can include freeing up time from an essential subject matter expert, working to resolve issues with a vendor, or helping to ensure the project team has the resources it needs. By removing roadblocks, the sponsor allows the project team to stay focused on their day-to-day project activities and deliver a successful VoC program.

Empower Decision Making

When launching and maintaining your VoC program, every team member should be empowered to make the decisions they regularly face. Enabling frontline decisions to be made at the appropriate employee level frees up time for ascending levels of the organization to focus on their strategic activities. Filtering every decision through the executive sponsor will quickly consume his or her day, cause distraction from supporting the project’s success, and will ultimately create a backlog and slow down the program rollout.

In the end, if your VoC program is supported from the top down and employees can see it, they will embrace it, which is the best insurance against program failure.

Watch for Part 2 in this four-part blog series where I discuss the second key to success: Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection.

Now that customers have the ability to shop when and where they want online, the need to ever enter a store is rapidly declining. Brick-and-mortar retailers are all working to figure out their strategies for the fairly new phenomenon of “showrooming,” where consumers browse in-store and buy their products online, often from a competitor.

This new shopping landscape gives consumers access to more merchandise choices than ever before and presents brick-and-mortar retailers with a series of new challenges. In the Age of the Connected Consumer, people are now being provided with an end-to-end shopping experience that includes the traditional brick-and-mortar store as well as an immersive online or digital experience.

Even in this new landscape, the physical store can continue to be a strong asset for retailers, delivering valuable things e-commerce services can’t:

1. Immediate Gratification

Our society enjoys and desires instant gratification. We want what we want and we typically want it now. The beauty of a brick-and-mortar store is that we purchase the items we want—from the latest in fashion to the newest gadget—and have the luxury of taking them home at that moment in time for immediate enjoyment.

2. The Sensory Experience

Unlike online retailers, brick-and-mortar stores have the ability to engage all of the customer’s five senses. They can fully express how the brand looks, sounds, smells, feels, and even tastes. The online world only appeals to the visual, and sometimes auditory, senses. As evidence continues to reflect that a multi-sensory experience leads to increased in-store spending, more and more retailers are beginning to embrace a sensory engagement process that triggers a “shopper’s high” and creates an emotional and memorable interaction. In turn, customers stay in the store longer, have positive emotions about their time spent in the store, and walk away with increased brand value perceptions.

3. The Human Connection

Another advantage brick-and-mortar retailers have over those that operate online is the ability to forge the in-person (or human) connection. Despite the average person’s desire to email, text and shop online, we are still very human and enjoy contact with others. Being able to discuss product differences with knowledgeable sales staff or receive guidance to find merchandise is no longer an expected service of retailers but a valuable differentiator and touchpoint in the customer experience. Just remember that you can only capitalize on and promote the value of the human connection if you have the appropriate staff levels and have provided them with the necessary training for success.

4. Personal Service

With the Internet, smartphones, and tablets in tow, consumers are more empowered than ever to do research on the products they are looking to buy, pre-empting what a salesperson can tell them. This rise in consumer self-sufficiency, as well as in-store self-service, has sparked a lot of discussion around the value that in-store sales associates offer. Some retailers have taken this trend as an opportunity to downsize their staffing requirements, while others have innovated with the introduction of personal service to create a new, heightened, and differentiated brand experience. One example is Wegman’s, who has introduced produce experts in their stores who chop fresh vegetables and fruits in the aisle so shoppers can take home customized mixes for salads and stir-fry dishes.

Brick-and-mortar retailers need not dismay. Focusing on these four natural advantages over online retailers is the path to maintaining in-store traffic.

I’ve written a few blog posts recently surrounding open review sites and their well-known pitfalls published in the media and verified by some of Mindshare’s own independent research. This is a topic that I am very passionate about.

Why? Because I believe that brands deserve to get credit for their customer service efforts. I believe they deserve to get the word out about the great experiences they provide to thousands of customers, through honest, authentic, timely and accurate ratings and reviews. I believe that consumers have the right to access this information in order to make an informed purchase decision about the brands, products, and services they research and select.

Open review sites today simply don’t allow this to happen and it’s because they are missing the following three essential elements that a review site requires in order to be reliable and effective:

1. Accurate, quality feedback

Typically, people only go to an open review site when they are extremely satisfied or dissatisfied with their brand experience. However, open review sites have no mechanism to validate that reviews came from actual customers, which makes fraudulent reviews a heavily scrutinized topic in the media today.

Brands have no true way of identifying who is really leaving a review for their locations – it could be a competitor looking to sabotage with negative reviews or the brand itself could be posting positive fake reviews to reinforce a weak reputation. Either way, brands or the customer experiences they deliver are not being accurately portrayed, making it difficult for anyone to truly trust what is said on an open review site today.

Putting the proper mechanism in place to ensure that reviews are authentic and validated will eliminate the nagging question of whether the review is fake or real.

2. High review volume

When it comes to customer reviews, the “less is more” approach just doesn’t jive. Why? Because they are the lifeblood of review sites and having a substantial volume of reviews is the foundation to a relevant and representative destination.The trouble is, consumers need to be enticed to voluntarily leave a review. With people typically compelled to visit a review site when they have either a horrible or a great experience, the average experience is often not reflected, which is what consumers are looking for in a review because it is likely what they can expect.

Offering an incentive to leave a review will entice consumers to offer their feedback, whether positive, negative or neutral.

3. Review recency

Review recency is as important as review quality and quantity. The timing of when feedback is submitted on a review site is extremely important as consumers need to understand what a hotel, restaurant, or store is like now. With review sites not getting enough new reviews, old reviews are kept on these sites for long periods of time, often several years. In return, there is a veritable plague of stale data circulating. The more recent the review data, the more accurately it will reflect what the current state of the customer experience is really like.