Next Generation VOC - Some comments on Temkin's recent report

I've just recently finished reading Temkin Group's new research report titled: "Prepare For Next Generation Voice of the Customer Programs".  It's an interesting read and worth spending a few bucks on ($195.00).  Anyone interested can purchase it at www.temkin.com.   After reading the report, I found myself agreeing with a lot of it.  I also wasn't surprised by many of the points Temkin makes.  Being in the business of selling and supporting feedback management tools, I help customers develop action oriented feedback programs all the time.  So, I see many of Temkin's VOC challenges and opportunities on a daily basis.

The report's main thrust is that businesses are getting less benefits from their current Voice of the Customer programs than they should be.  Temkin cites one main reason for this: A lack of action taking based on VOC.  He points out that current VOC practices divert resources and attention from VOC's real value (its usefulness in improving customer experience)  He specifically talks to three things that VOC efforts are too heavily weighted towards:

• Market research, relying on large annual customer surveys
• Management presentation of aggregated data (things like metrics and dashboards)
• Data analysis (In another life we called it analysis paralysis)

Most importantly, Temkin contends that Next Generation VOC programs will be much more focused on feedback based action.  He also notes that:

• VOC programs will have to incorporate more unstructured feedback sources (things like Facebook, Zendesk, Twitter, etc.)
• They will need to integrate customer feedback (however sourced) with CRM databases
• Organizations will have to shift over to Customer Insight and Action platforms (Systems Like QuestBack, EasyResearch and Listen & Act among others).

The following chart comes from an Aberdeen Research report I came across earlier this year.  I include it here because it demonstrates how acting on feedback builds value into customer feedback processes.  Clearly, Temkin isn't the only researcher seeing the shift in VOC best practice to more action orientation.

 

As I mentioned earlier, for folks like myself, Temkin's observations are not at all surprising.   I see companies with all the VOC issues he cites.  His insights are accurate, in my view, and correspond to what I see day-to-day. 

In fairness to large companies, when viewed at an enterprise level, VOC is tremendously difficult to boil down operationally, except within very defined silos (customer support, for instance). The ability to route customer specific feedback, either structured or unstructured, to a "person" like a product manager, account executive, third party representative (a reseller for instance) or someone else in a business composed of thousands of employees, hundreds of resellers, dozens of product managers, etc. is not simple nor necessarily easy. 

In my experience, when looked at more granularly, VOC is a lot easier to deal with and take actions on.  For instance, at a departmental level, the number of different paths customer feedback can take before finding a person is limited, it might be limited to only a few people.  So, implementing action oriented VOC doesn't need to be necessarily difficult.

I think it's wonderful that an insightful analyst like Bruce Temkin is promoting the concept of feedback based action taking while de-emphasizing the "Research" orientation that many feedback management initiatives adopt.  At QuestBack, we've been flogging the Ask&Act, and now Listen&Act, processes for many years.


Stewart Nash
s.nash@questback.com
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash