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It can be overwhelming to find relevant, unbiased CX resources to help move your work forward.

CXPA is here to help.

Our Topic Guides--CXPA members with years of CX experience--have curated our most relevant, popular articles, whitepapers, and webinars to bring you the very best information on topics that are critical to your success.

Note that some resources in the links below may be content only available to CXPA members. 

CXPA's Guide to Voice of the Customer

One of the key responsibilities of customer experience professionals is being the voice of the customer in the company. All departments have their own challenges, KPIs and targets to achieve. In this world, someone should remind other departments that organizations exist for their customers. In that manner, customer experience professionals take on a great responsibility. Customers’ requests, thoughts and complaints should be listened to, considered carefully, and forwarded to related departments for awareness and action.

On the other hand, all products and services should be designed to meet customer’s needs and expectations. How can you be sure if your products or services met your customer’s needs? You cannot understand the needs without listening. Like Dr. Ernesto Sirolli mentioned in his Ted Talk, you have to listen if you want to learn their thoughts.

There are 2 ways to listen to the voice of customers. First, you contact them and learn from their experiences. Second, you can analyze their interactions with your touchpoints. There are some breakdowns in these two. Now let’s look at them.


1- Organizations touch the customers: This is basically that organizations reach the customers and ask for their thoughts about the experiences they had. It is divided into two according to the type of research:

  1. Qualitative Methods: These are the methods used for understanding customers’ deepest needs and reasons for their decisions. Such as focus groups, diary studies, in-depth interviews etc.
  2. Quantitative Methods: These are the methods used for reaching more customers and monitoring average scores. Surveys are included in quantitative research. NPS, CSAT, CES are some of the metrics measured with surveys.

2- Customers touch the organizations: Not only organizations touch the customers, but also customers reach organizations to be heard too. Customer experience teams should carefully monitor these interactions that take place at the frontlines and digital channels. 

  1. Information: Customers can reach the organizations for getting information.
  2. Request: Customers can reach the organizations for requests such as changing a phone number, understanding a bill, or changing a product they use.
  3. Complaint: Customers can also reach the organizations for solving problems they are experiencing.

 

Your Topic Guide

Gokhan Kara, CCXP

Gökhan is the first  CCXP in Turkey. He is the founder of CXPA Istanbul Network and a Board member of CXPA. He is a chair of judges in prestigious customer experience awards such as International CX Awards, UK CX Awards, and European Customer Centricity Awards. He is the winner of “2019 CX Impact Awards”, selected as “2019 Top 25 CX Leader of The Year” and “2020 Top 150 Global Thought Leader and Influencer”. He worked as a CX practitioner in Telecom, Banking, and Energy sectors for almost 10 years. Currently, he works as a Customer Experience Advisor at Pisano. He is a part-time lecturer at MEF University and gives Customer Experience Management courses. He’s an international keynote speaker and he gives training and consultancy to companies for better customer experiences.

Gokhan Kara, CCXP, CXPA Member

Read

  • Blog, VoC Basics, Nicholas Zeisler, CCXP: In this blog post Nicholas gives details about transactional and relational surveys and their positions in listening to the voice of the customers. It also includes important guidelines and tips for establishing VoC programs in organizations.



  • Blog, VoC Best Practices in Crisis Times & for the 2020s, Lynn Hunsaker, CCXP, The post starts with what customer-centric voice of customer means, then continues with qualitative-quantitative research comparisons. Lynn suggests being big action oriented, instead of big data oriented. This is one of the problems of VoC programs. If you are always listening - yet aren’t taking any actions, that won’t help any of your customers.


  • Blog, Four Steps for Making Your Customer Insights Users Successful, Aimee Lucas, CCXP, In this blog post Aimee shows a holistic approach to VoC programs and explains 4 steps CX teams should take when they execute their own VoC programs. Identifying the value of insights, understanding the needs, stakeholder management and celebrating success of learning from mistakes. These are the main steps explained in the blog post.


  • Whitepaper, Confirmit: Are You Listening? , This whitepaper is a good example of how VoC programs should have technical abilities such as multichannel feedback capture, reporting, alerting, sharing and integrating feedback data. These are the technical details of how companies can listen to their customers and create actions based on these listening insights.

Watch

  • Webinar, The Future of Feedback: Adapting Customer Listening for Our Changing World (Sponsored Webinar by InMoment), this webinar emphasizes that in a changing world customer listening methods should change too. From 06:55 to 08:52, 4 strategies evolving from traditional to modern methods are shared briefly. After that, until 34:50, details of those 4 strategies are shared. All of them show that feedback strategies should change in accordance with the changes in customers’ lives. Not only conducting surveys all the time, but also gathering non-survey data is critical in listening to the voice of customer – which is discussed at 29:00.


  • Webinar, Listen, Analyze, Act: How CVS Delivers Meaningful CX for Every Interaction, Every Day (Sponsored Webinar by Verint), in this webinar, case study of CVS health is shared. At 04:55 a VoC model is shared, how qualitative and quantitative data is gathered from different sources and used for improving customer experiences. At 07:17, “repeatable and methodical processes to improve customer satisfaction” are shared such as Listen-Analyze-Share, Influence-Measure progress and closing the loop. At 25:00, 3 case studies are being elaborated. VoC Program Maturity Model is also shared at 33:12.


  • Webinar, Closing the Customer Feedback Loop: Avoid These Costly Missteps (Sponsored Webinar by Concentrix) , closing the loop is a crucial part of the voice of customer system. It’s basically communicating with the customers and letting them know their feedback had been received and addressed. In this webinar Jackie Potts shares the mistakes of organizations executing the ‘close the loop’ approach. At 05:04, she shares that 70% of customers are more likely to recommend you if you close the loop of feedback. She also shares that if you don’t reach your customer, churn rate will double in comparison with the reached customers after feedback.


Listen

  • Podcast: Challenges and Opportunities: The Current State of VoC, and Where It’s Going: This panel discussion with CX thought leaders include how organizations apply VoC programs and what the future will bring. At 07:20, Musa Hanhan shares the importance of proactively listening to the customers. From 09:10 to 14:56, panelists discuss what most mature companies do to drive action plans as a result of customer feedback. From 15:16 to 23:30, panelists share their thoughts about the first steps of establishing VoC programs, VoC platforms’ capabilities and the critical factors they look at while choosing one.