Add Vision to Voice of the Customer (VOC)

You can have 90% customer satisfaction scores on individual interactions but
have an overall low NPS. Why? They loved the effort you made in supporting
them but not if it took 5 support requests. Customer experience is an art and
a science and the art bit is done by adding vision to the voice of the
customer. Below we'll cover key problems with data analysis and then show you
how to add vision.

What's VOC and how do companies measure it?

Voice of the customer (VOC) is the "process of capturing customer's
expectations, preferences and aversions. Specifically, the Voice of the
Customer is a market research
technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs" via
Wikipedia.

Here's how Hubspot describe
it
"This process captures everything that customers are saying about a business,
product, or service and packages those ideas into an overall perspective of
the brand. Companies use VoC to visualize the gap between customer
expectations and their actual experience with the business."

How do you go about doing this?

Customer interviews, surveys, NPS, live chat, customer reviews, feedback
forms, social media and more.

The underlying problem with data is people post-rationalise

This article
contains
a powerful list of key points on the dangers of surveys including:

"When people answer direct questions they attempt to rationalise their
decisions and behaviour"
"We are prone to making sub-optimal and often irrational decisions. This is
contrary to how we like to perceive ourselves and naturally we don’t
articulate this when answering survey questions"
"Relative importance of an item is heavily influenced by the ease with
which we can retrieve it from our memory".

At Upscope we realised they copied and pasted their answer from our

example

Upscope had a form asking customers:

"Where did you first hear about Upscope? e.g. "Googled co-browsing
services".

Around 5% of the answers said "Googled co-browsing services".

This made the marketing team think "Ok, we should double down on that and
create more ads for that search term as it works".

It turns out that new sign ups were simply copying and pasting "Googled
co-browsing services" or typing that in directly with various spelling
mistakes.

We discovered something both obvious and funny. In some countries people are
not familiar with the abbreviation "e.g." and of course some people just
wanted to get it done and the above was a close approximation of their search
term or not at all.

5 star ratings all the way through but overall a 3 star? Yes

Here's an example by Mckinsey showing the importance of end to end customer
experience. The individual steps were great but the overall score was not.

This is partly why the Intercom co-founder Des Traynor suggested someone in
your company should be signing up to your own service every 2 weeks and going
through the whole process to check on the overall process.

Another example is that, at Upscope, we realised were were sending too many
emails from across several functions but no-one had complained until someone
finally said "the emails were a little intense".

New technology distorts the data further

Google now have automated replies built into gmail.

Let's say you send a very angry customer an email confirming that you've
completed a task for them and rather than typing out a fully reply they simply
select Google's preset "Awesome, thanks!" reply.

Over time you've got 1000s of replies that suggest everything is awesome.

It's definitely not.

"Because if you know customers are having problems, it should be your goal to
get to the root of it. On the flip side, if you know where customers are
finding enjoyment in your product, you should want to find out why so you can
expand on it."

"VoC best practices stress that you ask probing questions and not just set
yourself up to receive positive remarks"

How to add vision on VOC to give context to data

On top of all the visitor analytics, text analytics, social media mood
measuring, surveys and NPS scores you can add screen recordings and one to one
co-browsing sessions.

The visual side is hard.

It's not hard to implement, it's hard to watch the truth.

When you've spent months on redesigning your website flow and then you watch
customers fumble their way through and struggle on parts you never imagined
would cause problems, that's tough.

When your data suggests everything is OK but it turns out they're simply not
bothering to complain then you end up questioning your own strategy.

Add screen recording which has in-built struggle detection

Some companies use screen recording tools like
SessionCam which can be integrated directly into
customer experience tools such a Qualtrics and Medallia.

They can include features like "Struggle detection" which measures when
customers struggle with an interface and records that session for you to view.

This can then be combined with data to give you a new set of assumptions to
test.

Looking at a recording, seeing a problem and making changes is just as bad as
going off just the data. The recording gives us a clue as to what might be
missing in the data. That gives us assumptions to test. It is still data
driven.

Co-browsing and one to one sessions

Talking to someone while watching them navigate through your website is
painful but rewarding.

Co-browsing is a form of interactive screen sharing
built for onboarding one to one because there no downloads or installs and you
can click and scroll with the customer on their screen.

The difference between this and screen recordings is that you get to ask the
customer what they don't understand and take notes as you go along.

This is often where you'll discover the real reason why they struggled with
part of a form, navigation, what they understood from a set of instructions
given and what's unclear.

Some companies are taking one to one onboarding to an extreme

Imagine Google onboarding every single person, one to one, when they signed up
for a gmail account.

Crazy?

Superhuman are doing it for their email product.

Scroll down to the first point in this
article to read more
about both positioning your product in someone's mind and how it fits with
onboarding them, along with Superhuman's super crazy plan.

Imagine the feedback they get from doing this. Many companies can't do it but
Superhuman are scaling one-to-one sessions and likely have rapid accurate
product iterations.