3 Steps to grow your annual company revenue 10x year over year.
I was blown away.
With everything we develop and discuss on a daily basis, and the products we plan and execute on we often end up with the impression that we have it all figured out and that we know unquestionably exactly what the customer is doing, and what they need next.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
While conducting user interviews recently to attempt to improve existing product a user off-handedly mentioned a part of their daily work process.
Something we’d never realised would be part of their lives, that we could directly automate and improve upon.
It wasn’t about the section of the product I was asking about, but it was so exciting that needless to say this insight got added to our future product development, an eye opener to just how much of a customer’s journey we know nothing about.
In recent research conducted by Aberdeen into the importance of the customer experience it was revealed that the top 20% of companies ranked on performance were able to achieve 10X growth of their companies annual revenue by utilising a strategy known as ‘Voice of the Customer’ programs.
It’s no secret we should be listening to our customers when they’re putting food on our tables. But just how much listening are we doing and how well are we acting on that information?
This information was compiled as a list to help me better understand Voice of the Customer processes in an attempt to better implement them in our business. Hopefully it’s can help encourage you to do the same.
In Michael Hinshaws ‘The Real Value in Voice of the customer’ it’s also mentioned that these same companies were also able to achieve:
55% better customer retention rates
This is an astronomical figure when the cost of getting a customer is 2 to 3 times that of keeping a customer.
23% decrease in year-over-year customer service costs
Servicing a happy customer, who’s needs are solved on a base level is easier than servicing unhappy customers with more problems. Looking good here.
292% better employee engagement rates.
Makes sense right, employees who feel like they are actively partaking in helping customers achieve their daily goals will feel more empowered and are more likely to project that attitude. Especially when the requirements of being ‘Customer First’ come from the top down and are part of your culture.
Seems pretty obvious these are statistics we all want to see in our own lives.
So how do we implement the Voice of the Customer into our business?
3 simple steps.
Listen
Listening to your customers is crucial to understanding their journey. Your customers will tell you what your product should do, how they want to be helped and how they want to be treated. All you have to do is listen carefully.
All you need to do is ask the right questions at the right time.
Identify your high priority items, like why your customer chose you, how they found you, or more importantly why they didn’t choose you.
Do you know why your customer came to your website? Ask them
Do you know what’s most important to your customer about the sale of their house? Ask them
Do you know why that customer never called you back after seeming interested your services? Ask them
Tip: Try to avoid overloading a customer with too many questions throughout the process and segment your efforts into blocks of 2–4 questions per customer, targeting different goals per test.
Act
Acting on the information you’re presented is crucial to improving their journey, and future customer journeys. It’s no use listening to customers if you don’t let that craft your business decisions.
Discovery can only get you so far, now it’s time to drill down into the information you’ve accessed and figure out how to change the parts of the process that aren’t working. If a car stops working you don’t just throw away the car, you replace the air filter or the fuel pump or whatever is broken.
Identify the people and parts of the organisation that are directly impacting the customers journey and understand what the customers are trying to do.
Areas that might be identified as needing repairs?
Your lead generation and marketing. Your customer follow ups. The education and transparency of your products usage. The treatment of the customer after the typical sales cycle is completed.
Tip: Get out of your own head, Voice of Customer research is about using data to guide your decisions, our own natural biases have no place here.
Monitor
Once you’ve decided on the action to take and made changes, unfortunately the job isn’t over yet.
This entire process isn’t complete once and move on.
To drive real results you need to monitor the changes you’ve made. Iterate on your processes like a start up iterates on their products and truly design the entire service you provide and then ask the same questions again.
Hopefully you get different results, and you’ll find new areas and pain points in your customers journey to investigate, act and monitor.
We’ll be implementing better VOC research across our customer journey’s as I get a better understanding of the best methods and practises, if you’re interested in hearing more about it reach out to me and let me know.
When I’m not thinking about how to perform Jedi mind tricks on customers to improve our products I’m trying to improve my product management or user experience skills to build Realhub. A real estate marketing platform that services thousands of agents across Australia. Right now I’m attempting to write 30 articles in 30 days and I’m at day 2/30. If you liked this article consider giving me a thumb, or a clap or just nod to yourself silently (I’ll sense it).
