When designing and maturing a VOC program, there are a slew of best practices and approaches to consider that will help ensure you are deploying a study that will drive action, improve the customer experience, and keep stakeholders engaged or bought-in to the program.
One of the best practice domains that’s often forgotten about (until it’s too late!) is Enterprise Sample Management. There has been an influx of DIY Customer Experience programs that are emerging that promise democratization and flexibility but many of our clients, 18-24 months into launch, realize:
- Customers are being over surveyed
- Response rates are declining
- Stakeholders have lost confidence in the results due to “survey gaming” or low base size
These are just a few of the common challenges we hear.
With our ConcentrixCX Institute we have a team dedicated to guiding our clients to ensure governance, consistency, and actionability.
Here are 5 VOC design themes to advise your overall strategy:
1. Avoid over-surveying
Ensure there are enterprise rules in place that consider multiple surveys, channels, and interactions. Apply processing rules/quality controls so that customers are only surveyed once in a predetermined time frame. Based on best practices, the time frame and frequency can be different dependent on channel or customer base (30-60-90 days etc.).
2. Consider channel volumes
When determining how to prioritize sample at an enterprise level, sometimes it warrants prioritizing lines of business or channels that are lower volume to ensure you receive feedback on those experiences. Without an enterprise prioritization list, it is possible that certain lower volume/high revenue groups are underrepresented.
3. Ensure quality controls
Do not sacrifice quality for speed or investment. When done right, Enterprise Sample Management includes a mix of automated and manual quality controls that account for survey gaming, speeders, and have processes in place to clean the data. If not properly cared for, results can be skewed or inaccurate, and the program can quickly lose trust with senior stakeholders.
4. Care for unique business needs
An enterprise customer experience partner must provide flexibility based on your sampling needs. Sample management does not have a one-size-fits-all method. For example, if you specialize in the call center, you know how important it is to provide relevant and actionable feedback to your front-line teams. Selecting a partner that can maximize your sample data to enable sufficient representation throughout the month is critical to provide coachable moments and compensation.
5. Monitor trends when making changes
Organizations often make changes to their VOC programs. When switching partners or making a transition to a new VOC technology, it is important to monitor trends. Ensure you are tracking modifications to your sampling, survey methodology, survey mode, etc. because major changes can impact performance metrics. Being able to partner with a team of experts to pilot or run side by side programs will help you get a baseline understanding of the impact on performance. Understanding the influence your changes have made on metric performance will help you to socialize updates to senior stakeholders inside your organization.
In summary, prioritization, quality, unique business needs, and trending are all key design themes to keep in mind when building out your customer experience program. With these best practices in place, you can avoid some of the common pit falls that occur before it’s too late.
