Blogs

Establishing a Voice of the Customer Operating Model to Break Silos and Elevate Customer Experience (CX)

By Ms. Shruti Chopra, CCXP posted 11-08-2024 02:53 PM

Recommend

Co-authors: Shruti Chopra and Lora Zlatanova

The Importance of CX 

Customer experience is the order of the day. Whether it’s Services, Marketing, Sales, or any other department, the unified goal is to provide customers with a seamless and exceptional experience. Different teams accomplish this in different ways, but a Voice of the Customer practice is a critical pillar and a maturity differentiator in every CX Strategy.

As the Voice of the Customer (VOC) team for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services, we’re at the heart of the mission to elevate the customer voice. Our responsibility is to gather customer feedback across various channels and customer segments, analyze it, and provide actionable insights that drive improvement, innovation, and new value for customers.

The Challenge

As VOC practitioners we are not only chartered with collecting customer feedback and crystalizing insights but also ensuring that they lead to consistent and impactful change. Accomplishing this goal in an enterprise context, for multiple business units and services offerings, juggling a portfolio of 15 transactional and relationship VOC programs, and ensuring alignment and buy-in from all levels (service delivery teams, functional leaders, and senior leadership) turned out to be a challenge. We had to find answers and formulate clear messaging on the below aspects. Most importantly, one that resonates with the different stakeholder groups.

What are the customer outcomes that the VOC practice facilitates?

How do people, technology, and processes come together to realize these outcomes?

What are the roles, responsibilities, and deliverables for each party and how does everything play out in sequence?

Next to driving tactical improvements for customers, how do we leverage customer insights to inform strategic programs and transformational efforts?

How can we make VOC reports relatable for the different stakeholder levels to drive action? How do we define what actions are required in the first place?

How can we ensure senior leaders’ buy-in and commitment to drive accountability for planned action in their respective domains?

The Opportunity 

As VOC practitioners, we understand the potential of customer feedback and are cognizant of the value of addressing negative feedback by “closing the loop.” While most organizations handle immediate issue resolution (or “inner loop”) effectively, they tend to overlook strategic issues (or “outer loop”). 

At our organization too, while there are several teams dedicated to closing the loop to resolve customer pain points daily, there are some enterprise-wide thorny issues that take more effort to address. With a B2B organization as large as ours with operations across the globe, serving customers across multiple segments, delivering an optimal customer experience involves managing many moving parts.  

To drive governance, accountability, and executive alignment around VOC, we developed an operating model and a governance structure to provide customer insights from Services-focused listening posts and move the needle on customer experience improvement at both tactical and strategic levels. This model is more than a process; it’s a culture and mindset shift.  

The effort was orchestrated as an 8-week sprint-style initiative involving business unit partners to raise awareness of the VOC scope and listening posts. This led to the development of a VOC forum, key deliverables, engagement cadence, and a quarterly plan to present to senior leaders.

The Methodology 

Now, let’s dive into how we set up the VOC operating model and governance. Our VOC team’s daily work entails managing transactional and relationship surveys, as well as an interview program to gather meaningful customer feedback for the moments that matter along the customer journey. The feedback is then reported through centralized and role-based reports. Results are analyzed, which includes root cause analysis and working with business unit partners to understand business decisions that may have resulted in customers reaching out with questions or concerns. In response to customer feedback, our teams close the loop with individual customers with negative scores. They reach out to get more information from the customer and fix the issue. 

A diagram of a company model

Description automatically generated Step 1 – Executive Report: To kick-start the governance model, we gather insights from 10 listening posts and compile them into an Executive Report. This report is distributed quarterly and contains key CX metrics, themes, and ongoing/planned improvement projects. Its purpose is to provide insights to the leaders and decision-makers, highlighting positive trends and areas of opportunity. 

Step 2 – Deep-dive Analysis with Stakeholders: As a follow-up, we meet with business unit leaders/stakeholders to delve into our findings. This step includes multiple meetings and communication spread across a few weeks. The primary purpose of this collaboration is to examine the information, allow stakeholders to verify ongoing initiatives, gather more details, and understand the organizational hurdles that have prevented improvement opportunities from being turned into improvement projects. Through this exercise, we create a summary of all Planned Action projects for each business unit. We gather as much information as we can, showcasing the progress, owner, completion date, and other relevant details. 

Step 3 – Executive Engagement: Finally, we present the planned actions – ongoing and proposed initiatives - to the executives. We update them on the progress made and the status of each project. For areas that are not moving along as expected, we highlight the reasons and ask for their support and sponsorship to move the needle. As a result, we have a list of concrete CX improvement projects that the organization is working on at a given time. We’ve done this exercise twice, bringing to light some significant investment and effort being allocated to key areas of concern within the organization and how customer feedback is being addressed by these improvements. 

A diagram of a pyramid

Description automatically generated

Takeaways 

The VOC forum has had two quarterly meetings so far which have resulted in tracking over 20 initiatives focused on systemic improvements. We gained increased visibility and transparency into strategic challenges being tackled by different parts of the organization to address customer feedback, the impact of changes on KPIs, and opportunities that could lead to increased customer satisfaction and growth. However, there were some other things we observed that we hadn't anticipated. 

Leadership engagement: We hoped from the long list of leaders we’d invited to the first Council, at least a few would attend and help us prioritize the planned improvement projects. We hadn’t expected that most of them would take time out of their hectic schedules and not only just listen but actively participate, debate, discuss, engage, brainstorm, and bounce ideas. It seemed like creating this forum based on the top-of-mind customer issues filled a gap where leaders could review planned actions and provide strategic perspectives on alignment, prioritization, collaboration, and execution. It was enthralling to witness senior executives pulling up their sleeves to identify ways for us to deliver an unparalleled customer experience. In most cases, what was on the roadmap was validated, but in some cases, where we had blind spots due to our position in the organization, the leaders helped us connect the dots. Senior leadership buy-in and engagement are key to ensuring the strategic closed-loop process is successful. Witnessing the level of engagement, we realized we were on the right path.

Cross-functional collaboration: This was undoubtedly a desired outcome of this exercise, and it played out beautifully. We witnessed several examples of team members coming forward and offering to collaborate and align key initiatives with common goals. At times, follow-up discussions were suggested on certain topics, which was exciting to see because it not only increased visibility on critical initiatives but also facilitated breaking silos and provided a platform for teams to come together and understand how they could collaborate effectively. This is the second crucial element of a fully developed strategic closed-loop process - creating an environment where teams are motivated to work together and solve problems for the benefit of customers.

Spotlight: The governance model serves as a catalyst to showcase excellent initiatives in the organization, fostering a culture of recognition and appreciation. The frameworks and governance alone cannot bring about the necessary culture shift. It is team member engagement and empowerment that lead to lasting change. As we embark on this crucial task of bringing multiple teams together to solve customer pain points, it’s imperative to acknowledge the accomplishments and celebrate the wins. When team members understand their role in improving customer satisfaction, it creates a virtuous cycle of addressing the root causes of customer issues, fixing them, ensuring that customers don’t experience the same problems again, and recognizing the teams' contribution to resolving those issues.

 Conclusion

Our relentless pursuit of customer-centricity involves a continuous focus on VOC operations to ensure that both the “tactical” and “strategic” loops are closed. Recognizing that customer feedback presents an opportunity to identify areas of improvement, fuel growth, and achieve excellence is the first step in creating the best-in-class customer experience.