Page 37 - Warwickers Customers Count vflip2

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE VOC Voice of the customer programmes where customers co create the experience Savvy organisations realise the value strong customer experiences bring. What better way to design an optimal customer experience, than having your own customers contribute to its design? This reduces the level of optimisation and tweaking of the experience organisations would have to do later on. Most of the leading customer experience organisations embrace this method today, and as other companies become more mature, look for this trend to increase. 37 CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER Emotions account for over 50% of an experience, as Colin Shaw points out in The DNA of Customer Experience. Because a customer experience is inherently emotional, qualitative data is the best way to capture and understand it. This has led to increasing adoption in Voice of the Customer (VOC) programmes, which aim to capture customer expectations, preferences, and satisfaction. Bruce Temkin describes VOC as “A systematic approach for incorporating the needs of customers into the design of customer experiences.” there are many possible ways to gather the information – focus groups, individual interviews, contextual inquiry, ethnographic techniques, etc. But all involve a series of structured in-depth interviews, which focus on the customers’ experiences with current products or alternatives within the category under consideration. Successful voice of the customer programmes provide organisations with the feedback they require to continually develop a better customer experience. Think of them as the data that drives the customer experience modelling process. The necessity of optimising the customer experience is leading to more of these programs being adopted and embraced. The important thing to recognise is they are one tool of many and they need to be considered in this light. Leading organisations bring their customer understanding tools together.