That's why Temkin Group has shared these recommendations for building a strong VoC program -- so that companies not only understand the value of asking for feedback, but also understand the value of using it.

To learn more, read our advice about what to do when you first receive customer feedback next. Originally published Aug 3, AM, updated June 15 Subscribe to Our Blog Stay up to date with the latest marketing, sales, and service tips and news.

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To keep up with customer expectations, brands are increasingly investing in Voice of the Customer VoC programs that employ a closed-loop process. Ask any CX, research, or marketing executive, and they will tell you that gone are the days when the customer marketing landscape was represented by a one-way dialogue for engaging prospects.

Today, market leaders are shifting their listening and response mechanisms faster as VoC programs represent a huge opportunity for driving loyalty and increased sales. Discover how to gain a return on your investment in customer experience initiatives. It focuses on customer needs, expectations, understandings, and product improvement. VoC programs have gained traction over the years and are fast-growing segments of a core business strategy for organizations.

Customer perceived quality and above-average customer service have been proven time and again to be leading drivers of business success. When your customers share their voice in real-time with your organization, they expect you to listen, act and report back to them on progress. To win the war on customer loyalty you must have a single line of sight into your customer, market, and employee groups.

Zappos is known for having exceptional customer service and they measure it by asking how the interaction with the employee made the customer feel. Zappos wants to know how the brand and customer experience emotionally resonates with customers. Additionally, the company empowers their customer service representatives.

For instance, when one customer called to return shoes after her mother had fallen ill, the employee on the phone sent her flowers. The woman was shocked that Zappos actually cared about her personal life. Too often people rush into building a program without aligning all the necessary factors to move forward with creating a customer-centric organization. By focusing on the following six factors, you can successfully establish organization-wide customer centricity.

Establishing a customer-centric culture starts at the very top. Without executive-level buy-in there is a low probability of creating maximum impact for any customer-centric initiative.

Leaders set the tone for their teams, so if a leader decides that the customer is important, their direct reports will follow suit. Your vision for VoC needs to be specific so that everyone within the organization can easily understand the common goal. We recommend a short and simple vision statement to help you increase understanding and buy-in from leadership.

An engaged workforce is vital for the long-term success of a customer-centric company. Can you start a VoC program without a customer journey map? Yes, but it will be a lot better with one. There is no perfect formula for what to measure in a VoC program. There are key ingredients to consider when gathering both structured and unstructured customer feedback on an ongoing basis.

And a bonus is that customers want you to ask them for feedback. Consistency: Measuring anything consistently is better than no measurements at all.

Combined viewpoints: Customers are complex and nuanced, just like each of us is. This wonderful combination is what helps us really hear the Voice in Voice of the Customer. Storytelling: Your VoC program should tell the story of your customer. And guess what? Use what they tell you to share their story to the leaders who matter. Employees should start asking, what can we do to improve these results tomorrow?

How can we engage with our customers more? A great VoC program includes a combination of structured and unstructured customer feedback. Your organization may select a metric to use that helps capture how customers are feeling about working with you.

Surveys may be collected in several ways, and they may measure different things. There is a place for a regular, relationship-based survey, as well as transaction-specific surveys, based on your organization and industry. This question leads to a scale of 1 through 10, with 10 being definitely will recommend or something of the sort. Those who rank the likelihood of recommending to others as 0—6 are considered Detractors.

Those who select their likelihood of recommending as 7—8 are considered Passives. And those who select 9 or 10 are categorized as Promoters. This number a percentage is what you track as your overall NPS. Measuring CSAT can be used to determine how a customer feels about the experience overall, parts of the customer journey, or even specific products or services. The question is typically presented to the customer using a 1—5 scale, with 1 being very dissatisfied and 5 being very satisfied.

You can determine that approach with a formula to see the percentage of customers who selected very satisfied or somewhat satisfied against the whole of your customers surveyed. Multiply by to see the percentage of satisfied customers. How much effort did it take for your customer to work with you?

If a customer feels he had to put in a lot of effort, he will most likely be more negative about the experience.

CES can be used as a survey to discover how specific parts of the customer journey are handled. Use the total sum of responses, then divide by the total number of survey respondents. Some organizations will want to include just one of these metrics, while others will have a combination of relationship-based and transactional results. To launch a VoC program, consider what you will consistently gather and act on. Focus groups are also something to consider.

In a focus group, you select a number of customers to meet in a room, where they are asked a series of questions by a trained moderator. Questions are meant for data collection, focusing on perceptions, beliefs, and other opinions regarding your product or service.

You need to also create listening paths that tap into unstructured feedback. Where do your customers talk about you? What do they really want to tell you? Within that open-text field, customers give you amazing gifts. But there are other places where your customers provide unstructured feedback that you need to leverage.

Your customers are talking about you on social media, in user groups, and at events. Your salespeople and customer service agents are talking to customers every day. Is there a place to gather that feedback in a centralized location? Encourage your employees to capture what customers are saying. If you are just setting up a VoC program, another powerful tool is often overlooked: conversation. Pick up the phone and call your customers. Listen for tone and implied disappointments so you can set up your key listening posts around moments that matter to them.

Operational data like First Call Resolution FCR in your contact centers and customer churn and retention rates help you understand the big picture results in your VoC strategy.

Including customer behavioral analytics like service call frequency, purchase data, and last payment helps us see how to connect the dots between what they tell us and how they actually behave. The leaders in VoC have a few things in common. There is a centralized hub of information, typically a dashboard, that employees throughout the company can review and share. Dashboards include the metrics gathered along with graphs, charts or other tools to tell the story over time. Dashboards should answer the question: How are we doing today compared to yesterday?

Engage your employees to understand why numbers moved up or down and not just reporting they did. Voice of the Customer results should lead to innovation around customer experience. Based on the feedback gathered and data shared, every employee has a chance to submit ideas.

Highlight a handful of customer quotes from survey open-text field verbatims. Use a rotation of good and not-so-good to show what drives these reactions. Recognize and reward those employees who did something worth noting by name!