Retail TouchPoints: Keeping Your Ear Tuned to the Voice of the Customer
Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of a current article from the Retail TouchPoints website, presented here for discussion.
Despite the hypercompetitive marketplace in retail and the presence of more analytical tools than ever before, there are very few radical changes in the retail business - but I've seen one lately. In fact, one of the truly game-changing developments in retailing comes in changes in the voice of the customer (VOC).
The VOC comes over the phone, internet and on the sales floor. Those are obvious places, but when you look a little deeper, retailers need to be aware of what the voice of the customer sounds like on the rest of the planet. How to do that? Here's how I recommend keeping your ear to the ground:
Spend a Day in the Contact Center: Jeff Bezos at Amazon still does it once a quarter. It is a fairly obvious place to listen to customer complaints, but the VOC at the contact center can speak to pricing, operations, channel partners, inventory, and marketing activities. The VOC that tells a company that there's a new product line out there that might be hot is a much more valuable message in the long-term than the first-call resolution of a complaint.
Read Your Reviews: Some of these companies have been around for a while such as PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice. Go to the sites that allow customers to influence each other. Retailers might find out that safety issues are more important than pricing for toys and kids' furniture. You might find out that return policies are also critical. You might learn that some major brands you partner with aren't listening to the VOC.
Get Your Head Out of Wall Street: The VOC is not the VOS (Voice of the Shareholder) or the VOA (Voice of the Analyst). If you neglect employee training or cut costs on inventory management systems, the voice of the customers will reflect that negatively. But the analyst that looks only at numbers will applaud. I would argue that because it has so many platforms, the voice of the customer is a more important one than Wall Street could ever be.
Change Competitive Shopping: It's a multichannel world. Shop a competitor online and offline. Call their contact center. Talk to a competitor's employee. See what they look like on Facebook (you'll find 1-800-Flowers there). See what they look like on email. In fact, I think it's a good exercise to shop retailers outside of your business.
Identify the Influencers: Social media has elevated a few customers to the point where their value is higher because their opinion is influential. I'm not talking about Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal here. Some retail customers are more active on blogs, message boards, and review sites than others. Retailers need to know who these people are and how to make them happy. In this case, the VOC can be louder for some.
Current retail touchpoint structure allows for more places to hear the VOC. Bottom line: work hard to hear it and hear it often. Don't confuse quarterly numbers, regardless of their ups and downs, to be the VOC.
Discussion Questions: What do you think are the best ways to hear the voice of the customer (VOC)? Which of the recommendations in the article do you find to be the most promising for retail management looking to understand the VOC?