In the 80’s/90’s, one of the most important initiatives organizations had was something called, “Voice Of The Customer.” These initiatives were very powerful and impacted the whole organization. It was a very powerful discovery methodology to unlock customer insight, opinions, views. VOC, as it was known at the time, impacted everyone in the organization. Gaining deep understanding of the VOC and their experience with our offering, shaped our GTM and customer service/experience strategies. They shaped our product development strategies. They shaped our business strategies.
They helped us understand a number of things. How our customers actually used our products. I remember dispatching teams of people to various customers to sit beside them and watch them work, watch how they incorporated our products in their work. Were they using them as we intended, were they struggling, what did they think of the products, how could they be improved? And in observing how they worked we saw new things our products might do to extend their value to the customer. We discovered associated problems, challenges we might address. We understood how they felt about not only using our products, but how they worked.
These exercises weren’t really about which functions they used in the products, the keystrokes they made, how often they used the products, where they struggled. It was discovering how they worked and how they felt about their work. These were things we could never have learned by analyzing their logons, which functions, they used, looking at customer service calls/trouble reports (which we also did (at this time, we had a SaaS product, before anyone invented the term. It was just software we sold.)
There were other aspects of VOC that were as important, and often very uncomfortable. We would invite groups of customers to come visit us. To sit in a conference room talking about their experiences with our offerings. There were no sales pitches, no presentations about how wonderful we were, no decks about the upcoming release and it’s great capabilities.
The focus was on hearing them. Learning from them.
Usually, we’d have some sort of agenda, areas we wanted to focus the discussion on. Maybe their experience, what they liked, what they didn’t like. Maybe certain features/capabilities, could we improve? What was missing? What were we missing about what they did? These sessions were always lively, we never had to nudge them to talk. We’d toss an issue out, someone would start, another would jump in, then another……
They were often uncomfortable. But they were important. And they were important to the customers, their focus wasn’t on telling us how great we were, or how bad we were. They participated because we were important to them and they wanted us to learn more from their experience and how we could be better and do more. And they built relationships. Not just with the people that were in the room, but the people they talked to when they returned to their companies and offices. And when they talked to others at conferences.
I remember being at a conference, and a customer came up to me, towing a few people behind her. She said, “Dave, there was an important discussion at that last VOC meeting. I’ve been telling these guys about it, can you talk to us?”
VOC was about deep learning. It was about connecting with and understanding the customer through their eyes, experience and needs. There were no metrics around VOC. Rather VOC was a process of learning, discovery, engagement, design, understanding, and empathy. VOC was not intended to validate our roadmap or what we were doing, but to challenge it, to help us improve, to get better and to help our customers improve and get better.
Somewhere along the way, the concept of VOC was hijacked. It’s original purpose morphed into something different, something more efficient. We thought, we don’t have to see the customer or actually engage them. We can just survey them and analyze the data. We created customer satisfaction surveys, dozens of questions rating things from, “this sucks” to “this is wonderful!” We started looking at NPS scores, CSAT, and other metrics.
Rather than asking the question, “What did we learn,” our focus was “What was our score?”
Soon the objective was all about the metric. “How do we create a higher NPS score?” “How do we create better CSAT scores?” And those metrics became part of our GTM campaigns, “We have higher NPS than anyone else…. Compare our CSAT to the competitors!”
Our dashboards tracked these numbers, we focused on the numbers, failing to understand drove the numbers, and what we could learn?” We let these metrics masquerade as meaning, and have lost all meaning.
Then these metrics became a contest. After each interaction, we sent a customer satisfaction survey, “Did you like this phone call with customer service, would you give it 5 stars?” “Do you like our products, can you write a review?”
And they have morphed into, “Please give us 5 stars on Google/Amazon/Yelp!” “Can you please give us a testimonial or quote?”
After every engagement, interaction, we are pummeled, within minutes, for our positive reviews. And when I respond with a negative comment or review and say, “Yes, I’d be glad to take a call to discuss my feedback,” the phone never rings.
And those moments where we feign concern around customer experience, it’s not focused on learning, growing, it’s focused on getting renewals or the next contract. We focus on how we “game the numbers.” And now, as users, the numbers have lost all meaning, “Are they real, how many reviews have the purchased, how many are AI generated?”
The Voice Of The Customer hasn’t disappeared, we have just stopped listening.
This post is not just about VOC. It’s about virtually every foundational concept in business. It has been best expressed by my friend, Glen Drummond:
“Meaning drifts. Every decade or so, business terminology needs to be replaced because the insight created by a new term becomes truncated, then corrupted, then substituted by the term. Consider when ‘voice of the customer’ becomes reduced to ‘things customers say about how much they like us’ – you are well down that slippery slope.”
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post. It’s actually quite good, they dive into the issues, offering interesting perspectives in the discussion. Enjoy!
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