In our latest survey on the state of the art of VoC programs, 71 percent of respondents said their VoC program was not fully or mostly effective in driving actions. That's jarring. No matter how much effort you put into collecting VoC, the insights are still only as good as what stakeholders in the company do with them.

As a VoC program owner, you therefore need to get better at leveraging your internal customers so they drive the action required to improve customer experience and your bottom line. This is what my new report "How To Drive Action In VoC Programs" is all about.

First, you have to figure out your internal audiences. Some are more in tune to the VoC than others. Your audience often falls into three categories:

  • Unengaged: Those employees don't know that there is a VoC team or why they should pay attention to what that team is doing.
  • Unfocused: These are employees who are actually interested in what you have to say. But that's as far as it goes because they really don't know how to prioritize issues, identify root causes, or systematically make improvements.
  • Underutilized: They should be your best friends since they are already avid users of VoC insights. However, they are also very demanding because they want to get faster and smarter about taking their customers' experience to the next level.

Then, you need an engagement strategy for all important stakeholders depending on what kind of audience the stakeholders represent:

  • Motivate unengaged employees with logic and emotion. How? Establish an emotional connection between unengaged stakeholders and customers and establish your own credibility with this skeptical group. Also, prove that VoC matters to business results. Beyond The Arc for example helped a client in the financial industry to size the impact of an issue on the broader customer base in a new and more robust way.
  • Provide guidance for unfocused employees. Help them understand the broader customer context, involve them in finding solutions to customer problems, and deliver insights when employees need them–not just on a predetermined reporting calendar. For example GE Healthcare analyzed carefully how the engineers made their decisions and adapted the way they share VoC insights.
  • Empower the underutilized with advanced tools. Spur more far-reaching action by helping these stakeholders to prevent customer issues and design better customer experiences and to find new opportunities to grow the business. For example the team at AT&T mobility currently tracks 160 projects like the releases of new products and devices throughout their development process and post-launch on a number of success metrics. The team reports this information back to the product managers who use it to take corrective action and to continuously refine their on-going development processes.

Read more about the examples above and what else companies did to engage stakeholders in my report How To Drive Action In Your VoC Program.