Choosing the right Voice of Customer supplier

XMcentric
Customer Experience management is now well embedded in most industries and there are of course direct correlations between customer satisfaction and increased business and colleague engagement.

Listening is the key to the core of customer experience management and vitally important to have the right mechanisms in place to listen effectively. 

When choosing a voice of the customer supplier, what should you be looking for?

The first point to understand is your challenge statement, is there a primary challenge you want to address or are your requirements more general, this will define any specific competencies you need from your VoC supplier.

When selecting a supplier, consider the following questions...

Capability  

  • Are they more Analytical or more functional? 
  • Have they delivered this kind of programme with other organisations in similar to your own sector? 

 Service Delivery 

  • Are they focused on “do it yourself” or “Supplier managed”? 
  • Can you buy a technology platform and manage it yourself or do you need the supplier to do it for you? 

 Focus Model 

  • Are they tech based or a consultancy service? 
  • You might need more of one and less of another, so think about this and only pay for what you need.   

 Approach 

  • Does the suppliers approach fit with your established way of working? 
  • Can they demonstrate that they understand your business and the challenges you face? 

 Technology Platform 

  • Are they building bespoke systems for every client? Do you really need bespoke or will a proven off the shelf system work better? 
  • Are you happy for everything to be supplier side and cloud based or would your IT team prefer to bring the capability in house and host on your own servers? 

 Specialism 

  • Is the supplier universal or do they specialise? 
Further consideration should be towards Social Media, you need to be where your audience is!
No one should be ignoring social media and if your audience is using particular platforms then the Social listening component of your programme should target those platforms.

Finally, when you have selected your supplier, really think about the questions you ask in your survey.  Are the answers going to be actionable?  Can you do something with the data you receive?  Go for honest feedback, there is no benefit is gaining data that tells you you’re great! (apart from having confirmation of the fact if you are), but every organisation can improve.

About the author
James Scutt | JamesScutt.com
James is an eminent Customer Experience XM leader and strategist with a unique value proposition spanning sales, operations, technology, culture change and the hospitality industry. A Non-executive Director and keynote speaker, James is the founder of CustomerXM.org & CXaccredited.com


Tags