This principle is all about establishing ongoing programs that bring the voice of the customer (VOC) into strategic discussions at all Leadership levels. 

Historically, the importance of customer experience has rarely been up for debate. Leadership knows it’s a vital component to your company’s success and growth. However, what usually remains in question is the ‘how’ to get this done. That’s where the voice of the customer (VOC) comes in—and it is arguably the easiest and most effective way to begin tackling this highly nuanced (and critical) aspect of your business.

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Customer Success: Champion the VOC internally

As the primary team that partners directly with customers, Customer Success will ultimately champion the voice of the customer across your organization. However, executive leadership must prioritize giving Customer Success an important seat at the table to amplify their voice  and ensure these insights are used holistically across the business.

To be clear: VOC is not to be leveraged for one and done clean ups—it should be an ongoing motion embedded into your organization’s every day processes. Plus, let’s let one more thing be clear: this should not be an extra lift on the already multi-tasked CS team. This is an exciting opportunity for Customer Success that may require a little more effort from CS leadership in the beginning. But, the Catalyst team is here to kick-start your approach and lighten that initial load. Let’s get started.

Constantly communicate with leadership

As a Customer Success leader, it is critical that you—if you haven’t already—have a weekly cadence of showcasing your wins, at-risk customers, product feedback and expressing any additional support needed from the organization (ex: improved sales positioning, feature prioritization on the roadmap). 

Consistency in your communication to leadership is going to take you a long way on your VOC journey without burning yourself and your team members out. Wondering where to start? Check out our Best Deck for CS Leaders in the Boardroom for guidance on how to gain executive buy-in around prioritizing customer sentiments, gaps and resource needs in leadership meetings and business decisions. From here, implementing the following initiatives will become drastically more attainable.

Share updates to the field as much as possible

Up next, the voice of the customer needs to be widely shared, heard and used across all members of the business. All teams should value learning directly from customers to improve their understanding of the company’s ideal customer profile (ICP) and make better decisions that support new revenue as well as customer retention and growth. And, this surely means going beyond sharing NPS results alone. 

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Below are a few ways CS can drive cross-functional impact through VOC sharing:

• Have a dedicated Slack channel for sharing industry insights, NPS feedback, and wins across CS and Sales to align your organization to real-time customer information. At Catalyst, we call this channel #bringing-cs-to-the-center and every team member is automatically added in on day one.
• Actively bring Product and Engineering onto calls to provide first-hand access into customer goals, needs and plans with your platform.
• Highlight a customer call snippet, email response, online review, NPS feedback, and more on company-wide calls and in Slack.
• Capture feedback through post-implementation surveys to better understand how you can drive faster time to value.
• Work with Product to capture direct feedback on your product launch processes (interviews or surveys, not just adoption metrics) to ensure you’re consistently driving customer adoption and value through new offerings. 
• Conduct churn post-mortems (a.k.a. ‘customer exit interviews’) each time you lose a customer and share those highlights. This should not be done on a subset of customers. The deeper your understanding of churn reasons, the better informed you’ll be to attract and maintain a more diverse set of customers within your market.
• Partner with Sales to build an effective ‘Sales to CS hand-off’ template. Consistently communicate pass-off challenges/wins to Sales for improvement and ensure they have an updated pass-off template that captures the right information.
• Track adoption metrics and gather direct feedback along the customer journey to assess what areas throughout the relationship need optimizing.

The importance of employee feedback in improving the customer experience

Marketing: Tell the customer story

Marketing has a major stake in the business when it comes to truly understanding and sharing the voice of the customer. However, this opportunity has been traditionally viewed as an outbound strategy to reach new audiences and revenue. 

It’s critical that these programs and insights are highly indexed within your strategic decision making. We’ve gathered the primary programs to help remind marketers of the power and influence that they possess in shaping your VOC strategy.

Customer Advisory Boards (CAB)

Naturally, CAB is an important part of VOC programs—make sure these insights don’t live and die with Marketing! Partner directly with Customer Success on findings within specific accounts, share learnings on your ICP to develop its definition, and align with Product on feedback specific to your offerings. Beyond sharing this information to functional leaders, CAB learnings should be frequently reviewed and discussed by executives to enrich their understanding of your customers to make the right decisions.

Case Studies and Stories

Use case studies as both an external campaign story and an internal education tool to understand what customers truly care about when partnering with your team and solution.

Community Building

Create events, programs, forums—whatever is feasible—to bring together customers who can share their platform success stories, learnings, and best practices with each other. Capture this information to inform your strategy and understand your best advocates for further interviews.

Win/Loss Deal Interviews

Meeting with buyers to understand why they did or didn’t buy your solution is another powerful VOC program, especially with respect to your competitive positioning. Up-sell and cross-sell opportunities should also be included to drive more revenue from within. However, win/loss is often a challenge due to time, and we recommend automating the scheduling while ensuring notes can be seamlessly shared in real-time. In Catalyst, you can automate win/loss interview scheduling and publish notes directly to Slack. 

Sales: Embrace customer intelligence 

For Sales, it’s all about prioritizing CS intel in your path to quota. Wondering how you can gain an edge on your competitors? Listen to calls CS has with customers to deeply understand their needs, challenges and plans, including how your product actually delivers on this in reality.

Joint Sales and CS enablement

A great way to embed more VOC initiates with Sales is through combined Sales and CS enablements. We are not saying joint enablements every time—but having a cadence of bringing Sales and CS together around key customer insights and learnings from the field will certainly support their understanding of your customers.

Learn the CS experience

All sellers should listen to customer calls from time to time, especially customer onboarding sessions, to inform their own sales pitch and improve pass-offs for better adoption, retention and growth.

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Product: Prioritize VOC across all decisions

Directly Partner with Customer Success

Customer Success is a crucial partner in shaping key Product decisions such as prioritizing features on the roadmap, UX/UI design updates, data storage, integrations, and more. Product should meet regularly with CS (quarterly at minimum) to gather product-related feedback from customers. Plus, there should be ongoing workflows to escalate feedback in real-time, such as having Catalyst integrated to a product-owned Slack channel.

Understanding Buyer Behavior

At the very least, companies should be analyzing a representative set of won and lost opportunities, and categorizing trends or drivers for each category. Though this is typically performed by Product Marketing—Product and CS should periodically meet to analyze and discuss these trends at the beginning of each planning cycle to increase customer value through your platform and partnership. 

The widespread revenue impact of VOC

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Be the ambassadors of customer advocacy

All of the above translates into building differentiated customer experiences that exceed expectations and firmly cement customer loyalty. When the voice of the customer is widely shared and valued, making the right product decisions, new business targeting, customer community building, and more—will all come naturally across your organization.

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