The voice of customer program…your path to good profits and business sustainability
Why I Deleted [name] App – A Loyal Customer’s Breaking Point
Over the past 3 years, [name] has gone from bad to worse. Every week, there’s a new issue. No real customer support—just untrained agents reading scripts. Calls are dropped in your face. No escalation, no accountability—just people saying, “not my problem.”
Orders get stolen. Food arrives open or half-eaten—and no one follows up even after reporting it. Today, I faced a major issue. I tried to reach a trained manager. Turns out, there are none. It’s a broken company—from the most senior leader to the last-mile agent.
Three years ago, I messaged their Managing Director on LinkedIn saying:
You have the worst customer support in the world.” Three years later, I’m still waiting for a reply. Maybe I’ll just send the same message to the next MD when they join.
Today, I deleted the [name] App. Not because of one issue—but because of years of theft, disrespect, and zero care for loyal customers.
If you don’t value your users, don’t be surprised when they turn against you”.
The above is a verbatim post published by a customer on a social media platform. It clearly expresses the “experience outcome”.
Every interaction with a brand generates an experience outcome (XO). XO is the output and results of customer experience, which can be positive or negative. The XO is crucial for the business because of its results and consequences:
It has a direct impact on the financial indicators, mainly the total revenue and profit.
It shapes brand perception. It might lead to a brand position gap (negative sign) or support the brand position (positive sign).
It impacts customer experience metrics (customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer advocacy).
Businesses operate to generate profits, but the profit generated varies based on the experience outcome. In fact, the profits can be segmented into segments:
Good profits
Bad profits
Good profits:
Derived from a positive experience outcome, which leads to generating satisfied, loyal, and most likely advocated customers.
Bringing new customers at zero acquisition cost through recommendations.
Increase the loyalty rate and Customer life-time value (CLV).
All in all, good profits generate revenue in the short-term along with business sustainability and growth in the long-term.
On the other hand, bad profits:
Derived from a negative experience outcome, which leads to generating dissatisfied, disloyal, and non-advocated customers.
Leading to negative brand reputation and perception, and absolutely a brand positioning gap.
Reduce the loyalty rate and the Customer life-time value (CLV).
As a result, bad profits generate revenue in the short-term and a decline in the long-term.
The above social media verbatim post shows a clear example of a negative experience outcome that results in a bad profit. The App lost revenue as the customer became a churned user, and a declining business sign has been observed.
Now, the logical questions are
How to avoid similar incidents to the above App?
How to spot experience violations proactively before losing business?
How to ensure business sustainability and growth?
Here, the voice of customer program comes into the picture.
The voice of customer program is a structured framework that measures, tracks, and acts on customer experience to improve products, services, and overall experience that drives business to revenue sustainability and growth.
Why does the voice of customer program matters?
Qualtrics XM institute study of What happens after a bad experience? indicates that
51% of customers reduce or stop spending after a poor experience with an organization.
Organizations risk losing 7% of their revenue due to poor experiences.
A long-standing study by Deloitte reveals that customer-centric firms are 60% more profitable than their competitors.
These research findings reveal the importance of two key elements: offering a positive customer experience and keeping the customer at the center of business planning and decision-making. Achieving these elements is hard without understanding the customer’s experience with the brand across their journey and what the customer wants and what they get – this is the core job of the voice of customer program.
It acts as a monitoring tool for the experience across the customer journey and brand touch points. This is done by collecting customer feedback and converting it into insights that help businesses understand the experience and make decisions that suit the customers at the right time.
Pillars of voice of customer program
According to the voice of customer program definition, the program construction is shaped around some pillars, which can be summarized as follows:
Fresh experience: VoC focuses on recent and real-time experience, which involves transactional data collection of customer feedback.
Omnichannel measurement: Data collection of the customer feedback done across the brand touch points and customer journey, specifically for the moment of truth (MOTs).
One size does not fit all: The customer experience metrics are defined based on the customer journey and the touch points. Metrics are not fixed across all channels and journeys. VoC program varies across brands.
Combination of metrics: The strong VoC integrates several types of metrics to reach reliable results and conclusion. This to reflect the actual performance, shows a complete story, and achieve solid conclusion.
Data democracy reporting: The reporting of the customer experience metrics should be available at the right time for the right stakeholder. Hence, each stakeholder can track the results according to their job role and functions.
Proactive and timely actions: The effective VoC empowers businesses to identify and report the poor experience on the spot, allowing the brand to close the loop with unhappy or disloyal customers in a timely manner. Closing feedback loop means identifying the poor experience and contacting customer had negative experience in a timely manner to make the necessary service recovery actions before the customer acting negatively (e.g. spreading negative experience, stopping doing business).
Benefits of voice of customer program
Employing voice of customer program leads to several advantages for the business
Business sustainability and growth.
Maintain healthy customer satisfaction, loyalty, and referral rates.
Acquiring new customers with zero acquisition cost.
Optimize the corrective actions plan and budget spending.
Customer-driven prioritization of improvement actions.
Proactive corrective actions for experience violations.
Quality assurance and control enabler.
Maintain a positive brand perception and alignment with positioning strategy.
Key points for success
Be objective oriented: Focus on the actions that improve the experience instead of increasing the perception customer experience metric scores. This drives the employees towards the ultimate goal of offering a memorable experience that generates positive experience outcomes and good profits. Tie the employee key performance indicators to the actions, instead of the score of perception customer experience metrics. Based on the experience, many disadvantages have been observed when employee’s performance is linked to the perception customer experience metrics.
Allocate resources effectively: Assign a key person for closing the feedback loop and avoid loading the person with multiple tasks that prevent them from performing the closing loop with the customer effectively. Another important point is empowerment; the employee involved in this task should be empowered enough with the required privileges and permissions that suit the role. The main objective for this task is to convert unhappy customer to satisfied one and taking the necessary service recovery practices and actions in a timely.
Build customer-centric culture: When the employees believe in the customer focus and centricity culture, they will be familiar with importance of the VoC program and keen to have a positive participation and role in this journey.
Drive the changes with accountability: Assign relevant stakeholders to supervise and implement the VoC outputs and recommendations. The way of doing this varies based on the business and organization size. For example, in big companies it can be a committee chaired by the CEO or C-level management and in another situation it could the channel owner supervised by the general manager. However, the important point is to have accountable employees with the right privileges to supervise and implement the required changes.
In today's interconnected world, experiences are shared quickly and widely. Effective brand management must acknowledge this reality to prevent harm to the brand image and mitigate potential business decline. Implementing a voice of customer program represents a leading practice in this context.
Ahmed is a marketing research analyst focusing primarily on quantitative research. Throughout more than 18 years of experience, he held different roles at research agencies and corporate research departments. His experience extends to several countries, business sectors and research types. While working on the client side, he got an opportunity to be part of the customer experience department to support its mission of offering a memorable experience. He holds Insights Professional Certification (IPC) from the Insights Association, BA in business administration, a diploma in applied statistics in the opinion research major, and advanced analytic techniques badge from University of Georgia. In addition to his practical experience, he designs and delivers training in marketing research topics. Furthermore, he shares his thoughts and professional practices through articles. He is also the winner of the 2023 Insight250 award.
