Voice of Customer - how to make your B2B customers visible

There are many good reasons for carrying out a customer survey, be it simply a requirement of an upcoming certification like ISO 9001 or a genuine interest in knowledge about your customers and markets.

• Many of our customers implement VoC as a base information source for strategic insights, e.g. regularly for their next 3-year strategy planning period, or one-off for a strategic repositioning, e.g. in the face of difficult or competitive markets or precarious external situation.
• Several of our clients implemented VoC as a distinctive steering tool with regular update, to foster a continuous operative improvement cycle in their organization and to measure and adjust customer centricity as a main pilar of their strategic foundation.
• A further typical use case lies within the M&A spectrum, either at an early stage to gain a well-founded MDD target assessment, or at a later stage to prevent difficulties and pave the way for a newly integrated organization.

VoC approach and process

The basic concept of VoC surveys aims at one common idea: gathering direct insights from a representative sample of customers in a standardized fashion – ideally un-biased, honest and balanced for various factors determining the customer base’s structure. Ideally, VoC is not a one-way street but follows a continuous circle, designed to derive change and improvement activities, e.g. in a PDCA circle (plan, do, check, act).

Implementation modes are manyfold – a tailored approach allows to closely match a client’s core interests and to get to the essential business factors that really matter to a company’s customer relationships. This goes all the way through content and methodological considerations, also including data collection: depending on the required breadth and complexity of the relevant customer base and the targeted depth of insights, different survey types should be considered, including online surveys, telephone and hybrid interviews, as well as face-to-face and focus group discussions. Each one comes with its specific pros and cons in terms of scope, depth and quality of information, sample control and budget.

Finally, you need to close the loop to unearth the treasure and really derive the long-term benefit from it. Survey and analysis are only the first step to initiate improvement activities and to trigger progress. And with that step completed, the circle starts all over again: quick checks and full updates will help you validate, if you have taken the right measures to overcome gaps and unmet needs, and it keeps you aware of ever-changing customer expectations and business requirements – so keep pace with your customers.

VoC method and contents

Looking at the actual content of the survey, the core component is the evaluation section. Customers rate the key performance aspects and touch points at products, services and processes that characterize the client’s business model. The confirmation-disconfirmation rating approach is an established way to objectively capture the ratings:

• participants rate in how far their supplier’s performance meets, exceeds or falls short of their expectations.

Several extensions help to enrich the data with relevance for action:

• importance weightings indicate the immediate relevance of performance aspects,
• competitor ratings put the results into perspective of competitive advantages and disadvantages,
• time comparisons reflect the direction of development,
• and qualitative reasonings in open comments help to understand root-causes at critically rated aspects, to derive customer-oriented improvement measures and to find opportunities for differentiation.

Thus, there is a wealth of extensions that help making sense of the data.

And still, there is so much more what you can do to achieve benefits from customer surveys: additional sections on strategic topics can e.g. include questions on share-of-wallet, net promoter score, price sensitivity meter and value selling, trends and developments in market, technology or regulatory aspects, unique selling proposition and key buying criteria, customer journey and interaction, just to name a few. So, pick your favorites and choose wisely – it might open up your next business opportunity.

VoC results and insights

To conclude our brief tour through VoC analyses, let us have a brief look at the outcomes and insights you can expect. VoC analyses excel in covering a wide range of content applications and any granularity of the insight levels required. From the strategic, bird’s eyes perspective with global KPIs and general drivers to the operative, frog’s perspective of individual customer details, everything is possible.

Indicators can be drilled down from top-level to criteria level to nested subgroup level. Portfolios and comparative tables provide a better understanding of the dynamics in the customer structure and help make use of it in terms of strategy and best practices. Quantitative and qualitative insights complement each other to get a more complete, holistic view of conditions and requirements.

Your gain

In summary, VoC analyses provide an effective means to fuel your strategy in sales and customer excellence, global footprint and positioning, operative performance, value selling, innovation and competitive intelligence – all closely tailored to your core interests.

Your appetite whetted? Please consider our upcoming webinar on ‘Winning with Voice of Customer’, to be announced soon.

Interested in further individual information or a concrete proposal for your survey?

Please contact:

Dr. Helmut Weldle
Phone number +49 6201 9915 52
Helmut.Weldle@schlegelundpartner.de

© Schlegel und Partner 2024