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Why it’s time to look beyond Voice of the Customer

 

Why it’s time to look beyond Voice of the CustomerOrganizations have reaped enormous benefits since outsourcing became common. As businesses ‘followed the sun,’ business geographies consolidated and distribution places became obsolete by ‘Right-Shoring,’ ‘Near-Shoring,’ and ‘Off-Shoring,’ and time zones became synonymous with 24/7/365.

Along with the massive shifts in business models, there was a steady maturation in consumers’ attitudes toward service providers across industries. ‘Options’ evolved into ‘Imperatives’ as the maturity curve progressed. For example, Value Creation as a term has evolved from a ‘Option’ to a ‘Imperative’ for customers. To elaborate further, with today’s fierce market competition, consistently fulfilling consumer expectations and going above and beyond contractual commitments has become a necessity rather than a choice. The Kano model has also shown empirically that today’s “Delighters” are tomorrow’s “Basic needs.”

The issue is whether companies have sufficient resources and strategies to anticipate, plan for, and handle the journey of consumer demands as they move from optional to mandatory. Traditional customer satisfaction/experience control techniques include surveys, group meetings, contract review discussions, Net Promoter Scores, and so on.

Also prior to the outsourcing period, these were in use. Customer feedback is sought at different frequencies and levels by businesses. Sweden, for example, was the first nation to use Customer Satisfaction as a key economic variable in 1989. There is also the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which is a benchmark for measuring customer satisfaction in the United States (ACSI). Customer satisfaction metrics are measured at four levels by ACSI: national, sector, industry, and company agency.

The growing digitalisation of public life is resulting in a steady flow of business process information between government agencies and private businesses. Consider the case of private-sector consumer concentration. This is guiding the process of shaping the goals of government agencies as they become more customer-centric; that is, when citizens become the consumer.

Customers have come to expect certain standard of service from their private counterparts, and there is recognition that government agencies must reorient their personnel and processes to be more customer-centric. However, the problem with these customer experience management measurements and tools is that they seem to have a ‘Rear View’ viewpoint rather than taking a ‘Windshield’ approach?  The organization’s ability to be ahead of the curve on the ‘Option’ to ‘Imperative’ cycle is limited by the ‘Rear View’ perception.

The conditions and circumstances in which current customer satisfaction methodologies were developed were essentially unchanged, and organisational development was linear. The focus is on obtaining customer experience information in a particular sense, such as a service or a product that has already been delivered at a certain point in time. Despite the fact that the majority of customer satisfaction surveys ask, “What else can be done to increase the quality of our product/service?” Customers usually answer with diluted excitement to those questions.

There is a customer category called “Passive” that has already been discovered and specified by the NPS theory, and this category is empirical in nature. As a result, it appears that consumer satisfaction surveys and other conventional forms of feedback are failing to ignite creativity in the development of customer demand. However, the most successful companies in recent years have successfully transitioned from Customer Satisfaction Measurement to Consumer Preference Development.

To understand the shape and forms of the emerging markets, research expenditures must be increased. For example, developing new alternatives to hydrocarbon fuels to reduce vehicle operating costs while also reducing the negative effects on the environment. Furthermore, there appears to be a strong market for cars with a smaller carbon footprint, but this demand is currently unmet by current models owing to inherent constraints.

The time has come to create a body of information, a science, to aid organisations in predicting changes in social and economic equations and, as a result, potential demands/expectations of the changing consumer – whether an enterprise or a single customer. The ability to systematically map out the course and form of potential customer evolution will distinguish the organisations that actually excel and sustain from those that might be relegated to the position of an ‘Also Ran’.

See full story on processexcellencenetwork.com

March 28, 2013   Benchmark Six Sigma
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