Understanding your business customer has never been easy. But then it doesn’t have to be as complicated as we sometimes make it. The key deliverable from a Voice Of Customer (VOC) process is an understanding of how a customer is going to make a business decision for your products and services. Here are three keys to help validate what your customer values most:
Have a guided conversation: You must lead the discussion in order to probe deeply into their purchasing decision. Move them quickly into conversation about how much they like or dislike a critical aspect of their business. This is not the time for ‘tell me about your day’ interviewing...that comes prior to a validation event. And customers generally love to talk about their company, so focus the conversation around them.
Validate your hypotheses with a small team of your customer associates: Interviewing for initial VOC is fine for one on one discussions. However, when you are validating what you’ve heard, you should include multiple associates of your customer in the discussion...together at the same time! This tends to moderate the dominant personality and the ‘I’m having a bad day’ individuals, both of which can lead you astray from what your customer (the company) really believes.
Feed your analysis back to them immediately: Echo back what you just heard during the event so that your customer’s team can validate the priority of their value drivers. This provides your customer with a ranked visual of their decision making priorities.
Once validated, you can use this information to...
lead your development teams to create higher value products and services
drive your marketing/communications team to focus on topics your customers value
coach your sales team on having high value conversations with the customer
Pareto Insight delivers on these key elements by focusing the conversation on Customer Value Driver (CVD) statements with a team of 3-5 participants from your customer. After discussing the importance to the business and how satisfied they are with their present solution, a 3D visual pareto of their ratings is immediately shown for them to validate. It’s a customer discovery process that actually provides value to your customers...so much better than Starbucks gift cards!