Best Practices

Creating a multi-country Voice of the Customer (VOC) program isn’t as simple as duplicating the same program activities in different countries.  The program complexity can increase proportionally to the number of countries involved.

While designing just about any voice of the customer survey, many debate the right placement of their key customer satisfaction questions such as “Overall Satisfaction with the Company” (or OSAT) and “Willingness to Recommend”.  Some place these key questions at the beginning of their customer feedback surveys, while others lean towards placing these types of questions at the end. 

Often when we’re working on global customer satisfaction surveys, we come across a common concern from business leaders outside of North America.  These leaders tell us they have seen their customer satisfaction scores compare unfavorably to scores from North America, even as they do all the right things to build up customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

As new clients begin their Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs, the question they inevitably raise is “What Key Metric should we track?” Many Customer Experience Managers have lost countless hours of sleep over this one. Will it be some kind of “overall satisfaction” score? A score for likelihood to continue to do business or expand their business? Or a fancy weighted index score combining the results from multiple questions? There are many different VOC metrics that a company could track, but what works and makes sense for one organization does not necessarily make sense for another. So don’t feel compelled to copy the metric that someone else is using.

These days, it’s hard to find companies that are NOT performing some sort of customer satisfaction survey. Whether you’re purchasing a big ticket item such as an airline flight, picking up something at a drug store, or calling into a help desk for technical support – it seems every company you deal with wants to know “how was your experience?” And that’s a great thing…if anything is actually done with the results.

Think of all the surveys you’ve taken in your life. As you hit the submit button or hung up the phone, did you ever expect to get something in return (aside from that minor incentive you come across from time to time)? The model below illustrates that your feedback rarely comes full circle: