Philips voice of the customer specialist says context is crucial

Voice of the customer

Ahead of his session at CXN Live: Voice of the Customer, Jay Callery, D2B voice of the customer (VoC) specialist at leading health technology specialist Philips, reflects on customer experience learnings from his career.

Citing several career experiences, one of the biggest lessons Callery has learned to date is: context is crucial: “If you can maintain an ongoing connection or conversation with your customers, you will realize metrics and scores don’t mean as much." He adds: “At end of the day, the relationship comes down to a context centered approach that entails action. Action beats anxiety from NPS or CSAT because you know you are relevantly engaged with that customer.”

Context is crucial

Callery notes that in alignment with listening to VoC findings, drawing on historical data points, in the form of key customer behaviors, purchase trends, product adoption, complaints data and such, is essential to optimizing organizational design and the development of products and services.

Iterative, evidence based approaches, such as Scrum or Agile Development, have many applications for key value area measurements that can unlock the true context to correctly action the voice of the customer.

For instance, Callery explains, a restaurant may encounter verbatim feedback that sees customers on a certain day state they had an ideal dining experience. If this VoC insight is connected to other critical quality metrics, such as years of experience held by the chef on duty that day, the restaurant can uncover meaningful actionable insights. Callery continues: “This systematic approach makes sure that [brands are taking] action to benefit the customers and drive value.”

He provides the additional example of a customer usage index illustrating a spike in the volume of support line calls. A brand may look at this measurement and notice that customers are using the support line more than usual, explains Callery, but he reminds us that this is may not be because customers enjoy calling more than using other channels. This spike could indicate a malfunction with a particular product line, another channel or a lack of online information about a particular product or service.

It is important to set aside assumptions and complete further insight exploration to see how this spike connects to other key measurements, Callery explains.

“This is where technology like speech analytics is crucial to be efficient at analyzing customer sentiment feedback over the phone, combining human intelligence with a high-tech effort to maximize insights from customer feedback,” advises Callery.

Sign up to the upcoming CXN Live: Voice of the Customer online event to hear more insights from Callery on the topic of measuring the validity of VoC with coverage and response rates at Philips.