MarketTools Blog

A Voice of the Customer (VOC) program is obviously critical to running a successful business. We’ve all seen statistics showing how retaining customers through customer loyalty is much more effective than converting new customers. As such, many service companies have methods in place to capture customer feedback  and track customer experiences.

However, as a market research professional, I’d like to point out some key distinctions that can be overlooked when capturing and interpreting customer feedback, because the end users of feedback data might be surprised at the kind of insights they could be missing out on.

About 2 years ago my wife, daughter and I embarked on our first Caribbean cruise on a major cruise line. Perhaps it wasn’t wise to bring a toddler on a cruise, but that’s a whole other discussion. Though the child care center had been touted as top notch, we quickly learned that our daughter was not being properly cared for, and ultimately pulled her out for the remainder of the trip.

The evening before disembarkation, the Cruise Director had all guests complete a paper/pencil survey that rated the cruise on numerous attributes, one of which was the quality of child care. Curiously, he instructed everyone WITHOUT children on board to rate this area a 10 on a 10-point scale. Meanwhile, as one of the few passengers who actually HAD a child, my rating of 1 out of 10 was lost in a “sea” of 10/10 ratings from those for whom the question was not even relevant. There was no “Not Applicable” box or “presence of kids” question enabling the cruise line’s analyst to filter responses among those with kids on board.

My wife and I no longer consider this cruise line when we’re making vacation plans, but their marketing department and executive team do not know why because the survey responses were collected in a completely biased coached manner. They have likely been seeing data for years suggesting their child care quality is impeccable. Instead of devoting more resources or training in this area, they may have even cut back. Scary. We still receive marketing materials from this carrier in the mail, and they go straight into the recycling bin.

I won’t argue that the survey administered by the Cruise Director didn’t have value, but I will argue that it “missed the boat” in terms of delivering the kind of insights that would improve their customer experience. Their existing approach of coaching respondents is likely an appropriate tool to incent front line employees to keep service top of mind, or even influence customer perceptions – just like a car dealer will plead with you to rate your experience on a post-service survey with all 10/10s. However, this type of data should not be confused with unbiased data that management can use to uncover potential issues.

If the cruise line had followed up with me with a request to fill out an online customer feedback survey, it would have been able to collect my unfiltered feedback and potentially uncover the “smoking gun” that prevents customers like me from repeating business with them. Further, an enterprise feedback management solution like MarketTools CustomerSat  would also enable them to more easily collect verbatim comments in addition to responses to survey questions, and analyze those comments using text analysis  – so I could have provided some telling details about their child care issues.

In the end, it’s necessary to construct and run your Voice of the Customer program(s) based on the information you want to collect, while understanding the potential biases. Coached survey administration to monitor front line employee behavior can be very useful, but it will disguise insights that reflect real customer concerns. With careful planning and execution, an effective VOC program can be designed to successfully accomplish both.