It has been some time since I participated in a speaking engagement (Adobe Summit, 2014?!?), but this past week I was invited to join CX leaders from Cisco & Wild Alaskan to speak about the Voice of Customer Chain of Custody. I know it’s hard to carve out time during the day, so I decided to post my responses from the session for all to see.
The session was hosted by Frame.ai, and I was joined by Rossana Parrotta and Zach Bouzan-Kaloustian. The session focused on the following areas…
- How different functions in any business can share ownership of the customer voice
- Ways to leverage key listening posts to support different vantage points
- Using the customer voice to inform critical decision
Big thanks to Mary Cleary for the invitation and for being such a wonderful professional colleague over the past few years.
I started my role as a Senior CX Specialist within the FinTech group at Intuit in September 2019. I truly believe that every role I’ve had before this one has led me to working in Customer Experience. This is a big turning point in my career, not just speaking again, but being the advocate for customers, and living the Intuit mission to Power Prosperity Around the World.
Please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn if you’d like to continue to discussion or have any questions for me. Enjoy!
The Customer Voice Chain of Custody Panel
What’s your role in your company’s customer relationships?
I help thousands of small businesses that use QuickBooks Payments make the most of their experience using QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Point of Sale, and our mobile payments solution, GoPayment.
What metrics are you accountable for?
Support metrics include contact volume by channel & driver, escalation & resolution rates, and average handle time. Being in payments we are also mindful of new signups, transaction volume, and volume of funds that are processed.
Which cross-functional teams do you partner with?
I partner closely with our on & off shore tier 1, 2, and 3 support teams, in addition to Product & Engineering, Design, Analytics, Social & Community, Content, and Marketing teams.
You’ve invested in detailed documentation to help your customers easily find the information they need, but you’re still seeing high Support inbound volume for issues that have highly trafficked documentation pages. How do you evaluate whether an issue needs better documentation, is a better candidate for live support, or if there’s something more fundamental about the functionality that needs to be addressed?
Before getting into the minutiae of how detailed content can be written, I’d start with understanding why customers are looking for this help in the first place. Is the user trying to better understand something they haven’t tried before? Or did the customer have an unintended outcome after attempting to complete a task?
We can talk about what we think customers are thinking all day long, but interviewing customers has been the best way to learn more about their preferences, be it through written articles, videos, or live 1:1 help in the product. Having a close partnership with my Care teams helps me collect feedback from the field en masse, and provides me with a chance to include questions that our agents can ask when providing support. For example, understanding how successful customers are when searching for self help content helps us prioritize in-product, online, community, and search engine initiatives.
Additionally, we have to be mindful of where the customer is in terms of their experience with our products, and their role within their organization. We may have experienced bookkeepers calling in for help with a new feature or a florist that is in their 3rd month of business that needs help reconciling their books for the first time. Each of these customers will have different needs and serving them with an experience that fits their expectation is truly one of my favorite challenges.
Your vantage point is per-product. Tell us about the data sources you look at, and how they relate to one another. How do you package your findings so that you can share them efficiently with peer teams?
I’m very fortunate to have visibility from multiple angles, everything from free form text in feedback surveys, searchable call recordings with transcriptions, and in-product analytics. I spend more time than I probably should in my text feedback, even with text analytics tools I learn a lot when reading through the feedback, and then pairing that with in product & payments activity to better understand the context for the feedback. Having to gather and present insights has been part of my career since I was an analyst at Experian in 2008, and the quickest way to a high five at the end of a presentation is to understand what will remove the greatest amount of friction from our customers’ experience. For example, quantifying the rise in contact volume over a period of time, paired with call recordings, and a view of attrition (directly or indirectly) due to the driver is a great way to motivate teams to act.
Tell us something that you brought to the attention of Product that made your customers more successful.
Revising a feedback survey to be more specific & give examples of what good feedback looks like lead to over 80% of feedback being categorized correctly compared to the original survey, and eliminating ALL requests for support through the feedback channel.
This was achieved by including help resources such as chat, and a new information hub that consolidated commonly related articles that anticipated our customer’s journey within our product at the very beginning of the survey.
This update helped us learn more about the shared issues across different customers and aided in prioritization with our product & engineering teams.
No organization can or should react to all customer feedback, so how do you cut through the noise and prioritize what’s most important? Tell us how you advance a hunch to a hypothesis to a validated recommendation?
Like I mentioned before, I probably spend too much time reading feedback, but I typically start with data cleansing, weeding out no feedback/venting feedback out first, then clustering into major categories such as people, process, or policy.
I have be mindful that this feedback does not live in a vacuum and our customers may be experiencing issues as a function of another product or external factor, so partnering with my customer experience team is important in connecting the dots. This actually helps when forming a hypotheses of what’s really going on with our customers, and what help really looks like. Performing an experience review, where I’d attempt the user journey myself, is something I’ve been able to do with great success as I don’t come from an accounting or payments background and view our products closer to how a new customer might look at it.
Underpinning all of this is data, be it customer tenure, count, charge volume, etc. It goes without saying, getting the feedback from customers about the change and whether or not it will be as successful in alleviating pain as we think it will is necessary in moving forward.
Do you get data requests from Product / Success that are geared towards expansion / upselling?
Yes, it’s in my nature to help both our customers graduate to the next level of their business and our product teams to better enable & empower our customers. Data is the currency here, so bringing a compelling story to the real impact to our existing customers’ business in addition to how we are perceived among our competitors to our prospects is very important.
Who owns renewals and expansion at Intuit? How has your background in Sales and as an analyst helped shape your partnership with these stakeholders?
While I’m not as close to sales as I’ve been in the past, there are opportunities for many, including those in Support, to help new customers sign up and existing customers expand their relationship with us. I’m a big fan of Strategic Selling and understanding the customer, whether they are the user, technical, or economic buyer goes a long way in how I’d frame the benefit of our products & services. I’m always happy to share this knowledge and coach those that might get caught up in what they think are the benefits of our products instead of focusing on what the customer who they are speaking with believes is important.
Who else in your organization would say that they own the customer voice?
In addition to the Customer Experience team, I’d say the Client Success as a whole, including tier 1,2, and 3 agents. In reality, we’re all responsible for our customers experience.
What advice would you give to a CX professional who is overwhelmed by the idea of looking directly at the customer voice to inform priorities?
Don’t take negative feedback personal, separate actionable feedback from the rest, sort by length, merge VOC with other data (for example, customer tenure) and create a well-defined & short list of VOC categories to stay true to any categorization you perform in the future.