Discover the power of the voice: Strategies for successful customer listening

This article is inspired by Cate Vanasse’s talk, Bringing the Megaphone to the Voice of the Customer, at our 2022 Customer Marketing Summit, check out the full unedited version here.

Hello there, fellow customer marketers, and anyone who appreciates the art of customer insight! I'm Cate Vanasse, your guide in today's exploration into how to improve your customer listening strategy.

As the Head of Customer Marketing at Cisco, my passion revolves around tapping into our customers' voices. I'm intrigued by their perspectives, unique experiences, and insights that shape our strategies, and guide our teams to make more informed customer-driven decisions.

But one of the issues I’ve come across in my years of experience in the industry is that customer feedback can often get trapped in silos, isolated and underutilized.

It's a frustrating reality that can feel like trying to understand an elephant while blindfolded. You might feel a wall, a tree, or a snake —but you're missing the full picture. That's what feedback trapped in silos can feel like, disjointed, fragmented, and confusing, causing what I like to call ‘proximity blindness’.

I want to explain how you can change that with an optimized customer listening strategy, enabling your business to hear what your customers are saying more clearly and respond to them more effectively. I'll share how to identify your key stakeholders, understand current feedback channels, centralize your insights, and most importantly, close the feedback loop.

I hope you're as excited to dive into these insights as I am to share them with you. Let's jump in and discover the power of truly listening to the voice of your customers! 📣

Step 1: Identify your key stakeholders

In our journey towards better customer listening, the first step is to build a dedicated team – your 'Voice of the Customer' squad.

You should aim to get the backing of your VP of Product Support, Customer Success, and Marketing, to give your initiative strong executive support from the get-go.

However, if you're just starting out and don't have a team like this in place, don't panic! The most important figure you need on your side is an influential executive champion.

This person will drum up enthusiasm for the cause and help set the expectation that this initiative is a priority. It could be your president, CMO, or a leader from your technology, product marketing, or customer success teams.

Once you've found them, it's time to map out other crucial stakeholders across your business. Identify the teams that own a customer feedback channel: this could be the ones managing social listening, customer advisory boards, executive briefing center experiences, or various surveys.

You’ll also want to bring in representatives who might not own a feedback channel but will be significant consumers of the insights – think product marketing, audience marketing, solutions marketing, or your sales teams.

Step 2: Understand your current feedback channels

With your dream team assembled, the next stage is to dig deep into your existing feedback channels. Try asking yourself:

💡How are they currently functioning? What type of insights are they capturing? How are these used, and shared, and how often? Importantly, how are you closing the feedback loop with customers through these channels?

This understanding will help you collaborate more effectively with your voice of the customer squad, and pave the way for the centralization of your insights. A more unified voice of the customer begins to emerge when you bring together insights from various channels and start to see the bigger picture.

At Cisco, we took an MVP (minimum viable product) approach as our foundation for our voice of the customer hub and identified two distinct audience types to analyze for the findings from the VoC program.

One is the individuals that go to VoC, roll up their sleeves, and dig into the data, whereas the other group just wanted a very succinct summary of what our customers are telling us each month.

As well as considering these audience types and building a function that worked for them both, we worked out that we also needed someone to take a narrator role, looking across all feedback channels and what we’re hearing in the voice of the customer hub and reporting a summary back.

This feeds nicely into my next point.

Step 3: Centralize your insights

Once we had a good grasp of our current channels at Cisco, we knew the next logical step was to centralize all the feedback we were receiving, bringing together all the channels across the various silos into one place.

To facilitate this, we selected a third-party technology platform. This wasn't a simple task. We needed something versatile enough to ingest all types of customer feedback - from qualitative comments on social media and discussion boards to case studies and structured survey responses.

We also needed the platform to help us categorize, analyze, and report on this data.

In the end, the effort was worth it. With all our customer insights consolidated into one place, we began to see patterns that had been previously obscured by the siloed nature of our data.

Step 4: Close the feedback loop

The last, but certainly not the least, step in the journey is closing the feedback loop with your customers, and it’s a vital step in unleashing the power of customer listening.

It’s crucial for customers to feel as if they’re being heard and acknowledged, that you aren’t just collecting their feedback for the sake of it, but were actively using it to improve their experience.

Beginning this task can feel overwhelming, like staring at a blank canvas, but fear not! Let's apply the "good, better, best" principle to conquer this challenge.

Start small by enhancing the in-the-moment experience for your customers. When feedback comes through surveys, don't overlook the opportunity to customize your thank you pages based on their input. It's simple to do and can make a significant impact.

Strike while the iron is hot by tailoring the thank you page for interested customers, inviting them to participate in a beta test right away.

This can work in the same way for detractors, offering a personalized follow-up, and triggering the support or product team to reach out and address their concerns.

Moving up to the "better" category, go beyond automated responses. Craft tailored replies and inject a token of personalization using your marketing automation system. By fine-tuning just 25% of your message, you can create a highly personalized experience for your customers.

In the realm of "best," embrace the power of genuine human interaction. Follow up personally with customers, especially detractors or those who have shifted from being loyal promoters to passive participants.

Then you can summarize your conversations and bring them back into your CRM system, making sure that your follow-up workflow is well-defined, and providing clear guidance and talking points for your outreach team.

Remember, you don't have to limit yourself to a single approach, feel free to mix and match strategies based on customer types or topics.

Also, establish processes for categorizing customers, this way, when you address customer feedback, you can reach out directly to customers who expressed relevant needs, showing them the value of their input.

Keep in mind that your customer listening strategy is an ongoing journey, it's never truly complete, continuously optimize, iterate, and scale the process as you go.

Final thoughts

There you have it, folks! Hopefully, these four key steps can revolutionize your customer listening strategy or help you to reflect on your current strategies, perhaps even sparking some new ideas.

If anything though, this should signal the start of your journey, as actively listening to customers is truly a continuous process of learning, adapting, and growing.

Just remember to centralize your insights, close the feedback loop, and show your customers that their voice matters. It's time to elevate your customer listening strategy to the next level.