Customer-first Marketing: Embed your “voice of the customer” loops
We always liked the previous CIM definition of marketing as it used the word “advocate” for customers, whereas now it talks about satisfying and responding to customer needs. However, the word advocate we always found very emotive word to use when helping the teams we lead to understand their role. For us apart of this advocating for them, means ensuring they have a voice and we’re listening to them!
Having a voice means being incorporated within operational processes and we’ve given some ideas on how you could do this. Our first recommendation is to make you customer feedback continuous. Move beyond annual surveys to real-time feedback loops using post-interaction surveys, social listening and support ticket analysis.
Don’t sit on the customer insight you’ve gathered creating spaces or ways to use this feedback. Ensure customer feedback isn’t siloed and only looked at by one team; share qualitative insight with marketing and operation team, so they can use it to inform their work.
NPS process for an events department
In a previous role, Natasha Milsted, Chartered Marketer lead on a voice of the customer insight programme, where one of the biggest shifts was moving from the organisation passively collecting post-event NPS score and event feedback to incorporating this within their business as usual processes.
“I had joined a company that had been collecting NPS scores for around about three years, but didn’t truly understand how the net promoter score worked and therefore largely ignored it, even though they had a wealth of information. This meant that I had a wealth of data and insight available to me from day 1.
“Some of the challenges I faced included questions around ownership of NPS from my own department; a knowledge and skill gap within my team to enable them understand and use this data; and a need to create a process for gathering and using this feedback.
“The question of ownership is one that I see come up a lot when we are trying to empower marketing teams to understand and advocate for customers needs. Organisation structure in my experience can sometimes get in the way of things just needing to be done. In this situation, I had previous experience of using NPS and customer feedback surveys to drive improvements to customer experience and retention. Therefore, it made sense for it to be sat with me, however, I did have to take the time to justify that and explain up front how the roles and responsibilities would sit between marketing and operation teams and how we would collaborate.
“The next phase was relating to people, I needed to improve my teams understanding of NPS and feedback and role model how the insight we gained could be used to improve our products and content marketing. We also defined to be processes for post-event feedback, with automation and how we are going to use the information in mind. I tried to pique the interest and curiosity of my team by holding regular voice of the customer team meetings where we would talk through the latest set of feedback and collective discuss any recommendations we wanted to make.
“Our final step was to get everyone to care about customer feedback – we would use internal comms channels to talk about improvements to customer experience and share real time feedback with internal stakeholders.”
Customer journey mapping
What is a customer journey? A customer journey plots out the main steps a customer goes through when choosing to purchase a product or service from your brand. The defining feature of this is that it is done from the customer point of view. It is not starting with the internal processes or view of the world. It is starting first with what is logical to your customers.
Mapping your customer journey with your team is a great way to get them to put themselves in the shoes of your customers and get them to shift their perspective to think about a problem or challenge from the customer view first. It is a chance to understand how your touchpoints work together and identify friction areas and “aha!” moments you might want to focus on. Back this up with real customer insight or data for each of the journey steps to ensure that what you think and what is happening are the same thing!
We have spoken about customer journey mapping in more depth on our page dedicated to how we help organisations to understand their customers. Our top tip is to write content that addresses the pain points you have identified.
Examples of social listening for a travel brand
What is social listening? Social listening tools help you to tune into themes, beliefs and perceptions your customers have about your brand, by grouping and analysing comments and engagement on social media channels. These offer a real wealth of insight that a lot of organisations miss.
Natasha Milsted, shares an example of how she has seen big brands use social media listening tools:
“I have seen social listening tools used really effectively within travel sector. For example, I worked with a customer communication team who would take the time to tag any social media comments, reposts and direct messages with labels summarising what it was about. So, if the feedback was related to check-in they could understand the overall sentiment and also pull examples to help contextualise any challenges or pain points. This was then feed into the right teams to help improve the customer experience.”
We hope you’ve enjoyed our second blog on creating a customer-first marketing team and are feeling inspired. Our parting thoughts for you is to start with thinking about what customer feedback you have available and taking the time to think through processes to enable marketing to share this feedback with key internal stakeholders and how marketing can use it. There are lots of ways this can be achieved in reality, but we have focused on continuous feedback loops, customer journeys and social listening tools.
