Voice of the Experience
A behind-the-scenes look at how Slalom approaches experience management.
Today, consumer and employee expectations are set by experience-led organizations such as Amazon, Airbnb, and Starbucks — companies that have built customer-centricity into the fabric of their business.
Modern brands are tasked with the complex challenge of understanding the opportunities and pain points users face along their journey and reacting to those opportunities in real-time. This is where Voice of the Experience (VoX) comes in.
The evolution of customer research
Over the last decade, customer feedback has grown increasingly important in product design, marketing efforts, and shopping experiences. Brands employed research methods such as focus groups and surveys to inform industry-standard metrics of loyalty, including the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
As the consumer ecosystem grew in complexity, the need for a comprehensive method of collecting feedback across all the channels and touchpoints in the journey led to the inception of Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs and technology.
VoC was designed to gather cross-journey sentiment and feedback and leverage technology to uncover insights and opportunities.
What is Voice of the Experience (VoX)?
Slalom’s latest evolution in the experience management space is VoX — an engagement strategy that continuously and systematically captures and amplifies the “voice” of a brand, customer, employee, or partner, enabling organizations to understand and react to experience feedback in real-time through closed-loop strategies.
VoX goes beyond surveys, net promoter scores, and siloed channels to gather, normalize, activate, and operationalize “voice.”
How does VoX work?
A successful VoX program leverages one or more experience management technologies to collect incremental feedback across the consumer journey, including “ask” feedback methods (such as surveys) and “listen” methods (such as online review sentiment analysis), to gain an understanding of the experience.
That feedback is then enriched with the business’s operational data around the consumer (geography, past purchase behavior, tenure, etc.) to provide valuable segmentation insights.
Finally, text analytics, AI, and ML are used to uncover trends, opportunities, and friction across the experience. The experience management platform provides a method for the brand to communicate directly with customers to address issues and mitigate risk.
VoX programs address key business challenges, such as:
High employee attrition rates, or low CSAT score.
Brands with low experience satisfaction metrics are often broadly aware of the challenges but have difficulty pinpointing the exact trigger or friction area. VoX leverages real-time collection methods and advanced analysis to understand the when, why, and who of the experience.
Lack of customer data needed to make informed product and business decisions.
A general lack of customer data across the journey, or customer data that is collected infrequently via CSAT or NPS survey, leaves brands in a reactive mode — never being able to gather and respond to needs in real-time. VoX programs provide a wealth of real-time customer data that can be operationalized to inform business decisions.
Customer data that’s disconnected and not operationalized.
Most organizations collect some level of customer data but struggle to connect and operationalize that data in a meaningful way. The experience management platforms that VoX programs utilize can pull in data from other third-party systems and business data from proprietary sources to create valuable, rich data, and segments.
Experience management technology that’s not optimized or integrated.
Many companies have already invested in some form of experience management or customer management tooling. But often, the system is not integrated with other technology, such as CRM, CMS, CDP, marketing automation platforms, lead management tools, etc. The siloed system leads to wasted technology investment and inefficient use of marketing dollars. Building a VoX program with a strategic vision and cross-department support ensures the integration of all technology investments.
Building an impactful Voice of the Experience capability
Experience programs fail when the capability is not planned and properly supported, including lifecycle planning from strategy through to management and growth. Below are four key offerings that support clients and businesses no matter where they are in their VoX journey.
- Vision and program strategy definition.
Grounded in experience research and discovery, map the current state of the experience, and collaborate to define and build the roadmap of the future-state of experience for the end-user. - Technology selection and implementation.
Work with your team to develop the business and technical requirements needed to select a new (or optimize an existing) VoX vendor and integrate their capabilities into the MarTech stack. - Management and operations.
Develop the core components of VoX programs — including research, survey design, operations and governance, message and communications support, measurement strategy, and business case development for growth. - Program growth and expansion.
Design growth strategies to gain buy-in from internal stakeholders, secure additional program financing, and strategies to scale consumer-facing programs to new global geographies, channels, and products.
At Slalom, we approach all VoX engagements with global and local program capabilities, industry-leading technology, vendor partnership expertise, lifecycle support, and passion. For help creating and implementing VoX programs, contact Slalom today.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
