Every business knows how critical customer service is for the success of its brand. Customer service can, in fact, make or break a business. A brand’s engagement with its customers doesn’t end with sales, but continues throughout the product’s lifecycle.

The risk of product failure is dramatically reduced when brands strive to understand the voice of the customer and design products in accordance with the preferences of the customers.

In this article, we will attempt to define customer service, explore some tools for handling customer service, and see how businesses can benefit from efficient customer management.

Understanding Customer Service

Customer service includes all activities, strategies, and processes through which a business engages with its customers throughout the lifecycle of its products and services. This includes assistance to customers across touchpoints in their journeys. Brands need to support customers when they’re making product purchases, providing them with adequate and accurate information about products and also resolving issues they face, if any, on a priority basis.

Customers often have queries and concerns that begin right in the product search and buying phases. If a brand can be proactive enough to approach customers right from this stage, it will lead to a strong customer-brand relationship and higher customer satisfaction rates.

Customer service also helps bolster brand loyalty. It’s imperative to establish positive experiences for customers before and after-sales. This will ensure customers have all information to use products and services in an intended manner. 

Customers also often need technical support and assistance with their grievances and complaints, which is an integral component of customer service. It’s important for brands to handle product returns and exchanges in an efficient and timely manner to make the experience as seamless and hassle-free as possible for their customers.

The Right Customer Service Tools

Brands should consider offering personalized suggestions and recommendations to their customers based on their preferences. Responsive communication across touchpoints including social, email, web, and mobile can go a long way.

Businesses should use helpdesk software to simplify customer support with centralized management of all queries. Brands can track all complaints, and support tickets, and respond to them within deadlines. 

Social listening tools can help businesses monitor customer feedback on diverse social platforms. Customer complaints and inquiries on social media should be promptly addressed. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps businesses to track all customer information at a single place. They’re also great at providing insights about customer behavior using AI. CRM tools help establish personalized communication with customers.

Knowledge-based software can be used to create knowledge bases and central portals for customers to discover relevant information themselves.

The Era of Holistic Customer Service 

Too many brands make the mistake of relegating customer experience to just the after-sales engagement. Customer service begins right at the time of customer purchases and continues through the product lifecycle.

It is imperative for brands to monitor customer conversations and stay abreast of their requirements.

The post What Really is Customer Service? appeared first on 6sigma.

Qualitative customer feedback is a great way to measure the voice of the customer, as it reflects the opinions and thoughts of the brand patrons. In this article, we will understand what qualitative customer feedback really is, how it differs from the voice of the customer, and how brands can use it to assess the voice of the customer.

What is Qualitative Customer Feedback?

Qualitative customer feedback provides detailed feedback about the customers’ opinions, perceptions, and experiences. These are collected through various methods including focus groups, surveys, and social media. It’s important to remember that qualitative feedback is subjective and not numerical in nature.

Qualitative customer feedback provides detailed information about the customers requirements, which helps businesses assess existing strategies, develop the right strategies, and deliver products according to customer requirements. 

Qualitative feedback requires businesses to remain open-minded and allow customers to share detailed experiences without always orienting them in a specific direction. 

What is the Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer, often called VoC, is an indicator of the cumulative feedback, opinions, and experiences of customers on a certain brand product or service. 

The VoC helps businesses understand the exact requirements, expectations, preferences, and needs of the customers. With a clear picture of what their customers want, businesses can create optimal products and services that are more likely to deliver greater value to customers, which promotes brand loyalty and retention. This also contributes to higher customer satisfaction and ultimately, creates long-term profits for businesses. 

Qualitative Customer Feedback as VoC

Ultimately, qualitative customer feedback is one of the aspects that come under the voice of the customer. 

Once qualitative feedback is collected, it should be analyzed to gather the voice of the customer. This can be done manually or through AI-based analytical tools. The VoC picture that emerges from both qualitative and quantitative feedback should be used to make critical decisions like modifications to existing products and resource allocation for new product lines.

Use Qualitative Feedback to Understand VoC

Qualitative customer feedback is not the same as the voice of the customer but they are closely related concepts. In fact, qualitative customer feedback is an important component of the voice of the customer and offers unique insights into customers’ emotions and psychology which will be invaluable for business decision-making.

Qualitative customer feedback is subjective, with no structured formats to collect the same. It can be obtained through open-ended questions, social media conversations, and surveys.

It’s imperative to continuously monitor VoC for the best results. Businesses who use qualitative customer feedback to gather VoC are at a competitive advantage as they benefit from higher profits and customer satisfaction.

VoC also plays a pivotal role in helping predict future trends. It helps businesses reduce and manage product failure risks better, which are significantly reduced.

The post Qualitative Customer Feedback and the Voice of the Customer appeared first on 6sigma.

Qualitative customer feedback is often overlooked and quantitative analysis given more importance, whereas businesses ought to use both to increase customer retention levels. Qualitative feedback helps understand the needs of the customers at a deeper level.

In this piece, we’ll take a quick look at what qualitative customer feedback is, why it matters so much, and how businesses of all scales can use it to garner higher profits and deliver greater value to their customers.

Understanding Qualitative Customer Feedback

Qualitative customer feedback is a way to measure the voice of the customer by asking them questions. The term “qualitative” indicates that the quality of data obtained takes precedence over the quantity. Qualitative customer feedback is used to measure complex phenomena. Customers are required to fill in their experiences and feedback in forms and surveys and share how they found a certain product or service.

There are various ways to gather qualitative feedback information. This includes social media, interviews, and online reviews. Businesses should, time and again, monitor conversations on social media. Customers often take to social media to express their opinions and thoughts, which can offer unique insights for brands.

Open-ended questions are often of great importance in surveys to gather customer feedback in detail, since customers are free to share what’s on their mind without specific directions or focuses.

Small discussion groups can also be created where customers can offer their insights and share their experiences about the brand and the needed optimizations. These help companies make improvements in their products and services.

Why Collect Qualitative Customer Feedback?

Qualitative customer feedback is a great way to establish a personal relationship between a brand and its customers. This is done by personalizing the products according to the needs of the customers. 

It also helps capture customer satisfaction levels, which might otherwise be difficult with quantitative feedback.

It also helps understand what it is that the customer really wants. Customers feel their opinions really matter and are factored in when optimizing their favorite products. This helps to increase brand equity and loyalty.

Qualitative customer feedback provides businesses with the experiences, opinions, and preferences of customers. This can help businesses to make improvements in their services and products. 

Qualitative and Quantitative: The Best of Both Worlds

In the era of data-driven decision-making, many businesses often overlook the importance of qualitative customer feedback. Brands should ideally combine both quantitative and qualitative feedback for the best results. What makes qualitative customer feedback so distinctive is that it is subjective in nature, meaning that it conceals significant actionable insights.

It is important for businesses to be transparent about how customer feedback will be used. They should assure that the feedback would be used to improve products and services, thus encouraging customers to freely speak their mind. This once again strengthens the customer-brand relationship.

The post What is Qualitative Customer Feedback? appeared first on 6sigma.

The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of the most important metrics that business owners should monitor for long-term success and profitability. 

You can calculate and combine the metric with data from other sources to capture a bird’s eye view of the business and see where customers fit into the picture. 

In this article, we will attempt to define this metric and examine the advantages of the CLV.  We will also see how CLV is key to data-driven decision making and how businesses can harness it for greater profits and brand loyalty.

Defining the Customer Lifetime Value 

The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a measure of the total income a customer will bring to a business over the entire course of their interactions with the brand. The CLV thus measures the profits the business is expected to garner from a customer.

There are several ways to calculate the customer lifetime value, and each method has its own advantages and disadvantages. What differentiates each method are the assumptions that are made to calculate CLV. When you compute the customer lifetime value, you should also pay careful attention to the customer segment, since it has a direct bearing on CLV values.

Data-driven Decision Making with CLV

The customer lifetime value can be a key indicator of business success and brand loyalty. If the customer acquisition cost is greater than the CLV, it implies net losses for the brand. It is also important to track changes in the customer lifetime value with time, since this is a dynamic metric that changes with the passage of time and with market trends.

Measuring the CLV helps businesses develop the right strategies to gain new customers and estimate long-term profits. It also helps create novel marketing strategies with a knowledge of exactly how much the business can spend on the customer.

CLV helps identify high-value customers, so businesses can then strive to make them long-term customers for higher profits. The metric also helps identify areas for improvement and invest the right resources in the priority areas.

Bolster Customer Satisfaction Levels with the Customer Lifetime Value Metric

Ultimately, the customer lifetime value (CLV) helps businesses create better products and services for customers that yield higher value and raise customer satisfaction. This keeps customers coming back to the brand, bolstering brand loyalty. CLV also helps selectively identify and target high-value customers and allocate the right investments to keep them engaged.

While CLV, on its own, holds a lot of actionable insights, even more information can be had by combining it with other key metrics like the acquisition costs of customers.

You can use CLV to identify customers that would benefit from personalized interactions and custom offerings, for example. It can also be used to make important predictions about customer behavior when combined with predictive analytics.

The post Understanding Customer Lifetime Value appeared first on 6sigma.

Here are the methods used to apprehend the Voice of Customer:

• Surveys: To use this method, you must target the specific audience that you are trying to please. Each generation has their set of high priorities. If the product or service that your business provides is for millennials, then you need to target your customers that are between the ages of 23-38.
• Focus Groups: This is used for more detailed information about behaviors and motivation of this targeted group.
• Customer Interview: This is actually your best bet if you can obtain it. It is best if you can make your customer feel as though it is a friendly chat rather than an interview. Many people are complimented that you would take time out from your business day to speak to them. It helps build good client relationships.
• Employee Feedback: Employees would be considered internal customers, and their feedback can be considered suggestions.
• Third-party sites such as Yelp, Google, Group Forums: Since these are open forums, the data given can’t be trusted 100%, but consider it a gauge.

The business owner who really is invested in his business will go out of his way to get this information and why you ask. 

Many companies have talked to their customers to gather this kind of information to improve customer service processes. As an example, consider the next time you are trying to locate a prescription medication made by a specific manufacturer or lab. So you call the pharmacy, and they tell you that you would have to come in to get that information.

So, you call your health insurance company, and without batting an eye they offer to call the pharmacy. This is great customer service, and you the customer, is why this is important. There are many health insurance companies that use Six Sigma methodologies for their excellence.

For more information on our Lean Six Sigma courses and services, please visit 6sigma.com. 

The post You, As Voice of Customer appeared first on 6sigma.

Since many small businesses are now worldwide with their online presence, the days of truly knowing the customers that frequent your establishment are not what they used to be. In the days of yore, you as the owner might see your customer on a daily basis and talk to them as “friends,” and they would give you an honest answer, as well as remaining loyal to your business. 

Now with the internet, businesses grow faster and quicker, and may not have the personal touch of a local business, so you can’t always establish those friendships with your customers. We discuss the Voice of Customer (VOC) in this infographic, which is an effective way to gather that pertinent information.

The post INFOGRAPHIC: Steps in the Voice of Customer (VOC) appeared first on 6sigma.

Voice of Customer, or VOC, is how you will stay above the competition. Many business owners feel they know exactly what their customers/clients want, but in actuality they don’t. People are constantly changing, so the Six Sigma tool VOC is extremely important.

Let’s take a fictitious scenario that could have happened. As we all know, milk delivery stopped many years ago.Today people buy their milk from supermarkets, and the need for milk delivery has diminished. This didn’t happen overnight; it was gradual, until one day many people lost their jobs as businesses closed down. 

What if we added Six Sigma methodologies to this scenario?

DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control)

Define: Business is down as people are cancelling their service. I have 10 truck drivers delivering milk and dairy products to many customers. I will reach out to my customers and ask if milk is still important to them, and if not what is their new beverage or product of choice.

Measure: Look at the ledgers and find the data that shows how much business is down and in what areas. Then get all the data that shows how much is spent on gas and maintenance of trucks. Assess all outgoing and incoming data.

Analyze: After looking at all the data, it seems that people are moving away from milk and dairy products. After speaking with customers, they all agree that delivery service is appreciated but lifestyles are changing.

Improve: I have decided to start offer delivery of groceries for the busy family. As a trial run, I have taken three of my trucks and offered my current milk clients this service. They stated that early morning delivery is still great because both parents are at work all day. This has kept my business going, and business is up since I am the only one to offer this service.

Control: I will monitor and change as my customers’ needs change. I will continue to keep in touch with my customers and keep an eye on the data and receipts that dictate how business is doing financially. I was also able to keep my drivers on the job. 

* Note: This is a condensed example of could have been done.

For more information on our Lean Six Sigma courses and services, please visit 6sigma.com. 

The post Six Sigma’s Voice of Customer (VOC) appeared first on 6sigma.

Reaching out to your customers is essential to the success of your business. Unless special packaging is required for the safety of your product, then any extra processing or materials used that is not important to your customer is waste, and it can happen quickly.

By the same token, for an entirely different reason don’t mess with your original product trying to improve it. The year was 1985, the month was April, and the day was the 23rd. This was the day that will forever haunt the Coca-Cola Company as they introduced New Coke. Needless to say, that dark period is over and we shall not speak of it, but please note the customers never asked for Coca-Cola’s original formula to change; the company just went ahead and decided to make the change. If the customers ask for it or request it, then it is the VOC and you as the business owner are doing your due diligence in keeping a customer-focused business. 

Ways to Reach out to Customers

• One-on-One Interviews
• Surveys
• Focus Groups
• Customer Suggestions
• Call Centers/Complaint Logs

For more information on our Lean Six Sigma courses and services, please visit 6sigma.com.

The post Customer Service Is More Than Just Customer Service appeared first on 6sigma.

What is Voice of Customer (VOC)?

These are the preferences, requirements, expectations and any comments that your customer has to offer about your product or service. 

These can be obtained by:

1. Surveys
2. Interviews
3. Focus Groups
4. Suggestions

A good rule of thumb is to give the customer what they want, but many large companies will make you work for it. A colleague of ours told us about a credit card company that she has been a loyal customer of for 30+ years. She noticed she had been charged double for the same purchase, and it was on her statement. She called the company, and they said that she had waited too long.

So she told them about her long-standing loyalty with the company and asked to speak with a manager. The representative then went on to see what she could do to help the customer. At the end, the individual received credit, but it had been a rollercoaster ride! A better scenario would have been to agree to it since this issue was apparent from the very beginning.

Everyone understands about company policies, but when those policies stand in the way of good customer service, it is time for that company to become immersed with the Six Sigma culture and bring great customer service back.

Fact: All companies need their customers to stay in business.

Fact: A customer is not going to get rich from returning an item or asking for a refund when they were charged twice.

Fact: The company will always make money from their customers.

Fact: Six Sigma’s mindset will always treat the customer like gold because they are the reason you are in business.

For more information on our Lean Six Sigma courses and services, please visit 6sigma.com.

The post Customer Service, Six Sigma Style appeared first on 6sigma.