This post was originally on LinkedIn – And was written by Kevin Lau.
Voice of the Customer (VoC)- how can you use it effectively to drive a culture of #customerledgrowth in everything you do from product innovation, GTM planning, and more.
The sad truth is many companies still operate from an inside out perspective – “we know what’s best for the customer” without validating if what you’re building or launching even resonates with your clients.
Here are 4 ways you can implement #voiceofthecustomer programs in partnership with teams across your company.
🔬 1. Alpha & Beta Product Testing
This is really about gathering valuable feedback from customers who are interested in testing new features & functionality to help your product teams evolve your company’s products and services.
For some of your best advocates that crave exclusive opportunities to tinker with your solutions, this is a slam dunk for creating a win-win outcome – they get to experiment, and your PM teams gather valuable insights.
📥 2. Customer Feedback Surveys
It’s one thing to launch a survey to your customers every 3-6 months but if you never look at the insights and share it broadly with your teams does it even matter?
Solutions like Medallia Qualtrics are great as central hubs for survey insights over time and the best part is you can get super granular with the targeting.
🤝 3. Advisory Councils & CABs
The tried and true CAB is great – bring together your top 12-15 customers for 1-2 days of learning and networking but what happens when you have 10 different CABs that every team wants your help to spin up – it’s helpful to have an engagement model (see images below) to standardize on how you support teams and run your CABs at scale.
✍ 4. Peer Reviews
If this is not part of your strategy in 2023, you NEED to build a business case on this ASAP.
There is SO MUCH you can do with peer reviews from influencing grid reports and MQs, driving demand pipeline, creating battle cards and more targeted traffic to your website.
If you’re strapped for budget, run a pilot on one review site, drive a review campaign and show proof and results to leadership – this is the exact process I’ve followed to get incremental $$$ at different companies.
If you’re unsure about the differences in the review sites, I put together a little table to make it easier to see the comparisons across G2 TrustRadius PeerSpot Gartner Capterra.
FYI. See below for Support Engagement Mode