The term "Voice of the Customer" (VoC) is a very useful term for initiatives designed to improve customer experience but it is also a term that has been bandied about in a very loose manner. So it is good to see from Bruce Temkin (Forrester) some definition of terms and analysis of how the concept can be translated into practical action!

The use of online communities to amplify and validate these VoC initiatives I believe can take these initiatives to new levels of effectiveness.

Bruce Temkin provides the following definition for a VoC Program:

"A systematic approach to incorporating the needs of customers into the design of customer experiences."

He then identifies five distinct levels of activities in a VoC Program: (my comments in parenthesis)

1. Relationship tracking. Organisations need to track the health of customer relationships over time... Why is this important? Because an easy-to-grasp report card helps align everyone in the organisation around a common purpose. And focuses investments in key areas that correlate with improvements.

This, of course, is the challenge addressed by metrics such as Net Promoter Score. Online communities can make these efforts more dynamic by incorporating NPS results into subsequent conversations and prompting - eg. "why did you vote the way you did"; "how can we increase the propect of you recommending to a friend in future...".  

2. Interaction monitoring. Every customer interaction - from an online transaction to a call into the call centre - is important. Firms need a way to monitor how effectively they handle these customer touches. This can provide detailed (& immediate) feedback to/about frontline employees and help spot problematic trends.

Incorporating this touchpoint feedback into an online community setting - helps to validate how widespread or problematic the feedback is and may of course prompt suggested improvements.

3. Continuous listening.  Structured feedback through customer surveys provides enormous opportunities for analysis. But this (data only view) should be supplemented by executives regularly listening to customers - such as listening to calls in the call centre, reading blogs, reading inbound emails and visiting retail outlets.  

We would argue that online communities can take this to another level with the more social component (customers talking to customers as well as the brand) and with the use of voting and ranking as appropriate. 

4. Project infusion. Projects that affect customers should incorporate insights about customers. Despite the clear need for this type of effort, many companies lack a formalised approach for infusing customer insights into projects. To make sure that this doesn't happen, some firms are incorporating customer insight steps in the front-end of their Sigma processes.

One simple step... ask the online community! Employees and/or customers. "Is this project a good idea?" "Are we missing something?" "Could this project be executed in a more effective manner?". Particularly in a pilot or scoping phase - this type of feedback can represent a great form of risk mitigation.

5. Periodic immersion. Every so often, it's valuable for all employees - especially executives - to spend a significant amount of time interacting directly with customers or working alongside frontline employees. These experiences which should be al least a half day, provides an excellent opportunity for the company to question the status quo.

Whilst nothing will ever quite match dealing with a real live customer in the flesh - online communities are a pretty raw form of customer feedback and interaction; and with so much business be conducted remotely these days (employee-to-employee as well as employee-to-customer) online communities are a very efficient way for a vast number of employees to "stay in touch" with reality.