Surprisingly, Smith isn’t in the human resources department. Rather, he’s the manager of a large global team. As such, he has become increasingly attuned to all topics surrounding employee engagement and disengagement. “Disengaged employees are not willing to tap into their discretionary energy to solve problems,” he says from his base in Montreal. “I believe that people are always at the heart of solutions for better processes or structure or products. Engaged people have so many more positive outcomes. We all know the Gallup statistics.”

Let the numbers do the talking

An actively disengaged employee costs their organization $3,400 for every $10,000 of salary, or 34 percent

Smith is referring to the famous study from 2013, when Gallup found that a staggering 87 percent of employees worldwide were disengaged. And 25 percent of those were actively disengaged, in other words, company detractors. Gallup stated that an actively disengaged employee costs their organization $3,400 for every $10,000 of salary, or 34 percent. That means that a disgruntled or “checked out” person on staff making $60,000 a year costs their company $20,400 for that same year.

Updating that information in their 2017 State of the American Workplace Report, Gallup noted that 51 percent of employees were looking for a new job. “The old ways of running a workplace—annual reviews, forced rankings, outdated competencies—don’t get the intended results,” the report states. “Leaders must gain scientific insight into employees’ evolving wants and needs and learn how to build an exceptional workplace.”

A case study: LANDR

That’s why Marjorie Desriac is spending her day lining up yoga classes and an on-site massage service for her 73 employees at LANDR Audio. LANDR is a cloud-based audio mastering service with an industrial-chic office in Mile End, one of the hippest neighborhoods in Montreal. Desriac, in her role as the company’s Culture and People Partner, implemented Officevibe feedback technology to get ahead of employee disengagement issues that might arise during their rapid growth spurt. Staff can anonymously rate their work life across 10 metrics. “The stress metric went up a bit last week,” she reports. “So, we’re looking into a gym partnership, yoga and massage.”

LANDR also offers employees free access to Dialogue, a virtual healthcare service. “Yes, these perks are great and everyone loves them, but giving employees feedback and recognition from management for a job well done—we see that’s the important metric,” says Desriac. “People also want to work on professional goals, make sure they have skills and training.”

Indeed, the role of management is shifting to accommodate the new workplace. “We expect more from our jobs today,” notes Julie Jeannotte, the engagement expert at Officevibe. “Our relationship with work has changed. Because we recognize what a huge portion of our life we spend at work, it’s no longer okay to be unhappy. It’s not just about putting bread on the table anymore. Consequently, the definition of a leader is changing. Now, it’s more about coaching, helping employees attain goals.”

Companies could solve the $600 -billion employee engagement problem with improved empathy—better listening, more understanding and extra coaching

This new coaching style of leadership is an effective approach to tackling disengagement. Forbes magazine recently suggested companies could solve the $600 -billion employee engagement problem with improved empathy—better listening, more understanding and extra coaching. But the problem is persistent. A 2017 Harvard Business Review study proposes that companies can enhance their gains by thinking more long-term about solving disengagement.

“Organizations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on employee engagement programs, yet their scores on engagement surveys remain abysmally low,” writes the study’s author, Jacob Morgan. “How is that possible? Because most initiatives amount to an adrenaline shot. When organizations make real gains, it’s because they’re thinking longer-term. They’re going beyond what engagement scores are telling them to do in the moment and redesigning employee experience, creating a place where people want, not just need, to work each day.”

The employee experience factor

This jives with new findings from Gallup. In November 2018, Gallup published a report that recommends companies shift their focus to employee experience—defined as the entirety of their emotional and physical journey at the company. According to the report’s author, Jessica Buono, “Our research shows that the crucial factors that influence employee experience throughout the employee life cycle include an employee’s manager, role, team, workspace and well-being. You no longer simply try to make onboarding fun, you create a deeper connection with your organization that affects employee retention, engagement, performance and development, and whether or not they will represent your brand in a positive light.”

Companies that invest in employee experience outperform those that don’t

Employee experience is linked to engagement/disengagement in a feedback loop: Employee experience affects the level of engagement/disengagement, and the level of engagement/disengagement influences employee experience. This answers the question of why it’s imperative to heed these new findings and stretch HR resources to preempt disengagement, with its costly downside. As Jacob Morgan reported in his Harvard Business Review study, companies that invest in employee experience outperform those that don’t.

All this explains why Hayden Smith is so keen to gather actionable feedback from his global team. “We’ve had fantastic results, but experience and engagement are moving targets,” he notes. “You don’t hit them once. You have to check back often and adjust as you go. I’m a firm believer that understanding how they work together will improve your bottom line.

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On the phone from Evanston, Illinois, Malthouse defines customer disengagement as the buyer’s perception that a brand can’t meet their rational or emotional needs—so people stop listening to the brand and possibly go elsewhere. “For the past five to ten years, engagement was the hot topic for marketers looking to increase their company’s market share,” he says. “Now there’s a shift to look at the flip side.” Malthouse was ahead of the curve, being among the first to delve deeply into customer disengagement 15 years ago, while investigating why droves of readers were abandoning newspapers and magazines.

“We did surveys and learned about ‘the overload experience’,” he recalls. “That happened when a brick of a newspaper arrived at readers’ doors every Sunday morning. Customers knew they couldn’t read the entire thing, which reminded them of their inadequacies. That was one of the main reasons they stopped reading. Some canceled their subscriptions—the ultimate disengagement.”

The high cost of disengagement

Jim Novo, former Head of Education at the Digital Analytics Association, has been telling people to pay attention to disengagement for years. “It gets neglected because exciting new channels keep popping up. It’s always more fun to dive into a new channel than look back at why an older channel might be failing,” says Novo, author of Drilling Down: Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet, an industry bible in its third edition.

Disengagement costs far more than the cost of acquiring a new customer—due to the added damage done by negative reviews

“If you ask a CEO or CFO, everyone says they care about disengagement, but the proof is what they’re willing to do about it,” he says on the phone from Florida. “And they should do something because disengagement costs far more than the cost of acquiring a new customer—due to the added damage done by negative reviews.” Indeed, a recent study from the Pew Research Center says that 40 percent of adults almost always read product reviews before purchasing a product. Moreover, 82 percent sometimes read online reviews.

That’s why Meta S. Brown, an expert in data analytics, is flabbergasted when companies don’t try to extract deeper insights from feedback. “If customers take the time to write comments and posts, or answer surveys or talk to customer service, it’s because they have something to say,” she explains from her home base in Chicago. “If you don’t take the time to use the data, it’s a breach of trust.”

Brand strategy expert Robert Passikoff agrees with Brown, adding that a sense of broken trust is often behind customer defection. The 2018 Global Consumer Insights Survey by PwC ranks consumer trust as the second most important factor in a customer’s decision-making process, following inventory status (e.g. Is the product I want in stock? Do I trust this company to satisfy me?). “Brand disengagement is a death sentence, so it’s ridiculous not to keep trying to emotionally engage customers and listen to their feedback,” says Passikoff, President of Brand Key and best-selling author of Predicting Market Success.

When talking about customer disengagement’s effect on the bottom line, Passikoff points to Budweiser beer. “Budweiser throws lots of money at making Superbowl ads, with their Clydesdale horses and their puppies. Everyone loves the ads, but the ads have nothing to do with the beer, so people tune out and ultimately get turned off,” he says. “Budweiser has been losing market share and revenue every quarter. They didn’t correctly leverage the heritage of their Clydesdale horses to add value to the brand proposition. There’s a disconnect—a broken trust. It can take your company into a death spiral.”

The expectation race

Dissatisfied customers are at least three times more likely to spread negative messages

But ineffective TV commercials aren’t Passikoff’s biggest concern. He’s keeping an eye on consumer expectations. “They grow every year by about 20 percent, taking into account things like package delivery and customer service,” he says. “But companies can’t keep up. They can only improve by between 4 and 8 percent every year. That leaves a pretty big gap for a competitor to better meet those expectations. And we know that dissatisfied customers are at least three times more likely to spread negative messages.”

To help manage expectations, companies need to improve their sight lines across all channels so they can more fully understand customer experience, according to Tom Collinger at Northwestern University. Collinger is the executive director of the Spiegel Research Center, where he works with Edward Malthouse, our grocery shopper who was disappointed by the Aldi app. This fall, they published a new study, How B2B Engagement Drives Revenue.

The study also yielded key insights about disengagement. “No longer can companies risk annoying their customers by contacting them with too many emails, too many sales pitches, too much promotion, creates a fatigue effect that leads to disengagement,” says Collinger on the phone from his office at Northwestern. “The time has come for a coordinated contact strategy. The old blanket approach doesn’t work anymore. The way a company reaches out to Microsoft should be different from the way it reaches out to IBM. This is called account-based marketing.”

The old blanket approach can give a false positive for disengagement. To illustrate his point, Collinger creates a fictitious example: If Deloitte or McKinsey sends out a white paper on cyber security to a range of prospective clients, one of the prospects, say, Shell Oil, might be more interested in risk management for handling oil spills than cyber security. “Shell may not download the white paper on cyber security, but it might have downloaded a white paper on risk management,” he explains. “The practice of sending out more relevant content within channels is a huge sea change in the marketing industry.”

Who’s fighting the good fight against disengagement? In Collinger’s opinion, it’s the companies that listen to feedback

So, who’s doing it right? Who’s fighting the good fight against disengagement? In Collinger’s opinion, it’s the companies that listen to feedback. “The ones winning this game are, among other things, asking customers how often they want to be contacted and by what means… and then they listen. Many of the utilities and phone companies are doing it right,” he notes. “The next step is the biggest boulder sitting in front of B2B—change management. This means not managing by channel and getting company-wide engagement that correlates with business results.”

Meanwhile, back at Aldi, their grocery store app downloads without difficulty these days, but the content is still rather uninspired. And Edward Malthouse has a positive update about the experience of overload that caused disengagement from news media at the beginning of the digital era: “The New York Times solved the problem,” he says approvingly. “They listened to feedback and created ‘Your Weekend Briefing’ in print and online. They’re surviving.”

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Therein lies the value of listening to the voice of the customer with an open mind—at least, with no preconceived notion of what you should be hearing. Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute drove the point home in the summer of 2017 when they released the results of their study on customer experience (CX), a fast-growing field that focuses on keeping buyers and brands happily in sync. The study concluded that eight out of ten consumers were willing to actually pay more for a better interaction.

“Experience is the new battleground, and how you connect will determine how you win,” said Pierre-Yves Glever, Global Lead of Digital Customer Experience at Capgemini, when commenting on the study in a press release. “Organizations that tightly link their business operations with customer experience will reap the benefits in both streamlined operational efficiency and satisfaction.” Paying attention to the voice of the customer (VOC) is rapidly becoming a top priority for companies who want to enhance customer experience and retain brand loyalty.

Jump to a section:

1. What is the voice of the customer?
2. Why do you need a VOC program?
3. How does AI impact voice of customer analysis?

1. What is the voice of the customer?

If the voice of the customer is what customers are saying about a company, the voice of the customer program is what the company is doing about it. In other words, it’s the pathway taken to use data to change how organizations do business. The goal of a VOC program is to get actionable insights into the hands of decision-makers. Once enlightened, they can continually improve their company’s service or product. It’s an outside-in perspective. The more feedback, the better.

Implementing a VOC program, however, can have speed bumps, like any enterprise-wide initiative. “The challenges do vary based on the organization and their culture. Getting the business to truly care about the voice of the customer enough to act on it can be a significant challenge for many organizations,” said Chris Randall, Chief Customer Officer at ResponseTek, in a recent interview with CXO Leaders Summit.

“Saying you want to improve satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy is one thing,” he continued. “Actually putting in place the strategy, processes, support, training, communications, compensation, etc. required to enable fast change is an altogether more challenging commitment to obtain. For those who have achieved this, the results easily follow.”

Implementing this kind of strategy at your organization usually encompasses voice of the customer software like text analytics in order to understand large volumes of customer feedback data. This software is used to analyze sentiment across the customer journey from different channels like customer surveys, reviews, and support tickets.

Learn more about the voice of the customer

Read our complete guide to the voice of the customer here.

2. Why do you need a VOC program?

The benefits of having a VOC program outweigh the grumbling that comes with any organizational change. VOC programs improve customer satisfaction, brand management, product development, and marketing efforts, among other things. Look at the successes of Zappos and Ritz-Carlton—known for their intelligent use of VOC to create a thriving customer-centric culture.

A study by The Aberdeen Group called The Business Value of Building a Best-in-Class VOC Program discovered that companies who invest in customer feedback programs experience much higher client retention and employee engagement, and spend less on customer service. The study also showed that companies who implement a VOC program generate a year-over-year increase in annual company revenue that’s 10 times greater.

It’s no surprise that CX expert Annette Franz highly recommends voice of the customer tools. As the CEO of CX Journey, she’s well positioned to offer advice. “Unless you have executive commitment from the get-go, it’s just a listening exercise,” she says, chatting on the phone from California. “Without it, you’re not going to get the financial resources, the human resources or the capital resources to fix what you hear. Or to celebrate the wins. That’s where a lot of programs fall down.”

She recommends creating one centralized office for the VOC program, as opposed to different pockets throughout the organization. “It takes a coordinated effort, and having one office also helps with accountability,” she adds.

Yet, despite Franz’s warning about securing executive commitment for a voice of the customer software, there’s good news if you can’t achieve it right away. Meta Brown in Chicago advises not to worry if the mandate isn’t top-down from the start. “In my opinion,” she says, “more happens from the middle—that first or second level of management. You can still get great results.”

3. How does AI impact voice of customer analysis?

Maxie Schmidt, a principal analyst at Forrester, is also a big believer in VOC strategies. Furthermore, she thinks AI will change the future of customer feedback. “I predict advances in AI-enabled emotion analysis will equip firms to understand how customers feel. This will replace metrics like Net Promoter Score,” Schmidt said recently at a Forrester-hosted CX event in Boston.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer experience and predicts business growth by asking end-users one question: How likely are you, on a scale of 0 to 10, to recommend our product or service to a friend? It’s a long-standing CX metric, making Schmidt’s prediction about replacing NPS a bold statement. “AI tools help surface unknown issues or nudge employees to make real-time interventions,” she explained. “This will finally create a tight data-to-insight-to-action loop.”

When customers take the time to write comments and posts, or answer surveys or talk to customer service, it’s because they have something to say. If you don’t take the time to use the data, it’s a breach of trust.

This loop starts with feedback, and shoppers aren’t short on ways to make themselves heard. From social media posts and surveys to call center reports, it’s easier and easier for businesses to get to the “why” behind customer complaints and satisfaction. “However, all these conversations with customers from every channel can pile up,” says Charles-Olivier Simard, Keatext CTO and expert in computational linguistics and semantic technologies. “AI-powered text analytics turn feedback into actionable items, quickly. Otherwise, you lose customers and opportunities.”

Meta Brown agrees with Schmidt and Simard. She’s flabbergasted when companies don’t try to glean deeper insights from feedback using text analytics. “When customers take the time to write comments and posts, or answer surveys or talk to customer service, it’s because they have something to say,” she explains. “If you don’t take the time to use the data, it’s a breach of trust.”

Breach of trust sounds like a sure-fire way to lose end-users. And there is another danger to leaving customer feedback less than fully considered. “If you analyze feedback using only keyword searches, you get blind spots,” says Simard. “Deep learning starts from the text, not a list of keywords. It tells you what’s actually there, not what you think you’re looking for. It’s an essential component of an effective VOC program. Without it, you’ll probably spend money on the wrong things when trying to improve customer experience.”

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“At some point during the eight-hour flight, the airline knew my luggage wasn’t on that plane,” notes Hunsaker. “So, why not send another text to let me know? That way, I could cool down and plan ahead.” Hunsaker, co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Clear Action Continuum, had stumbled on an opportunity for the airline to improve their CX. A second text about the lost luggage would help manage customer expectations—a key player in customer satisfaction, maintaining positive word-of-mouth and building brand loyalty.

What’s CX? Do the math

The best way to define CX is to imagine an equation: take a customer’s expectations and subtract their reality (their luggage is lost). And expectations are growing. Thanks to web 2.0 and social media, people are able to share a high volume of feedback across many sources and channels. Think email, Twitter, Facebook, apps, call centres and help questions, among other communication tools. The ever-larger quantities of feedback fuel more ideas for improvements and eventually the improvements themselves, resulting in customers who have high expectations.

“It’s not about the evolution in technology, it’s about technology changing the expectations of customers, fast,” said Steven Van Belleghem, CX expert and author of Customers the Day After Tomorrow, while promoting his book. According to Van Belleghem, artificial intelligence (AI) is an important way to meet rising customer expectations. AI-enabled text analytics mines the avalanche of data by quickly categorizing and assessing large volumes of customer feedback.

Each time a customer is exposed to an improved digital experience, their expectations for all experiences are reset to a higher level.

Brendan Witcher, principal analyst at Forrester Research, couldn’t agree more. In a recent interview, he says, “Each time a customer is exposed to an improved digital experience, their expectations for all experiences are reset to a higher level.” Clearly, it’s go time. The race is on to meet, match and surpass those expectations.

Forrester, a pioneer in CX research, champions AI as an essential tool in the race. Their June 2018, paper on text analytics platforms concludes that the market is growing because more companies see turnkey solutions as the right way to address their top analytics challenges. This market growth is in large part due to an increased preference to buy rather than build their own in-house text analytics solutions. Moreover, Forrester notes that keyword-based analytics is outdated and less effective. Now, the focus is on extracting sentiments and concepts from customer feedback.

Text analytics: How AI and NLP change the game

The force behind the evolution of AI-driven text analytics is Natural Language Processing. It uses a unique combination of algorithms to analyze digital text, such as customer product reviews, to learn the sentiment behind the literal meaning of the words. For example, “sucks” isn’t necessarily bad if you’re analyzing feedback from customers who just bought a vacuum. NLP means not having to explain the context—or the joke.

Narjès Boufaden, the CEO of Montreal-based Keatext, is a computer science engineer with a PhD in NLP. “With old-school text analytics, companies had to come up with 20 or 30 keywords to search. That isn’t good enough anymore,” notes Boufaden, who works with clients like American Express and NASA. “AI identifies the important words on its own, learning in context without the need for anyone to customize a vocabulary of relevant words or phrases for each industry. Then it points to ‘weather vane’ issues you don’t even know exist. It uncovers new insights and new client needs.”

How, exactly? When a client supplies a list of keywords, they’re defining—and limiting—the problem areas beforehand. It’s a twist on the old saying, “If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” In this case, what if there are nails you can’t see? “Deep learning and combining machine learning algorithms (i.e. AI) bypass this limitation,” says Boufaden. In other words, AI and NLP find the invisible nails.

“Reading” between the lines

The less tangible feedback data—the underlying sentiments—is critical. “We’re wired to be emotional creatures and that wiring won’t go away because we have technology,” says Adam Toporek, author of Be Your Customer’s Hero. “Those who are going to win with AI are the ones using it to manage customer emotions and expectations, as opposed to just trying to be more efficient.”

On the phone from Florida, Toporek scoffs at the suggestion that people may resist the idea of AI managing their expectations. “No! Customers only care about results and CX,” he concludes. “Take, for example, weather apps. Do you care that it’s not the weatherman? Of course not. You just want to know if it’s sunny outside.”

And if a customer’s luggage has been misplaced en route to Paris and they complain about it? Using AI-powered text analytics to leverage customer feedback, airlines can discover unexpected insights that will help them manage client expectations and increase brand loyalty. Isn’t that the name of the game?

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