1. Lack of executive support to drive change

Being customer-centric is easy to say but hard to do without executive leadership. For example, despite proclamations of being “customer-driven,” a large software company found itself out of touch with consumers who felt the vendor pushed the technology and didn’t pay enough attention to implementation and ease-of-use issues. A comprehensive VOC program identified the issues, but what really mattered was CEO driving action. The key to the company’s success, according to the VOC program leader, was that top executives “believe with heart and soul in the importance of a VOC program and then drive real cultural change.”

2. Garbage in, garbage out

With VOC programs, you’re collecting customer feedback (input) so you can get insights you can act on (output). If you ask customers the wrong questions, that’s just garbage in. If your VOC program is built on faulty logic about what really impacts customer loyalty, you’ll waste time and money making changes that don’t matter, or actually make things worse. A worldwide restaurant chain found, for instance, that while good food was naturally essential, the key differentiator was in fact the “hospitality” of team members. This insight helped the chain make better hiring decisions and invest in training that would improve brand reputation.

3. Employees aren’t motivated to be customer-focused

Employees are people and tend to do things in their own self interests. So it shouldn’t come as a shock if rewards to decrease “average handle time”—a measure of efficiency—motivates call center agents to rush to get customers off the phone. Sadly, these tactics usually don’t save any money because the customer calls back or uses other support channels. Take a tip from Zappos, a popular retailer founded 10 years ago as an online shoe shore. In the Zappos call center, “customer loyalty representatives” are measured on First Call Resolution (FCR) and rewarded for the quality of conversations, not speed.

4. Listening with only one ear

Analyzing quantitative feedback from customers is like listening to customers with only ear. The other ear should be used to understand customers through the unstructured and often unsolicited feedback they provide. To start, text analytics can help listen to customers via their written comments on relationship and transaction surveys. But many other sources can provide unsolicited feedback, such as web site forms, email messages, chat messages and call center agent logs. One U.S airline was able to tie comments to a specific aircraft or even a seat number to help find and fix problems that have a direct impact on the customer experience.

5. Ignoring social voices

Consumer usage of social media has exploded in recent years, including blogs, review sites, Facebook and more recently, Twitter. This provides lots of options to rave about great experiences or vent about bad ones. Now, it’s true that social media is a chaotic and noisy world where it can be challenging to “separate the wheat from the chaff.” And besides, how do you know if the complainers are really your customers? Despite these challenges, can you really afford to ignore social voices?

Avoid these five pitfalls and you’ll be well on your way to success with your Voice of the Customer program.

When times get tough, it’s tempting to put “customer-centricity” on the back burner. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Below are a few tips on how to weather the economic storm:

Reach Out
Do you know what’s driving your customer decisions now? If not, reach out to your customers and have a real dialog with them. You may find that they’re looking for a better deal, but dig deeper and you’ll discover that experiences are still important and can swing decisions in your favor and help retain customers. Show them you care. Learn what’s most important in the solutions they need. These conversations will not only help you make better decisions during the downturn but will also strengthen relationships that will pay off in the future.

Fix Lose-Lose Problems
Budgets cuts may be a painful reality, so instead of building a customer experience plan around growing revenue, build it around efficiency and retention. For example, advanced analytics tools can help you ‘mine’ customer feedback to get to the root cause of what’s frustrating your customers and costing you money.

Personalize the Business Case
When it comes time to allocate funds, many customer-centric champions find themselves face-to-face with executives asking: “Why should I do this?” and “Who else is on board?” In other words, is the initiative going to help a key functional area, and is that manager willing to back the effort? To succeed, get the key people involved to believe that the project will be personally helpful to them.

Now What?
Once you have funding, the next step is to consistently deliver a more effective and efficient experience. As part of this, remember to give appropriate tangible and intangible rewards to encourage the behavior you seek.

Bob Thompson is CEO of CustomerThink Corp., an independent research and publishing firm focused on customer-centric business management, and founder of CustomerThink.com.

(Adapted from my article “Building the Case for Customer-Centricity: How to Make Your Customers and the CFO Happy“)