Joyfully Analyzing Voice of the Customer (VoC) with an 'Inside Out' Twist

6 mins

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Harsha Khubwani

July 10, 2023

Just as Pixar's award-winning film "Inside Out" delves into the importance of understanding emotions to navigate through life, businesses too need to decode their customers' emotions. This ability to grasp the emotions and sentiments of customers is crucial, enabling businesses to drive better performance. It is here that understanding and managing Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs play an essential role.

VoC programs echo the central theme of "Inside Out", which beautifully illustrates five core emotions. In a similar way, VoC captures customers' experiences, emotions, and feedback, and this process is vital in establishing a clear understanding of customer needs, wants, and expectations.

In this blog post, our discussion will focus on how businesses can effectively monitor and optimize their VoC programs. We will draw interesting parallels with "Inside Out", illustrating how lessons learned from this amazing movie can be applied to a business scenario for enhanced performance.

Unlocking the Emotional “Inside Out” Journey: Monitoring Your VoC Program

Just as the characters in "Inside Out" influence Riley's actions and decisions. Similarly, by monitoring your VoC program, you can identify the key drivers behind your customers' behavior. You can uncover what motivates their loyalty, what aspects of your product or service they value the most, and what pain points they have during the entire customer journey with your brand.

Here is how the five main characters Joy, Fear, Disgust, Sadness, and Angry can help you monitor your VoC program:

Joy: Promote Positive Customer Experience

Inside Out's character, Joy, is characterized by her efforts to maintain positivity in Riley's life. Similar to this, promoting joy among customers is paramount for businesses. This idea can be captured through your Voice of Customer (VoC) program by monitoring crucial metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT).

These metrics function as effective barometers in evaluating customer delight by analyzing customer interviews, focus groups, and other sources of customer data. They help you pinpoint actions that induce joy in your customers, and provide meaningful data to ensure those actions can be replicated across various aspects of your service delivery.

Fear: Identify Potential Service Pitfalls

Fear, though predominantly negative, plays a key role in preventing Riley from engaging in harmful activities in the movie. Similarly, in business operations, your VoC (Voice of the Customer) program should serve as a tool to identify and understand customer behaviors, fears, and concerns.

Such fears, often manifest in measurements such as the customer churn rate or Average Handle Time (AHT). These metrics can highlight pain points, providing significant insight into factors that might be repelling your customers or unnecessarily lengthening your service time.

Disgust: Understand and Mitigate Negative Experiences

The character of Disgust plays a vital role in shielding Riley from harmful or upsetting situations. This concept finds a parallel in business, where understanding the reasons behind customers' dissatisfaction or frustration is critical.

By monitoring negative feedback, businesses can take preventive action to avoid brand damage. This, in turn, can play a significant role in enhancing and nurturing customer relationships.

Sadness: Empathize with Your Customers

In the movie "Inside Out," the character Sadness significantly contributes to Riley's growth. It teaches her to be more empathetic and understanding. In the same way, businesses should also view adverse scenarios or feedback in the commercial world. This approach should not be seen as unfavorable but rather as an opportunity to gain a better understanding of customer emotions.

Acknowledge it and utilize the negative feedback to make the necessary adjustments to your services. The more a business can empathize with its customers, the better it can cater to their needs and expectations, ultimately improving its level of service.

Anger: Swift Problem Resolution

In the movie, Anger's primary role is to ensure Riley's fairness. He encourages her to demand better conditions when she's being treated unjustly. In the context of real-world businesses, this directly correlates to addressing and resolving customer complaints both swiftly and effectively.

Monitoring the speed and efficiency of your team's problem resolution is crucial. Utilizing metrics such as the Customer Effort Score (CES) can be significantly beneficial. CES specifically measures the ease of interaction from a customer's perspective, thereby providing insights into potential areas of improvement and the behavior of existing customers.

Unlocking the Emotional Headquarters: Optimizing the VoC Program

Incorporating an "Inside Out" perspective into the VoC program helps your business to understand and leverage the emotions you get as a result of customer feedback analysis. Further, it explains the role that emotions play in shaping customer experiences and satisfaction.

By optimizing your VoC program, you can gain deeper insights and make more impactful improvements to enhance customer loyalty and overall business success. Here are 4 ways to optimize your Voice of Customer program:

1. Integrate Emotional VoC into Your Company Culture

In 'Inside Out', the importance of each emotion in decision-making is emphasized. This is perfectly reflected in the workings of an organization, where every department needs to be involved in making informed decisions using Voice of the Customer (VoC) data.

Much like how Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness all play integral parts in shaping Riley's actions and decisions, every facet of a business can greatly benefit from utilizing VoC data. From developing new products, and fine-tuning marketing strategies to enhancing customer programs - when all departments put customer insights at the forefront of their decision-making, the resulting company culture becomes inherently customer-centric and improves customer journey.

2. Continually Improve: Promote Dynamic Growth With Emotions

Looking at 'Inside Out', we find an emphasis on the dynamic nature of emotions and how, despite the problems, it is necessary for overall growth. This concept can be applied within the realms of a business setting, specifically in handling and understanding the Voice of the Customer data.

Riley's emotions in the movie undergo constant fluctuations; similarly, businesses should perpetually assess the VoC data. This continual analysis is essential to identify emerging trends, understand existing challenges, and spot potential opportunities that can help you better align with your customer expectations.

3. Leverage Sophisticated Technology: Identify Hidden Customer Behavioral Patterns

In 'Inside Out', the core memories that power the islands of Riley's personality are stored and managed in an intricate and extremely efficient system, showcasing the importance of technology in organizing and making sense of complex data. Drawing a parallel to a business environment, customer feedback collected through VoC programs can be manifold and multifaceted. This requires advanced data analytics tools to sift through multiple layers of feedback, patterns, and trends.

In the movie, Riley's emotions adjust and learn in accordance with her experiences, arguably showcasing the theme of intelligence and adaptability. Similarly, in the modern business ecosystem, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) can harness the power of VoC data to provide much-needed agility and intelligence.

4. Act on Feedback: Optimize VoC Program With Emotions

'Inside Out', on its surface, is a tale about navigating through the whirlwind of emotions. However, a discerning viewer would realize that listening or merely acknowledging feelings isn't enough, it's the action taken in response that truly counts. For instance, Joy spends most of the movie simply rejecting sadness instead of acting on it.

However, it’s only when she realizes Sadness's importance and acts on this understanding does the story progresses and Riley begins to heal. Similarly, a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program symbolizes more than just attentively listening to what your customers are whispering. It involves deciphering the key messages hidden in those whispers and then turning them into actionable insights, ultimately increasing customer retention rate and customer lifetime value.

Steering Towards Success: Incorporating Emotional Intelligence from 'Inside Out' into VoC Programs

In the movie 'Inside Out,' Riley's emotions serve as the guiding light that helps her navigate through her world. Like these guiding emotions, your VoC program plays a crucial role in understanding the sentiments and needs of your customers. As Riley's emotional characters monitor her reactions and make necessary adjustments to help her cope with her experiences, similarly, businesses should collect customer feedback and monitor the responses through the VoC program.

The aspect of acting on emotions has been presented to be crucial to Riley's character development and overall well-being in the movie 'Inside Out'. When translated into a business perspective, it emphasizes the vitality to devise strategies and efforts based on the customer's voice. This feedback should be thoroughly processed, sorted into categories, and developed into an action plan that spells out concrete steps to be taken in response to the feedback.

The movie emphasizes the vital aspect of balancing all emotions for the ultimate well-being of Riley. When businesses master the art of incorporating customer feedback into their strategies effectively, they can improve performance, much like how understanding and acknowledging all emotions improved Riley's overall well-being. This holistic approach to dealing with customer feedback can foster loyalty and inevitably drive revenue.

Joyfully Analyzing Voice of the Customer (VoC) with an 'Inside Out' Twist

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