The Voice of the Customer You Aren’t Hearing
How you are missing the customer voice, even with call recording
As a SaaS marketing executive, there is one thing I fear more than anything: negative reviews.
It’s because I know every bad review costs the business incalculable sales. It’s also a key sign that we didn’t properly set customer expectations.
Recently, my company received an unexpected negative online review. The customer criticized (in rather lengthy fashion) the product for failing to do something she considered crucial – something that we never intended for the product to do!
The review set off a chain reaction of peeved emails and terse conversations about who was to blame:
- The VP of Marketing stormed across the office and asked the VP of Sales, “What are your sales reps telling prospects?”
- The VP of Sales stomped over to the VP of Product and asked, “Why doesn’t the product have the features the prospect is asking for?”
- The VP of Product charged over to the VP of Marketing and asked, “Why are we marketing features the products doesn’t have?”
To calm the fervor, I called the customer directly and it turns out, in fact, we weren’t clear in our messaging and we had missed some of the unstated expectations of this prospect. Ideally this is done by finding the specific sales call recording and searching for key words to find what the customer said relative to her needs in her own voice. New conversation intelligence is making this easier and faster with simple access to call recordings, fast ways to evaluate them, and improved context.
Ideally this is done by finding the specific sales call recording and searching for key words to find what the customer said relative to her needs in her own voice. At the time of sale, this was considered a success story. A sales rep dealt with questions and obstacles from a customer to close a deal. The problem is that we closed the wrong customer. It became clear it wasn’t as much about what was said as what was not said. We missed the true Voice of the Customer. With unfiltered access to the correct part of the correct conversation:
- We could have heard clearly she wanted the product to replace an existing system that did something completely different than what we designed our application to do.
- We could have coached sales reps on things to explicitly ask prospects to set better expectations and avoid similar situations.
- We could have started qualifying customers better upstream in the marketing process so they never made it to sales.
- We could have decided whether the product should be evolving in a different direction or whether this prospect isn’t our target customer.
One of the most important “voices” comes from the doubts, questions, rejections, excitement and enthusiasm that is part of every sales person’s day - all of which should be easily accessible via sales call recordings, I know. You already do sales call recordings, so does everyone. Old news, right?
Wrong.
If you don’t have a way for sales, marketing, product, and customer care to systematically review sales calls recordings, you aren’t learning.
Is it easy to find them? Who is listening to them and how are they using them? If you don’t have a way for sales, marketing, product, and customer care to systematically review sales call recordings, you aren’t learning. Unlocking the value of the sales call is critical to all areas of the business. So how can you use call recordings and new innovations to start hearing this voice?
- Make it a practice in your organization for sales reps to submit at least two calls a week for coaching – ask for each rep to share their best and worst examples.
- Distribute responsibility for listening to call recordings beyond just sales managers: to product, to marketing, to customer care. Listen to customers who bought different products and those that didn’t buy anything.
- Keep a regular cadence, annotate calls, store best and worst practices in call libraries, and run reports to hear the frequency that phrases are mentioned by sales or by customers.
- Use these data points and “voices” to modify your sales tactics, marketing personas and messaging, and product features.
Understanding customer expectations through call recordings is one of the top ways to inform sales and marketing and prevent negative online reviews. Even more powerful is how call recordings are now being employed more easily to confirm personas, refine messaging, and guide product development.
