Editor's note: Howard L. Lax is vice president, consulting, GfK customer loyalty, at GfK Custom Research of North America, New York. He can be reached at howard.lax@gfk.com. This article appeared in the May 7, 2012, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.  

 

Having written an article last year about how not to conduct voice-of-the-customer (VOC) research, I've often been asked for the flip side: What are the right things to do when designing an effective program? A list of things not to do is scarcely much of a blueprint.

 

So far I have begged off (that is, practiced laziness) and advised doing the opposite of the seven deadly sins. After all, that is how the seven heavenly virtues originally were defined - as the converse of the seven deadly sins. I have always known, however, that positively specifying the to-dos to design an effective VOC research program requires more than simply passively avoiding the don't-dos.

 

Absolution complete, here are the seven heavenly virtues of VOC research and why they are essential to the effective design, implementation and follow-though on any customer loyalty or customer experience research program.

 

Commitment

Your VOC program must be committed to meeting clearly-defined business objectives that direct the research and implementation.

This may seem like an obvious baby step but the frequency with which companies have VOC initiatives built in a proverbial vacuum, without commitment to specific business objectives, continues to stun me. At the risk of stating the obvious, charting a course requires a starting point and a destination. Repeat after me: The research is not the objective. The research is merely a tool that should be motivated and directed by the business goals. Absent a business vision, the research is a meandering waste of time and money - flipping a coin would be quicker and cheaper (and probably have a small...