In the current customer-dominated economy, your brand strength depends on how better you are than your competitor in delivering customer experiences. Enhancing your customer brand experience consistently requires the right insight into your customer expectations. And the customer doesn’t always say outright what his expectations are. You need to be equipped to listen to your customer’s said and unsaid needs to employ the right efforts and drive the right results.

Here are some strategies and tools to empower your customer support:

The Six Sigma Approach – Six Sigma is a set of practices employed to decrease process, product, or service variability, and deliver only supreme quality to customers. This essence of the approach is to deliver what customers want, exactly. The Six Sigma methodology starts with understanding customer expectations and proceeds to ensure that these expectations are being met at every level through rigorous analysis of every business process. You advance by continuously reducing the variation between your achieved results and preset standards. Six Sigma enables you to identify root causes of variations and drive operational excellence to achieve reduction. Six Sigma operates on the following concepts:

• Aligning processes, customer expectations (obvious, latent, and emerging), and business objectives


• Defining characteristics that customers believe affects quality(critical to quality characteristics/CTQ)


• Measuring process strength to assess its capability to meet customer expectations


• Failing to meet customer expectations(defect)


• Analyzing causes for variation


• Improving variation shrinkage through increased process performance


• Controlling process stability in adherence to standards

Voice of the Customer (VoC) Practices

VoC approach is employed to identify, understand, and prioritize customer needs. This is a cyclic process that gives you in-depth insight into your customer wants and helps you improve accordingly. An effective VoC empowers your Six Sigma to achieve desired results.

You can combine the efficiency of traditional methods of customer surveys, interviews, and feedback with the following techniques to enrich the competence of your VoC program:

Monitor Touch Points 

Every customer interaction is insightful and as such valuable. Monitoring every customer interaction, from an online access to a direct call, can reveal opportunities to create and improve customer experiences.

o Include Customer Insights at Every Project Level – You succeed in addressing your customer needs exactly, as a result.

o Get all Employees Involved - Employees across divisions gain insight into customer requirements as a result, which drives the right innovation.

Measuring VoC Right


• Conduct monthly/quarterly customer surveys as against yearly to get the most recent perspectives of your customers


• Employ automated survey tools to obtain customer feedback after a purchase or an after-sales interaction


• Use text analytics to know what customers are blogging and tweeting about you and saying on your surveys and emails


• Implement quantitative and qualitative research at every stage of project life-cycle to deliver conformity to customer expectations at every level and overall


• Involve your employees in online communities to keep them abreast of customer attitude and behavior

With powerful capabilities come superior results. Integrating technological tools and process strategies into your existing organizational system enhances your customer understanding manifold and creates truly outstanding customer experiences.