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Customer Experience

VOC vs. AOC | CX Weekly with Dan Gingiss

Welcome to another edition of CX Weekly, where Dan Gingiss shares customer experience tips! Watch the video by clicking above, or read the transcript below!

Hi everyone, I’m Dan Gingiss and today I want to talk to you about the difference between VOC or Voice of the Customer and AOC, Actions of the Customer. No, I’m not talking about the New York congresswoman. I’m talking about the fact that what customers say and what customers do can often be very different.

It’s critical that we look at both pieces of feedback and put them together to get the full story.

Now, you’re probably familiar with VOC. Perhaps you do surveys of your customers at various places or you track something like NPS (Net Promoter Score) or some other customer satisfaction score. So you’re kind of used to the VOC part. I would also put qualitative feedback into that category. So when you do a call listening or when you get written feedback from customers or readings and reviews, this all fits into voice of the customer and them telling you what you’re doing well and should be doing more of, and what you need to do better or do less of.

The part that a lot of companies miss is the AOC part. This is the Actions of the Customer. This answers the question, “what are they actually doing?”

Here we look for data like website analysis and looking at where people are clicking and what kinds of journeys they’re going on, how long they stay on certain pages and what articles they’re reading, etc. This helps us to understand what their actual experience is, not what they’re telling us they want, not what they’re telling us they think about the experience, but what’s actually happening.

Why do we need to look at this? Well, when we see what people are actually doing, we can enhance the experience based on that. One of the things that I always suggest is that if you see that it takes somebody three clicks or taps to get somewhere on your website or your mobile app, try to bring it down to two. If it’s already taking to bring it down to one. And I’m going to tell you a quick story about how we’ve got it down to zero at Discover Card.

When I was at Discover, the credit card company, I ran the website. We had 50 million logins every month. One of the things that we learned from Actions of the Customer reporting was that the number one reason people came to the website was to look at the recent transactions. But it turned out that that was buried several clicks deep. We decided to bring a Facebook-like feed to the home page. So when you logged in with your username and password and you got to that homepage with your balance and your rewards amount, you immediately saw a feed of your last 10 transactions.

Something amazing happened right after we launched this. Thousands of people logged in, didn’t do anything and logged back out. Now, if we were Amazon, we would not be happy about that, right? That’s called bounce rate and it’s usually a bad thing.

But for us, it was actually wonderful news because it meant that we had delivered exactly what the customer wanted. Who wakes up in the morning wanting to come to their credit card website? Not anyone that I’ve met. So we felt that our job was to make that experience as quick and seamless as possible. We didn’t want to bombard people with ads or try to get them to sign up for something they weren’t interested in. We just wanted them to get to their transactions and leave and enjoy the rest of their day.

Not surprisingly, our customer satisfaction scores skyrocketed. And that was the year that Discover finally dethroned American Express and won the J.D. Power Award for customer satisfaction.

This stuff works.

So, to recap, here’s what you need to do. Take your VOC, your voice of the customer, and your AOC, your actions of the customer. Look at them together for the full picture on designing your user experience or customer experience.

If you’d like to learn more, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel, visit my website, pre-order my new book, listen to my podcast, watch my weekly live show, or sign up for my newsletter!

Related: Call Listening

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