I am the proud father of three children, the oldest two (8 and 10) play Little League Baseball. I was lucky enough this year to manage the team for my 8 year old and assist on the team for my 10 year old (next year, thank the gods of baseball and busy parents, they should be on the same team). One of the things we humans naturally do is look for similarities and differences in our day-to-day experiences. It’s part of what helps us to make sense of the world and, early on, to survive: If a certain plant turns out to be poisonous, we’re likely to avoid eating other plants with similar characteristics in the future.

Perhaps my mind is overly attuned to this type of thinking (I’m certain in my undergraduate courses in English at UCLA, I wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of two - three million essays and papers doing ostensibly the exact same thing) but as the Little League season winds down (coincidentally along with this occasional series), I find myself thinking about the following realities of both coaching a little league team and trying to drive change off of a VOC program:

Most of the time we talk about “change initiatives” as giant, global, enterprise-wide projects that take years and face dozens if not hundreds of hurtles and more often than not struggle to succeed. And most of the time they are.

But for many of us, taking the initiative to improve our companies begins on a much smaller scale, within the realm where we can affect direct control. If you are striving to make an impact on your organization below the radar, here are a few key strategies for you to consider …

Everybody knows it is hard to drive change and a tens-of-thousands of people think they know why (just search Amazon.com’s book listing for “driving change”). In this post we list four of the common broad, general reasons change programs fail … and 1 or 2 specific examples for each about how a VOC program can help overcome that particular obstacle.

Here is an example of a small change that had far-reaching implications for one company.

Getting an organization to change can take a long time, even when the CEO is fully aware of a problem and committed to fixing it. A Voice of the Customer program from Knowledge Wave can help both by identifying problems before they spiral out of control and understanding the best places to start making changes.

When I first started in my current role, I was surprised at the number of customer who very consciously chose to not tie customer feedback to individual employee performance measures and compensation. As a rough guess it was about 50% of all our new business. That being said, within a year of the feedback program being implemented, those customers had generally changed their mind and started to include surveys as part of agent scorecards and performance metrics.

Read this entry to find out why ... and what you should be careful about when you do decide to tir customer feedback to agent compensation.

Being in my job, I can’t help but focus on how companies treat myself and the people around me … both the good and the bad. While we will use this forum to share some of those stories, we welcome your experiences as well.

Click on “Comment” below to share a particularly good story … or email us at vocblog@knowledge-wave.com.

In general we like to keep this blog focused on the positive side of customer experience: Things that go well or how to help them go better. But every once in a while we have to shake our heads and wonder what (or if) the company was thinking.

Got a story to share? Email us at vocblog@knowledge-wave.com and we’ll share it.

In general we like to keep this blog focused on the positive side of customer experience: Things that go well or how to help them go better. But every once in a while we have to shake our heads and wonder what (or if) the company was thinking.

Got a story to share? Email us at vocblog@knowledge-wave.com and we’ll share it.