What is outer loop VoC? Outer loop VoC permanently removes pebbles from all customers’ shoes. Outer loop refers to closed-loop communication with customers who have provided feedback to you. In outer loop VoC, you tell customers about their top issues you will solve, promise a date for sharing your progress, and keep customers informed about how you are preventing recurrence of these issues.

7 ways YOU can influence this:

1. Identify customer issue trends (data mining, dispositioning, etc.)

2. Share insights with groups who originate or perpetuate issues.

3. Show them the issues’ costs to you and customers.

4. Facilitate a 2-hour root cause exercise.

5. Guide their action plan to stop root causes.

6. Influence full deployment of the actions.

7. Celebrate action progress in recognition and compensation.

Not new: Both loops have been in practice since the late 1980s! Inner loop is more popular: it’s quicker, easier, and feeds business models of CX tech firms. However, inner loop can exhaust energy. Inner loop acknowledges a pebble or removes it for 1 customer at a time, usually as a temporary fix, without benefitting all customers. And when CX issues recur, ROI of inner loop is questionable.

Reality check: As an employee, do you want managers to acknowledge your concern and make a quick fix, yet continue to pursue business as usual? Or do you prefer managers to get to the root cause of your concern and prevent recurrence forever? That’s the difference between inner loop and outer loop.

Allocate at least 50% of your energy and resources to outer loop.

7 ways outer loop maximizes value:

1. Shifts value-rescuing to value-creating. Save precious budget!

2. Value-creating builds current and future growth.

3. Frees-up customers to be more productive with you.

4. Makes non-customer-facing groups more customer-centric. (they throw less stuff over the wall to customer touchpoints)

5. Improves employee experience in customer-facing roles.

6. Shapes lifetime value mindset companywide.

7. Makes our society less bogged down and more prosperous.

See also: Customer Experience Playbook

This is a glimpse into what you gain from ClearAction Experience Leadership Mastery.

What You Can Do to Master Experience Leadership

1. Get a sounding board for work you have underway.
2. Request a rapid action template session to kickstart your progress in any area.
3. Enroll your senior leadership team and board in our 2-hour C-Suite Guide to CX Growth working session.
4. Enrich your experts’ wisdom in this direction via Experience Leadership for Experts and Executives.
5. Redirect your CX/EX/PX strategy to this sensible approach by encouraging all experience managers (customer, employee, partner experience) to learn the full spectrum of skills needed: Foundational, Intermediate, Ongoing.

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