The voice of the customer (VoC) is no longer for the elite brands – it’s a critical component of customer success strategy.
What is the voice of the customer program? It captures and analyzes what customers say about a specific product or service. By listening to the voice of the customer, brands can make meaningful improvements. One benefit of VoC is that it taps into customer problems, preferences, and complaints. Recently, the SaaS industry embraced the need for VoC to become customer-centric. That way, brands can better understand the challenges customers face as they offer the service. According to qualtrics, including a VoC program in your business strategy boosts the customer retention rate by 55%. Not to mention, customers are likely to buy from companies with good remarks from other customers.
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How to create a strong voice of the customer program
Customers expect products and services to perform according to their needs. Additionally, they want a personalized and emphatic service. Here are a few steps to creating a VoC program:
Create a strong strategy, determine your goals and deadlines
A strong strategy aims at attracting and delivering excellent customer value. You should know your goals and meet the deadlines. Start by gathering actionable feedback by asking the right questions.
Your roadmap should highlight what you want to achieve and how to measure success. Along with your business goals, you should prioritize the data sources you want to achieve and plan on the areas that need improvements. As you develop the pilot program, state your VOC needs and ensure your vision statement is straightforward.
Be prepared to act on insights gained through VoC analytics.
Gather product & customer feedback
The customer data will help you collect relevant information to uncover continually occurring problems. Clearly, raw data won’t work unless there’s feedback. If you operate on guesswork, the program won’t deliver. Some of the methods you can use to collect customer feedback are:
Regular surveys
Online surveys help to collect opinions of customers with open-ended questions. Generally, surveys can be emailed to customers after a purchase. Your customers can also access them as pop-ups on the website. The aim is to gauge customer satisfaction and determine whether their needs are being met.
Surveys can include a questionnaire or a few questions posted immediately after signing up. To that end, you can filter the customers you want to get more details from. Surveys are the best way to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback along with open-ended questions.
Online reviews
Monitoring your business reputation on the web is a critical aspect of gathering feedback. Some customers will give 5-star feedback; others will leave a negative review. Another way to get unsolicited customer reviews is using third-party websites. You can use sites like TrustPilot and Consumer Reviews.
Interview customers
This is one of the most effective techniques for gathering time-sensitive data. Thankfully, you can conduct interviews via phone or video chat. The interviewers also have an opportunity to pull out additional insights. Maybe there are some issues that you want to come out organically. It can also be an opportunity to nurture individual customer relationships.
With customer interviews, you can hear their opinions aloud and see the body language. But to generate statistically significant results, you should aim for 50-100 people. As you conduct the interview, you must listen more and talk less.
Social media and forums
Social media allows for a two-way, informal, and real-time conversation. This is where most customers often vent out and praise service experiences.
When you monitor how customers talk, you get an unfiltered view of feedback. You can also use online forums like Quora and Reddit.
Conduct focus groups
Just like online interviews, customer interviews can be done in groups. A moderator presides over a discussion about a specific product. It’s the best strategy to conduct an exploratory approach. This is where you ask questions you’ve never thought of. With focus groups, you see how customers perceive a specific product or service.
Sometimes, focus groups are called blinded surveys where customers don’t disclose the company.
Why is customer success documentation important?
Customer success documentation can help your business in many ways. It boosts customer efficiency, so there’s less confusion. Secondly, it eliminates hours of rewriting content you already have. This reduces the organization’s training time for new employees. Even better, documentation boosts your confidence and efficiency of operations, so you can prepare for your customer calls.
The goal of gathering feedback is to understand customers’ relationships in your business. For a well-rounded insight, you may want to capture both structured and unstructured data.
Gather employee feedback
If you want to know how to improve customer experience, why not get guidance from employees? Since they interact with customers daily, employees give the overall brand experience. Here is the catch – you need a cross-sectional team to improve customer experience. It’s worth mentioning that empowered employees solve their feedback on the spot.
One tactic to get honest feedback from employees is using the traditional suggestion box. Since the employees leave anonymous feedback, there’s no fear of retaliation. You should place the box strategically, where workers can slip the feedback on their way home.
How employee feedback can be helpful in a voice of customer program
Employees have hands-on experience with customers. They can highlight the processes and procedures that are not working. Don’t make your employees feel like giving negative feedback can result in demotion or punishment. Both positive and negative feedback will boost employee-customer engagement.
For example: if a customer says he doesn’t like a specific product, you can reward him for giving valuable insight. After all, you want your business to succeed.
Employees know what they can do to deliver according to their customers’ expectations. By soliciting feedback from frontline employees, businesses can know the tools needed to enhance customer experience.
When done tactfully, employee feedback ensures the teams work effectively as they deliver their goals.
Thoroughly analyze the collected data
Now that you’ve gathered the customer complaints and suggestions, you can implement them into your business.
You should analyze the common issues that relate to customers like sales, retention, etc. It’s critical that you identify key metrics like pricing and customer experience. Most VoC processes focus on customer needs and product requirements. Now that you know the pain points, you should analyze the data.
When customers give responses, it’s in the form of unstructured data. You can use this information to understand what matters most.
Manually analyze the feedback
While the manual approach is plagued by human bias, it’s easier to implement.
Analyze data with Artificial intelligence
With artificial intelligence, you’ll better understand your customers. You can analyze thousands of texts as you quantify the various themes. The best artificial intelligence software will organize the sentiments of customers for an unbiased view. AI-powered analytics also give insights into unstructured data.
Use thematic feedback analytics
This is a great tool for your VoC program. It uncovers critical information in your customer feedback. Thematic feedback tool analyses data into different categories, so you can see what is important. This helps to identify goals, needs, and customer pain points. And because it puts data in one place, the company can respond to valuable insights. This tool is easier, faster, and more organized.
Special tools
Hubspot
This tool captures critical key performance indicators and everything you need to hear from your customers. It has a customizable voice of the customer template to help analyze key factors and create a seamless customer experience.
InMoment
It provides an in-depth voice of customer data and lets your team drill down to user experience. You get a holistic view of how people interact with your brand from the customer data you collect. InMoment uses data and technology to bring the human aspect into your business.
Medallia
Medalia makes it easy for businesses to capture signals and use large data. This software has multiple layers for customers and employees. In addition, it allows you to group customers based on contributing factors like social media, discounts, coupons, etc.
Clarabridge
It focuses on artificial intelligence to capture customer data. This tool also enhances customer experience through email channels, surveys, and calls. By actively listening to what customers have to say, you can track customer loyalty. Therefore, you can increase revenue from local purchases.
By analyzing customer data, your company will understand:
- How to engage customers
- The metrics to use to enhance customer experience
- The services that work for the customers
- What customers like about their products and services
Work with the insights to implement the improvements
Collecting and analyzing the data is not enough – you need to create actionable insights. The more data you collect, the better the insights.
Based on the analysis of the feedback, you can prioritize roadmap features and price changes. Since the voice of the consumer program empowers the users, you should prioritize feedback based on issues.
For example, if there are complaints about theft of personal data, you should identify the loopholes and put a few security measures in place. Spokeo can help with identity theft protection. This tool analyzes customer data based on customer location, contact information, and social media accounts.
Your goal is to translate the findings into a real business and improve customer experience. However, the VoC is more than just identifying problems. You learn what customers’ value most through predictive modeling. In particular, social media can uncover what people want but your business doesn’t offer.
Lastly, you should describe how these insights can transform the company, boost revenue, improve customer satisfaction, etc.
Conclusion
In today’s digital age, your customers expect the products and services to perform to their needs. To keep up with their demands, you should invest in a voice of the customer program that employs a closed-loop process.
Since you’re in business for your customers, you should listen to what they want to say about your brand. The worst mistake you can ever make is to assume what your customers want. But when you engage them, you establish better connections.
While building a successful VoC may look like an uphill task, it can help you save thousands of dollars down the road. Keep in mind that the voice of the customer is an ongoing program – it helps to gauge customer interests and market trends.
About Carson Derrow
