What is Voice of the Customer?
CX is defined as the Voice of the Customer. It’s the collection and analysis of customer feedback so that customers’ wants, needs and expectations can be qualitatively and quantitatively assessed.
In other words, Voice of the Customer is a way to learn about your customer’s needs and desires, so that you can improve their experience.
A Voice of the Customer program helps businesses identify areas where they can improve the customer experience by collecting and analyzing customer feedback.
The Voice of the Customer program uses technologies such as Voice of the Customer platforms, sentiment analysis, and natural language processing to capture and analyze feedback. This is a process that constantly uses customer feedback to improve the overall experience.
Why is Voice of the Customer important?
It’s important to listen to your customers so you can improve their experience with your company. happy customers are more likely to keep using your products or services and recommend them to others.
Voice of the Customer programs have grown in popularity and importance in recent years for several reasons:
- It costs five to twenty-five times as much to acquire a new customer as to retain an existing one. Improvements in your customer experience -> higher retention.
- 50% of buyers are happy to share an unsolicited recommendation.
- Prospects find a customer testimonial to be 82% more credible than any marketing material a company can produce.
What are the benefits of Voice of the Customer programs?
What drives this incredible revenue uplift? Voice of the Customer programs yield several benefits, including the ones listed below.
Faster improvements to your customer experience
There are two mechanisms that drive an improvement in your overall customer experience (CX):
- Improvements in your product(s) and
- Improvements in your customer service
Customer feedback programs help team understand the weaknesses in their products and customer service. If you can identify what your weaknesses are, you can take steps to improve them.
By conducting customer surveys and interviews, companies can find out what actions they need to take in order to be well received by customers. They can then make changes accordingly and see if those changes have a positive effect on things like revenue and growth.
Proactive reputation management
Voice of the Customer programs not only help companies understand how their brand is perceived, they also open up a direct discussion between companies and their customers.
A well developed Voice of the Customer program will allow you to:
- Stay abreast of feedback from customers across all channels
- Identify which feedback requires the most urgent responses and prioritize it
- Measure the effectiveness of your response, and iterate accordingly.
This is an upgrade to the helpdesk reporting that companies use to measure how effective different teams and agents are in handling different types of customer interactions. The Voice of the Customer program looks at many different sources of customer feedback, including social media, online reviews, forums, discussion boards, surveys, NPS results, in-product feedback, and call centre data.
Innovate faster than your competition
Voice of the customer programs help to identify the most important needs and desires of the target customer base. More advanced Voice of the Customer programs also use tools like emotion analysis, sentiment analysis and natural language processing to help teams solve for the customer needs that will have the greatest impact on the company’s reputation.
The inclusion of Voice of the Customer data in your product roadmap will help to avoid future development issues by reducing guesswork and human biases.
Create Brand Advocates and Superfans
If you improve your customer’s experience, you will get more positive feedback and less negative feedback. If you receive positive feedback, you will likely see an increase in new and returning customers due to word-of-mouth.
That’s only a part of the opportunity here, though. This means they are passionate about what your company stands for and would genuinely recommend your products or services to a friend or family member A Brand Advocate is someone who genuinely likes your company and what it stands for. They would recommend your products or services to a friend or family member.
Brand Advocates are people who share their positive experiences with your product to others, without expecting anything in return. They are active on social media, forums, discussion boards and review sites. They are loyal to your company. Your most effective sales people can be your Brand Advocates if you know how to identify and work with them.
Improved Retention
Voice of the Customer programs help companies keep their customers by providing feedback about their experience.
customers who have a great experience with a company, product or service are unlikely to shop around when it’s time to re-purchase.
A well developed Voice of the Customer program results in improved customer experiences, which in turn leads to increased customer loyalty. In addition, such a program enables a company to identify potential problems quickly and to take steps to turn a negative customer experience into a positive one.
Increase ROI on Marketing
Voice of the Customer can help you improve your marketing ROI in several ways.
Voice of the Customer programs help to increase the amount of business that is driven by word-of-mouth as opposed to paid sources, such as brand advocates. Involving brand advocates in your marketing strategy can be cost-effective and help new prospects trust your brand. You can do this by creating case studies, testimonials, videos, or blog posts.
Voice of the Customer programs help companies understand customer preferences, including the financial, social, political and environmental impacts on a customer’s buying behavior. As you learn more about these concepts, you can use that information to improve your marketing strategy in the 4 key areas: product, price, promotion, and distribution.
Vastly better employee retention
A best-in-class Voice of the Customer program can improve employee engagement rates by 292%, according to a study by the Aberdeen Group. Again, there are a few mechanisms that contribute to this positive outcome:
- Voice of the Customer programs empower employees to engage with customers directly
- Direct engagement with customers creates greater empathy
- Increased empathy with customers motivates employees to advocate for better customer outcomes
- This advocacy is nurtured and rewarded by customer-centric companies.
A good Voice of the Customer program also makes sure that employee goals match customer experience goals. When the customer is happy, the employee is also happy, leading to improved workplace satisfaction and motivation. This results in less staff turnover and higher employee productivity, both of which lead to greater customer satisfaction.
VoC methodologies to capture customer feedback
1. Surveys
Acquiring Voice of the Customer data can be effectively done through surveys with customers on-site. The surveys conducted help you understand what your customers want and the types of problems they face. Although it is important to always remember, if you do not ask the right questions you will not get the right answers. That’s why pre-planning your surveys is so important.
To achieve the best results, make sure you:
- Keep the questionnaire (and questions) concise.
- Ask questions that are easy to understand and provide the option for straightforward responses (yes/no and multiple-choice work fine).
- Categorize your persona-based surveys for tailored outcomes.
2. Customer interviews
Customer interviews have long been used to collect data about customer experiences. focus groups are commonly used to get feedback about service issues, product attributes, and people’s general impression of a brand. Businesses can interview a single customer or a group of customers with similar attributes to get feedback about their products or services. Although they can be conducted over the phone, they are typically executed in person.
3. Website behavior analysis
Your customers’ behavior on your website is a rich source of customer experience data. You can extract valuable information such as customer heat maps, scroll maps, and even eye-tracking data, all in a matter of minutes – especially if you use a single platform that brings all of that functionality under one roof.
4. Social listening
Customer feedback gathered through social media is some of the best available. It can be used to create a two-way communication channel with customers.
Maintaining a social media presence on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter provides valuable insights into customer concerns.
5. Focus groups
Focus groups are when you get your customers together in a room and ask them to tell you their opinions, thoughts, and feelings about your products or services. A moderator guides the participants of the group through a discussion.
Companies will often use focus groups in order to gain a deeper understanding of their customer’s thoughts and opinions. This is in addition to other methods such as interviews and surveys. If you have more than one person participating in a discussion, it can liven things up and help people come up with new ideas. The qualitative data helps with product improvements and the development of marketing materials.
6. Live chat
Live chat is your customers’ new best friend. Forty-four percent of respondents said they prefer to use live chat for online shopping questions. A live chat feature on your website can be used for customer support and to gather feedback from customers in real-time. By following up with surveys after an event, you can improve customer satisfaction. This makes it an extremely useful tool for capturing customer feedback data.
7. Email
You can have a casual or formal approach to email, depending on what you prefer. You can send emails that are personalized to specific customer segments or even create a template that can be used for your entire customer base. You can always get more information about a particular answer, or include a link to another one of your polls or surveys.
8. Online reviews
Almost 9 out of 10 visitors are reluctant to buy from companies that have negative reviews online. Your online credibility is not just a product of what you create yourself – it also includes any other references to your brand online, particularly online reviews. Analyzing positive and negative customer reviews can help you identify problems that customers may not be comfortable sharing directly.
9. Recorded calls
If you want to use any data from the past, call recordings are a good option. review of how your brand is seen, the kind of complaints your customers have, and what they expect from your brand.
Although it can be a lot of work, it can provide a lot of valuable data. You can use these recordings to see how your customer-facing and support staff are performing and find areas where further training might be needed.
10. SMS
Since most of your customers will always have their smartphones with them, SMS messages are an ideal way to reach them no matter where they are. This text is saying that if you add SMS to your customer feedback program, it will be easier for customers to respond to surveys, which will increase the number of responses you get.
11. Net Promoter Score
The Net Promoter Score is a metric you can use to evaluate customer engagement. It measures customer loyalty by asking if they would recommend the company to a friend or co-worker.
Answers are provided on a scale of 1-10 and segmented into three groups:
- Detractors (0-6): These are your unhappy customers that are unlikely to buy from you again and may even harm your brand reputation by discouraging others from buying from you, too.
- Passives (7-8): These customers are satisfied but not to the extent they can be expected to promote your business.
- Promoters (9-10): These are your most loyal customers and are most likely to refer you to prospective buyers. They typically have a high customer lifetime value.
You need to understand what they’re saying. If you want to provide the best possible experience for your customers and stay competitive in the market, you need to understand what they’re saying, not just listen to it. You have to act on it, too. And the best mechanism for doing that? A well-designed VoC program.
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