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In your business, you need information about your customers’ pain points, preferences, requirements, and most importantly their feedback.
Now think this way- to know about them, you need customer data. There can be two options. You either have mountains of data about your customers or barely any at all. Regardless of any such scenario, you’re left grappling with the same challenge—you will not get meaningful, actionable insights. Sounds scary? Dont worry. Why don’t you ask your customers directly? Well, welcome to the world of Voice of the Customer (VoC) methodology.
Successful companies create products that cater to customer needs, offer outstanding service, and tailor various sales and marketing strategies to send valuable messages. To excel in these areas, you must need deep insights into your customer base. While demographic data and general market research provide some clues, they fall short of revealing what your specific customers think about your company or what they truly need.
This is where voice of the customer programs shine. By gathering targeted feedback directly from your customers, these VoC programs help businesses enhance customer experiences, uncover new trends and opportunities, and of course boost sales. Sounds interesting? Let’s read more to understand what VoC programs are all about and how you can implement one successfully.
Voice of the Customer (VoC) is precisely what it sounds like: paying attention to your customers. But here is one proper definition for you!
The Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a structured approach aimed at capturing customers’ needs, requirements, and perceptions about your product offerings.
VoC methods involves collecting and analyzing customer feedback to directly enhance products and customer experiences. This approach ensures that customer responses are not only heard but are also used as a driving force for continuous improvement and innovation.
Voice of the Customer (VoC) methodology is a structured approach used to gather and analyze customer feedback.
VoC methodology involves various techniques such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social media monitoring to collect both quantitative and qualitative data, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the customer experience.
The famous online knowledge resource platform Business2Community released an article highlighting how companies can achieve significant results by implementing Voice of Customer strategies such as:
Up to 86% of consumers are ready to pay more for an enhanced customer experience. So, how can you ensure they receive it? The answer lies in your customer feedback. Let’s explore how implementing a Voice of Customer (VoC) program can significantly benefit your company.
The best way to gather the voice of the customer feedback depends on what you want to achieve, your budget, and your team’s capability. Here are several methods to gather valuable insights directly from your customers.
More than 41% of customers currently anticipate live chat availability on websites, valuing its immediate interaction advantages.
Live chat is a valuable tool that enables customers to connect with your business in real-time and provide feedback on your organization, products, or any issues they encounter. You can configure live chat to automatically pop up in response to specific customer actions, such as spending too much time on the website, and offering timely assistance when needed.
The live chat tools also allow you to conduct pre-chat surveys, gather valuable insights before the conversation even begins, get instant customer feedback after ending any live chat session, and measure important KPIs. This feedback can then be used to enhance your website or improve your offerings, ensuring a better overall customer experience.
Best live chat tools:
Surveys and questionnaires are widely used VoC methods. They can be distributed online, via email, or in person and cover a broad range of topics, from customer satisfaction to product feedback. Make sure your questions are clear and concise to obtain accurate responses.
Best VoC survey tools:
Monitoring social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter lets you see what customers are saying about your brand in real-time. Tools like social listening software can help track mentions, sentiments, and trends, providing immediate and actionable feedback.
While this method is effective for gathering feedback, identifying trends, and creating narratives, it can be more challenging to convert this into quantitative data. However, the advantage is that you receive unfiltered feedback directly from your customers.
Best social media monitoring tools:
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a tool used to measure customer loyalty. Created by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems, NPS understands customer sentiment by asking a simple question: “How likely are you to recommend our business to others?” This straightforward question helps your business understand overall customer satisfaction and loyalty, providing valuable insights into your customer relationships.
Useful tools for calculating NPS:
Interviews are another good voice of customer methods of collecting customer feedback, alongside focus groups and surveys. They can be conducted via email, phone, or in person. Many customers appreciate interviews, seeing them as an easy way to build trust and strengthen their relationship with the brand. This approach allows for follow-up questions and deeper exploration of specific issues, providing qualitative data that uncovers underlying problems if any, and motivations.
Your website serves as an excellent platform for conducting voice of the customer research. In addition to using live chat and online surveys, you can gather valuable insights by analyzing customer behavior on your site. By pinpointing navigation obstacles, you can enhance the overall user experience (UX).
Leveraging website feedback tools such as Google Analytics provides comprehensive traffic analysis, measures bounce rates, and offers features like heatmaps and scroll maps. These tools enable you to track user behavior at every stage of the customer journey, identify where users drop off, and optimize the online customer experience accordingly.
Best website monitoring tools:
Focus groups are gatherings where customers engage in in-person discussions, guided by a facilitator, to share their expectations and experiences openly. These sessions play a vital role in the exploratory voice of customer research, offering a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiment and the underlying reasons behind their opinions.
The qualitative data obtained in focus groups is often unstructured, making it more difficult to analyze compared to data gathered from online surveys. So you need to record these sessions to create transcripts that can be used for voice of customer analysis.
Best tools for focus groups:
Studies reveal that a whopping 90% of consumers check reviews prior to making retail purchases, with 72% referring to multiple reviews. Remember one thing! Customers write online reviews when they are extremely satisfied or deeply dissatisfied. Both types of reviews offer valuable insights into customer loyalty and preferences. So, it is advisable to get your business verified on Google and maintain an active social media presence.
Although online reviews may seem daunting, they help a lot in your voice of customer research. Platforms like G2 Crowd, Finances Online, TrustRadius, and Capterra allow businesses to collect VoC insights without the need to individually approach customers.
After collecting online customer reviews, you can:
Every customer interaction, whether it’s a simple support call, product demo, or sales pitch, contains valuable insights. Conversations through sales emails or customer support calls highlight key concerns customers have when they are closely examining or using your products. By running text analytics on transcripts from these emails and recorded calls, you can decode the voice of the customer in their own words. Recorded calls and emails offer a comprehensive view of how customers perceive your brand, their opinions, and expectations of your company.
Getting detailed feedback from recorded customer support calls and emails can help in:
Many times, you may visit customers to find out how they are liking your products or services. In networking events or other personal meetups in their own environments, ask customers about their opinions. Such personal visits help you to find out whether they are getting benefitted from your services or not.
How to proceed here? Here are some ideas for you:
Well, this is not an option, rather it is a must to have for collecting VoC data. Collecting feedback through different online forms is a great scalable method to understand customer preferences, thoughts and pain points.
Make it a point to place feedback forms on important pages of your website. So that customer can share their feedback whenever they feel like. You must create those forms with to-the-point and relevant questions so that customers can provide answers that are actually valuable for your business.
Pro Tips:
It is one of the best methods of collecting VoC data. Nothing is better than monitoring how customers are using your product and what results they are getting at last. User testing is a great way to understand whether your service is actually solving their problems or not.
But how to do it? Here the real users will use your product and the observers from your company will monitor how they are using it and what is the final result. Based on the qualitative and quantitative data, you can do further improvements if required.
This is a comparatively old method of collecting VoC data but useful in some areas. Suggestion box both in the form of online and physical is a good idea to collect feedback and new ideas from your customers. You never know, you may get new innovative ideas for your business from that pandora box.
Obtaining desirable and reliable results from the collected VoC data requires strategic thinking. Therefore, it is essential to carefully plan your Voice of the Customer program. Here’s a detailed guide for each step.
When planning a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, start by determining your objectives. You might want to understand how customers perceive your brand, test a new product or service concept, or learn more about customer behaviors. Clearly define what you hope to achieve from the feedback.
Once you’ve established the goal of your Voice of the Customer (VoC) research, choosing the most suitable technique becomes easier. Whether you opt for qualitative or quantitative methods, the next step is to develop your VoC questions. Utilize your chosen methodology to gather and document customer feedback.
According to Gartner, by 2025, 60% of organizations with Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs will incorporate voice and text analysis alongside traditional surveys. Investing in customer feedback software can streamline your survey processes and enhance data analysis. With such tools, you can easily set up surveys and distribute them to your target customers through various channels.
Additionally, certain AI-powered tools come equipped with sentiment analysis capabilities, enabling you to pinpoint words or phrases in survey responses that reflect customers’ feelings toward your brand or products. This advanced functionality not only offers more profound insights but also enhances your understanding of customer sentiments.
The goal of this step is to analyze the collected data and interpret the results. Ideally, the final report will address your initial questions. Occasionally, you may discover answers to questions you hadn’t thought to ask. Use digital tools where appropriate. Depending on your VoC methodology, you may manually review qualitative responses, analyze quantitative data, or use a combination of both approaches.
Thanking your customers who have invested their valuable time to complete your VoC surveys is a very important step in demonstrating that you value their feedback. To truly resonate with your customers, tailor your follow-up communications based on their specific responses.
With your thorough voice of customer research to understand what is and isn’t working for your business, now you are all set to create an effective customer experience strategy. By analyzing the data, you can identify strengths and weaknesses in your current offerings. To enhance your business outcomes, it’s essential to make adjustments to your products, services, and processes based on these findings. This approach ensures that your strategy is tailored to meet customer needs and improve overall satisfaction.
The voice of customer analysis aims to identify and monitor trends in customer sentiment based on which you can design an action plan to improve the customer experience. Businesses assess the success of their VoC programs using a combination of direct and indirect methods. Let’s explore this in detail.
To effectively measure the voice of the customer, it’s important to evaluate if your original planning, approach, conclusions, and subsequent actions achieved the desired results. Ask yourself:
The KPIs of the direct method include:
Here, to evaluate the impact of your VoC efforts, monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer churn, customer acquisition, customer retention, and sales volume. If you observe improvements in these areas that aren’t linked to other business activities or market forces, it’s likely that your VoC initiatives are making a positive difference.
The KPIs of the indirect method include:
Your voice of customer analysis methods will vary based on the feedback collection process you select. When analyzing VoC data, be sure to:
Evaluate the Response Rates: It is an important aspect of evaluating the effectiveness of your voice of the customer programs. High response rates indicate strong customer engagement, while low response rates may suggest issues with survey design or distribution methods.
Identifying Common Trends and Themes: It is a key part of analyzing Voice of Customer (VoC) data. This process helps you understand the overarching issues, needs, and preferences of your customers.
Analyze Qualitative Data: To process qualitative data for Voice of Customer (VoC) analysis, start by collecting and organizing customer feedback from various sources like surveys, interviews, and social media. Clean the data by removing duplicates. Next, assign codes to each piece of feedback to categorize themes or topics such as customer service or product quality. Use data analysis tools to help identify trends and key insights quickly.
Analyze Quantitative Data: Collect numerical feedback from different surveys and metrics like customer satisfaction scores. Clean the data, then use statistical tools to analyze and identify patterns and trends. Visualize the results with charts and graphs to interpret and generate insights on customer preferences and areas for improvement.
The voice of the customer methodology tools help businesses collect, analyze, and act on the customer feedback loop to improve their product offerings and customer satisfaction. Here are the 6 popular VoC tools and their key features to look into:
REVE Chat is an AI-powered omnichannel VoC tool that offers instant assistance on your web, mobile, and social media platforms like Facebook, Viber, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. It allows you to collect real-time customer feedback after each live chat session and gather important customer details through fully customized pre-chat survey forms.
Key Features:
You can experience all these features with REVE Chat’s 14-day free trial. SIGN UP today and start enhancing your customer service.
HubSpot is a comprehensive VoC tool designed to help businesses manage customer service, improve customer satisfaction, and build stronger relationships with their clients. It integrates seamlessly with the broader HubSpot ecosystem, providing a unified platform for all your customer service needs.
Key Features:
Zonka Feedback is an AI-powered CX platform that enables businesses to listen to the voice of their customers, act on the insights in real time, and improve the overall customer experience. This platform offers multi-channel, multi-location, and multi-language support to help you listen to your customers anytime, anywhere. Its AI-powered analytics help unlock hidden nuances in customer feedback at every interaction, automatically pass the issues to the right team/person, take the required action, and close the feedback loop.
Key Features
Medallia is a leading VoC tool designed to help businesses capture, analyze, and act on customer feedback from multiple channels. Then they can transform these customer feedback into actionable strategies, driving better customer experiences and enhancing overall business performance. Medallia also allows you to group customers based on their behaviors and factors like (using coupons, getting discounts, or clicking on social media links) to analyze their experiences.
Key Features:
Verint’s VoC software equips businesses with the tools and insights needed to turn customer feedback into actionable strategies. It also provides automated analysis to connect different data sources, reducing the chance of missing important customer information.
Key Features:
AskNicely simplifies your customer feedback collection using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) method. With this tool, you can gather feedback through SMS, emails, or other web responses. It aims to offer quick insights to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through continuous feedback loops. Moreover, AskNicely seamlessly integrates with your existing CRM systems and also works seamlessly with other support programs for enhanced functionality.
Key Features:
Here is a list of VoC questions that can be used and customized based on the specific goals and objectives of your business, as well as the industry and target audience. These questionnaires will help you to gather insights into customer preferences, their satisfaction levels, areas for improvement, and overall experiences with your product/service.
Businesses can integrate VoC into their operations by establishing a customer-centric culture, involving their employees in the feedback process, using technology to collect and analyze data, and continuously monitoring and acting on customer feedback.
The most common challenges include:
It’s recommended to gather VoC data at regular intervals to ensure that you have a consistent understanding of the customer needs, trends, and preferences. The frequency may range from quarterly to semi-annually, or even annually, depending on the nature of your business.
Communicating the VoC details effectively within the organization is important for driving change and fostering a customer-centric culture. This can be achieved through regular reporting, presentations, workshops, and interactive sessions with all the managers across various departments.
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Suvashree Bhattacharya is a researcher, blogger, and author in the domain of customer experience, omnichannel communication, and conversational AI. Serving as a content marketing strategist at REVE Chat, she develops contextual and interesting content for customers from different industries and segments like customer service, customer satisfaction, engagement, messaging platforms, etc. Passionate about writing and designing, she pours her heart out in writeups that are detailed, interesting, engaging, and more importantly cater to the requirements of the targeted audience. Her interests include reading, painting, and traveling.
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