Voice of Customer (VOC) is a term used to refer to a customer’s opinions, thoughts, and perceptions about a company’s product, service, or overall experience.
The term VOC has come to signify the practice of actively collecting customer feedback from different sources and measuring it to understand their wants and needs better.
It’s just one bad experience for 58% of consumers to stop doing business with a company. That’s why your business needs to be open to feedback and implement the process to collect the voice of customers.
Active listening to the VOC enables you to measure customer satisfaction, make required product and service improvements, and ensure a better customer experience.
If you’re a business wanting to leverage these benefits, this article is meant for you!
In this article, you’ll discover what’s meant by the Voice of Customer, what the benefits are, how to collect it, as well as analyze it and ways to overcome associated challenges.
Benefits of Collecting the VOC
Capturing Voice of Customer comes with a handful of perks. You can gather VOC to use it to enhance their business operations strategically. You can gain valuable customer insights about your customers that can help you make business decisions and create strategies.
Foster Better Customer Relationships
Collecting the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is an important aspect of customer relationship management. It will help your businesses understand and improve customer experiences.
By gathering customer feedback through various channels such as surveys, online reviews, social media, etc., you can gain valuable insights into what your customers need, what they like and dislike, and how they perceive their overall experience with the company.
This information can improve products, services, and the overall customer experience. It leads to building stronger and more positive relationships with customers.
Boosts Revenue
Voice of Customer facilitates you with a deep understanding of consumers’ desires and pain points.
It lets you tailor your products and services to meet the market’s needs better. Thus, you can ensure increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, increased revenue.
Improve Products or Services
The Voice of Customer can also help you identify areas for improvement and make necessary changes to increase customer retention.
For example, suppose your customers consistently complain about long wait times in customer service lines. In that case, you can take the necessary steps to improve your customer service processes and reduce wait times.
In addition, the information collected through VOC also educates you about what your customers want and how they feel about the products they use.
Better Visibility
Having visibility into your business operations is key to long-term success. The more you know about your business, the better you can plan for the future.
VOC offers a comprehensive insight into business operations. It can act as an invaluable asset when it comes to gaining visibility and optimizing operations.
With VOC, you can monitor and measure customer sentiment, engagement levels, employee performance, and other important business factors that will allow you to make smarter, more informed decisions.
Increase Efficiency
Using VOC can help identify problem areas in business processes, customer profiles, and usage behaviors that would be easier to find with the assistance of specialized analysis.
With these findings, businesses can create customer-centric strategies with customized customer services. It will lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction. This, in turn, results in increased revenue for businesses.
You can take the customer experience for your customers to the next level by focusing on individual customers’ needs.
Methods to Collect the VOC
#1. Focus Groups
As their name implies, these are a small group of customers or potential customers to share their thoughts and feelings in a supportive environment openly. They let you access firsthand customer insights that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get.
In addition to gathering feedback from focus groups, you should strive to foster a two-way dialogue between yourself and customers. Focus groups can help get customer voice into any conversation, giving you valuable insight into what your business is doing right and areas where you can improve.
#2. Customer Interviews
When conducted properly, customer interviews can provide valuable information on what customers need, what problems they face, and how your product or service can best meet their requirements.
You can even consider recording customer interviews. It will help you access data later, as you might miss some points while taking notes. Moreover, you’ll have more material to analyze and form new hypotheses.
#3. Surveys
Surveys are another popular and effective way to gather customer feedback and opinions. Online Surveys can be conducted through various channels, such as email, web forms, phone calls, or in-person interviews, and can be designed using survey maker apps.
The key to a successful survey is to make sure it is well-designed, targeted to the right audience, and provides valuable insights to you. To increase your audiences’ participation in your surveys, you can offer incentives in exchange for their contribution.
47% of customers report their complaints through social media. That makes it an extremely invaluable source to know about your customers’ sentiments.
You can monitor social media platforms using social listening tools to collect customer feedback and engage with them. By listening to what customers say, you can identify areas of improvement and address customer complaints.
Furthermore, understanding customer sentiment across social channels gives you greater visibility into how your audience perceives your products and services.
#5. Website Behavior
The term website behavior is generally used to describe user activity on a website, such as how long a visitor remains on a page or clicks from page to page. Analyzing this data using website session recording tools gives an insight into how users interact with websites and how effectively content engages the audience.
You can measure the engagement and visitor habits in real-time from website behavior data. The insights provided can be used to test content, create buyer personas and understand how users navigate websites.
#6. Online Reviews
Customer feedback gathered through online product feedback tools provides invaluable information on how to tailor the customer experience better.
You can proactively gather, engage and analyze customer reviews to create more customer-centric strategies. These customer-oriented approaches will assist in creating more tailored experiences that meet customer expectations and foster long-term loyalty.
At the same time, companies can leverage this sentiment data to gauge the perception of the brand and products, as well as make sure customer service goals are met.
#7. Feedback Forms
Feedback can help you gather information about your products and services and recognize if there is a gap or scope for improvement.
Gathering the necessary information from customers, colleagues, and employees through feedback forms is the best way to achieve the highest possible value from these processes. You can easily create feedback forms using online form builder tools.
#8. Recorded Customer Calls
It’s important for you to find effective ways to understand your customer base better. Using recorded customer calls is a great way to do this, providing critical insights into customers’ interactions and behaviors.
Recorded customer calls are useful for uncovering patterns and trends in customer behavior. You can anticipate customer needs and develop more effective products, services, and experiences that can highly benefit from this.
How to Analyze the Data Collected?
#1. Track the Percentage of Responses
Tracking the percentage of responses can be a great way to assess customer satisfaction and service quality.
Using the latest analytics software and services, you can easily access comprehensive reports and break down the data into detailed percentages. It will enable them to make the best decisions to improve customer service and satisfaction.
#2. Identify Common Interests
Utilizing sophisticated technology, you can interpret data to uncover common interests and trends. This information can then be utilized to shape product strategy, better target customer segments, and boost overall profitability.
#3. Modify Buyer Personas
When gathering voice-of-customer data, use the data to revisit and adjust your personas to ensure they accurately reflect your customer’s needs, interests, and attitudes. Keeping buyer personas up-to-date is crucial for ensuring your campaign’s effectiveness.
Focus on incorporating specific, in-depth data to ensure the best results when creating and updating buyer personas. Ensure your customer’s demographic details are accurate and look at individual details, like how they behave online or the kind of experiences they seek.
#4. Report these Trends
Upon completing your VOC operations, a comprehensive report should be made to understand and analyze the associated trends. A careful study of the results will give you a clear insight into how consumers view your products and services. The gained insights can inform future marketing strategies and optimize performance.
Analyze the data meticulously and leverage your report to reveal interesting patterns.
#5. Create the Action Plan
Now, it’s the time to roll your sleeves up and finally work on your action plan. For this, you must consider making the best use of all the data you’ve gathered in your report. Based on customer feedback, you must work on all obtained conclusions.
For example, if your customers don’t find your surveys to be interesting, try offering incentives at the end or do something to tell them it’s for them.
After getting done with your action plan, ensure to discuss it with your team.
#6. Discuss with your Team
Discussing with your team can help you make informed decisions. Team members’ feedback and their opinions on the reports can help get outstanding results. Arguments within the team can also bring new ideas to the table, help the team scale on customer service, resolve product-related skills, and even improve skills.
With a healthy mix of creative problem-solving and rational decision-making, your team can effectively identify and execute opportunities for improvement.
#1. Clarabridge
Clarabridge is one of the best tools that help you understand customer sentiment and experiences more deeply. It ultimately results in increased customer satisfaction.
With the help of Clarabridge, companies can benefit from analyzing customer sentiment by gathering customer feedback in real-time.
Features
- Data Integration – Harness customer data from various sources for holistic analysis.
- Text Analytics – Use natural language processing and advanced text mining to uncover detailed insights from raw text.
- Advanced Dashboards – Access data visualizations to monitor customer sentiment over time.
- Social Media Monitoring – Monitor customer sentiment across social media platforms.
- Customer Support – Connect with customer support teams for troubleshooting.
- Business Intelligence – Drive impactful decisions with actionable insights into customer sentiment.
#2. InMoment
InMoment understands the value of customer feedback. They provide comprehensive Voice of Customer solutions that easily collect customer sentiment and prioritize customer needs.
Features
- Multiple feedback methods include surveys, web forms, social media, email, and phone.
- InMoment’s Conversation AI automatically collects and interprets customer feedback.
- Integration with customer feedback management software and reporting systems for streamlined workflows.
- Fully customizable feedback capture options and digital surveys to better reflect the company brand.
- Ability to automatically trigger notifications and rewards in response to customer feedback.
#3. Feedier
Feedier makes it extremely easy to gather meaningful feedback from customers quickly and efficiently. This innovative platform comes with a unique suite of features, making it easy to make sense of customer sentiment and take meaningful action.
Features
- Interactive Questionnaires – Quickly create interactive surveys to gain insights into customer satisfaction.
- Benchmark Performance – Get the most out of customer surveys and easily benchmark against industry standards.
- Actionable Data – Convert raw data into powerful insights with various tools and visualizations.
- Custom Reporting – Present feedback results in a range of easily understandable formats.
- Collaboration – Create, share, and manage feedback initiatives with teammates and stakeholders.
- Integration – Quickly connect with multiple platforms and use custom features to embed surveys.
Challenges to Overcome when Implementing a VOC
No Incentives for Customers
Simply implementing a VOC solution is not enough; incentivizing customers to contribute through surveys and other channels is key to gaining valuable feedback.
Incentives are an effective way to attract customer participation and show them that you value their input. From discounts to gift cards, offering incentives in exchange for their contribution will make customers more inclined to provide detailed and comprehensive responses.
In the long term, customers who feel rewarded and recognized for their contributions will create a higher customer retention rate. It will ultimately increase your brand’s visibility and lead to greater success.
No Action on the Feedback Collected
Collecting customer feedback is not enough. It’s equally important for you to act upon it. Once customer feedback has been collected, you should look at it to understand your customer’s needs and concerns. This way, you can devise tailored plans and solutions to meet customer requirements.
Also, you should review customer feedback regularly, identify patterns in customer comments, and share your findings with key stakeholders. By making customer feedback a part of your routine and applying solutions, you can take tangible actions that positively impact customer experiences.
Lack of Dedication
To ensure the successful integration of a VOC system, employees must keep up the commitment to the new technology. You must go beyond the norm to bring the customer experience to the next level and show dedication to the customer base.
Each team member must actively participate and encourage the integration of this customer-focused culture into the workplace.
Conclusion
Utilizing Voice of Customer data provides a crucial window into understanding how your customers think and feel, helping you stay ahead of customer demands and trends. With customer feedback in hand, you will be well-equipped to maximize the impact of customer experience and drive success for your business.
