What is the Voice of the Customer? A Guide to VOC Strategy

Introduction

Businesses are constantly looking to improve their methods to match the growing trends and demands. Customer experience (CX) is a major factor in elevating the business strengths and turning customer demands into profits. CX quality is a crucial differentiator among rivals in the majority of firms. Implementing a VOC program is crucial to guaranteeing that client feedback is sought and appreciated. It is important that brands develop an engaging customer experience strategy to enhance customers’ experience. 

What is the Voice of the Customer (VOC)?

Voice of Customer (VOC) is the procedure for gathering and examining consumer input in order to enhance customer satisfaction and overall company success. It helps to bridge the gap between customer expectations and the experience provided by your brand. You may make smarter business decisions to enhance operations and increase revenue by knowing how customers view your brand and their interactions with it.

Why is the Voice of Customer program Important for Your Business?

Serious young businesswoman pointing to words and graph drawn on transparent glass, young and senior colleagues looking at it and standing behind with blurry office interior in background

Businesses that improve their customer experience goals will benefit greatly; studies reveal that companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more can make up to $700 million annually after three years of significant CX spending. Businesses may enhance their product and service offerings and better understand and satisfy consumer wants and expectations by hearing what customers have to say. A Voice of the Customer program provides information on the complaints, issues, and preferences of customers.

Companies record customer feedback in order to use the information to enhance the way that customers interact with the company in all of their dealings. Technology that incorporates text analytics and sentiment analysis is the most effective way to comprehend VoC as it guarantees that the data pertaining to consumer input can be interpreted. The top benefits of using Voice of Customer programs are:

• Secure brand loyalty from customers as they know that the business is interested in their opinions and is looking to improve and personalise for them
• Recurring purchases and improved sales due to positive shopping experiences from the past and positive association with your brand
• Helps businesses identify areas for customisation and improvement to appeal better to their audiences

Best Methods – How to Collect Voice of the Customer Data

There are several ways to collect relevant data to improve the voice of the customer program. It is important to have a sound understanding of what is voice of the customer, is to gather and utilise this data efficiently. When we consider what ways can you get the voice of the customer, the top methods are inferred feedback and direct and indirect feedback. Let’s deep dive into these methods. Some of the most common and quick ways to collect VoC data are:

• Use CSAT, NPS or CES surveys- these voice of the customer surveys provide you with better results to improve businesses and customer relationships
• In-app surveys are a sure shot way to get results as they are targeted and easier than other surveys
• Customer interviews with loyal consumers to improve their shopping experience. A quick call can also build trust and help with detailed reviews.
• Use live chats for quick grading surveys
• External online surveys with incentives also work great for collecting overall feedback of customer experience using business outsourcing services
• Extracting user experiences and ratings from social media sites like X and Instagram
• Analysing customer behaviour while using apps and websites by checking frequency and CTA rates.

Qualitative VOC Data

By asking users to respond to questions like, “How likely are you to buy the same product again?” or “How likely are you to use the same services again?”. Some brands employ BPO solutions to simplify this process.

Quantitative VOC Data

To obtain Qualitative VoC data, open-ended questions and user feedback are requested. It is collected by requesting clients to provide additional surveys to explain their previous responses. This method works well for finding out what problems customers are having.

Online Reviews and Social Media

Another excellent method for conducting customer research and comprehending customer expectations is social media listening. Customers share their thoughts about your goods on social media platforms, and prospective buyers pay attention and request recommendations. Therefore, you should ensure that they provide good comments. There are call center outsourcing services that come in handy to collect data. Collecting VoC data from social media networks can be a little difficult. But although you don’t need to ask customers for this kind of information, it’s worth having here because it makes the data much more valuable.

Passive VOC Data

Customer feedback that is started by the customer, not the business, is known as passive Voice of the Customer (VoC) data. In contrast, active VoC data occurs when a survey is activated by the business in response to a particular visitor’s behaviour.

Tools for gathering VOC data

Using tools and VoC software makes your job efficient if you regularly interact with customers in order to gather data and then take constructive action, converting demanding clients into ardent fans. Commonly available software for gathering VoC data are:

• Medallia
• Qualtrics CustomerXM
• Clarabridge
• InMoment

Voice of the Customer Data Analysis

Deriving useful insights from client feedback requires an effective voice of customer analysis. The following are some recommended practices:

• Grouping: To find certain trends and patterns, divide up client feedback according to product lines, demographics, or other pertinent factors.
• Sentiment Analysis: To better grasp the general tone and feelings conveyed in client feedback, use natural language processing (NLP).
• Text Analyses: To gain a better grasp of client demands, use text analytics to find recurring themes, keywords, and subjects in customer feedback.
• Evaluating: Compare your performance to that of your peers/brands in the industry past performance, and personal benchmarks.
• Graphic visualisation: To display feedback data in an understandable manner, use data visualisation tools like a dashboard.

The voice of the customer methodology gives brands an understanding of user expectations and helps them figure out ways to employ constructive changes in the business.

Conclusion

By offering insightful information about the wants and needs of your customers, the Voice of the Customer can revolutionise your company. You can boost loyalty, increase customer happiness, and propel business success by putting in place a strong VoC program.