Your business would be nothing without customers, so it’s important to listen to customer feedback and to analyse customer data to inform decision-making.
In order to provide exemplary customer experiences, you need to understand customers’ needs and expectations. That’s where Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs and analysis come in. Gathering customer data and decoding customer sentiments equips you with the information you need to meet, or even exceed, customer expectations and keep them coming back to you for more. The next step is to examine and understand that feedback to better understand your customer’s needs and wants. That’s where the all important process of analysis comes in.
What is Voice of the Customer Analysis?
In today’s competitive market, customers have near endless choices. If your business doesn’t satisfy their needs or meet their expectations, customers will go elsewhere fast.
A successful Voice of the Customer program and methodology will provide you with all the customer insights you need to understand their preferences, pain points, and complaints. That powerful data enables you to make customer-centric, data-driven decisions which will improve business performance.
But it’s not just about gathering customer feedback. The integral part of this process is the data analysis - the process of extracting actionable insights from all of the feedback. It enables businesses to ensure their decisions are aligned with customer expectations and that they’re improving customer satisfaction.
Why is Voice of the Customer Analysis important?
Voice of the Customer Analysis offers multiple benefits to businesses. The main advantages of using voice of the customer tools to listen to your audience are:
Discover more about your customers
- Learn about customer needs, preferences and expectations
- Target new customers better
- Identify the best places, times and ways to reach existing and new customers
- Understand the customer journey better
Drive business growth and boost revenue
- Improve customer loyalty
- Increase customer retention
- Enhance products and services
- Empower stakeholders with real time customer data
Gain competitive advantage
- Expand market share
- Reduce customer churn
- Generate repeat purchases from loyal customers.
Types of Voice of the Customer Analysis
There are many techniques you can use to gain reliable customer insights. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach to Voice of the Customer Analysis, and many businesses use a mixture of VoC programs and market research tools to gather customer data. Strong customer relationships are built upon a good understanding of the customer's needs and expectations.
There are two main types of feedback:
Quantitative data - these metrics include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSat), customer effort score (CES), website and social media data analytics. This data comprises statistics and numerical information.
Qualitative data - this is more about feelings and comments, think sentiment analysis, social media posts and open text survey responses. In real time, you can keep abreast of the keywords and terms being written about your brand and/or industry.
Here, we’ll explore popular methodologies in more detail.
Customer surveys
Surveys are a great way to collect customer feedback. However, the results are only as good as the survey questions asked so it’s important to really think about the messaging and the right questions to pose. You can target customers with online surveys or ask for face-to-face feedback. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) tool is another useful data source. Customers are asked give a score between 0 and 10 to the question "How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or a colleague?" This gives you a snapshot of customer sentiment. CSAT and CES template tools also help.
Direct customer feedback
Get an in-depth understanding of customer needs and expectations by listening to their viewpoints in person. Focus groups or individual customer interviews are a more personal way to collect customer feedback, especially when you want to gain views on particular customer experiences or new product developments for example. Recorded customer support calls also highlight pain points, customer sentiment and user experiences.
Social media
Social media platforms facilitate direct, real-time conversations with your customers. It’s easy to see what they’re saying about your brand, products and services. VoC tools can gather data like customer location and sentiment analysis. In addition, VoC programs can analyse comments made on third party social media channels. People may be less filtered about your brand on another platform.
Website data
Data analysis of customer behavior on your website gives valuable insights into your users. When you see data such as the pages visited, time spent on site and how customers use your website, you can make informed decisions on how to improve it.
Online customer reviews
It’s not just your own website that shows customer sentiment. Checking online reviews, comments and discussions on third party sites will also provide actionable insights. That could be customer reviews on sales platforms like Amazon or online discussion forums with discussions about your brand.
10 steps to Voice of the Customer analysis
- Define your question - what do you want to achieve through this initiative? What will success look like to you? Make sure you know what you want to address before you start.
- Gather customer feedback - choose the most appropriate techniques to gather customer feedback, such as survey responses, call center logs and digital analytics tools (as mentioned above).
- Categorize and organize feedback - VoC analytics and insights are the basis of successful VoC programs. Data metrics will outline the customer experience, whereas in-depth insights will reveal more about customer sentiment, behavior and motivations.
- Use sentiment analysis - determine whether feedback is positive, negative, or neutral. Then you can deliver more of what customers like and want and less of what they don’t. AI tools are particularly effective and efficient at sentiment analysis.
- Identify key pain points and trends - make sense of the raw data to find the main customer concerns, pain points and issues. Collate common themes and note any similar feedback at particular times of points along the customer journey.
- Quantify the feedback - understand why you’re seeing these trends and sentiments. Is a point raised by one person or many? Get to the cruz of the issues raised.
- Prioritize key areas for improvement - select the most relevant data, information, and conclusions, according to your targeted voice of the customer goals. Pick the actions that will have the biggest impact. Also consider the time and effort required for each task.
- Share insights across your business - involve team members with the VoC data that affects them. Engage everyone in the VoC analytics and insights to help them understand your customers better and make customer-centric decisions.
- Follow up with customers - close the loop and respond to those who have contributed feedback, showing that you’ve listened to them and are taking action.
- Take action, review and monitor progress - make sure you use the information that you’ve gleaned from VoC analysis. And don’t do it once and forget about it. It’s important to keep reviewing customer feedback, as well as the actions that you’ve taken in response to it.
Use VoC analytics to boost your bottom line
Put simply, to improve your bottom line and gain repeat business, you must listen to your customers’ feedback.
Voice of Customer analytics can help you optimize the customer experience and make better business decisions, guided by data on how customers use your products or services. Once you know and understand your customer better, and have feedback on their various touchpoints with your brand, you can actively improve your business and its customer strategy. By embarking on a VoC program, you pave the way for customer success and help to futureproof your business.
Book a demo to see how you can understand the voice of your customers in real time
“We gained access to an unlimited pool of actionable insights.” Read how the Customer Experience team at luxury jewellery brand, Monica Vinader, benefitted from Chattermill’s VoC program.
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