Customers are the lifeblood of your business and the key to its profitability. So it’s important to know and understand them. By unlocking real customer insights and discovering their needs, expectations and satisfaction levels with your brand, you can make informed decisions to drive customer loyalty and retention and deliver real impact.
What is a Voice of the Customer Program & Why Your Competitors Are Using Them
A Voice of the Customer program collects customer feedback on your business, products, and services from various sources. This data is analyzed to reveal customers' true opinions about your brand and identify gaps between expectations and experiences. These insights inform your VoC strategy, helping to enhance your business and offerings.
Major companies have to use a Voice of the Customer program to stay up to their customers' needs and preferences, which helps them remain competitive in the market. By leveraging VoC insights, they can improve products and services, enhance customer satisfaction, and foster loyalty. Without a VoC program, companies risk being out of touch with their customers, leading to missed opportunities, decreased customer satisfaction, and potential loss of market share to competitors who better understand and meet their customers' needs.
The 2 biggest benefits of a VoC program
1 Winning customer loyalty in the long run
Incorporating a Voice of the Customer program in your organization can reveal customer needs and preferences, helping you develop a closer connection with your customers. This leads to stronger customer relationships and the early identification and resolution of potential issues. As a result, customer loyalty and engagement with your brand increase, boosting customer retention. Additionally, a VoC program provides a customer-centric view of your business, enriching metrics like churn and revenue for a more holistic picture
2 Unifying your organization’s team
Within your organization, a VoC program can improve teamwork and collaboration, highlighting strengths to build upon. It informs and strengthens product development teams and assists customer success teams in creating a better customer journey overall. Ultimately, a VoC program helps develop a more customer-centric approach and vision, ensuring your business stays aligned with customer needs and expectations.
6 Steps to Building a Successful Voice of the Customer Program
1. Define Business Objectives and Questions
Start by defining the business objectives and questions that need to be answered by the VoC program. Senior leaders and stakeholders should identify the key areas where customer insights can drive the most impact.
2. Connect Feedback Across Customer Data Channels
Gather feedback from multiple customer data channels. Utilize Voice of Customer Tools or Software or market research and survey providers to ensure high-quality data collection. This includes direct feedback from surveys and indirect feedback from social media and third-party sites. Below are some of the VoC metrics you can begin pulling feedback data from.
Voice of the Customer Analytics
Analyze and interpret customer data to translate findings into actionable insights. Read our Voice of the Customer Analysis for a more in depth breakdown on how to approach this.
- Identify common themes and prioritize them.
- Document findings in a clear and accessible format.
- Plan implementation based on actionable insights.
- Involve your team by sharing filtered results and action plans.
3. Involve and Collaborate with Cross-Department Teams and Distribute VoC Insights
Engage cross-department teams such as customer service, sales, and front-of-house. These teams, having the most interactions with customers, can provide valuable insights into their needs and pain points. Promote collaboration between teams during the planning phase to align on goals and strategies for the VoC program. Share VoC feedback and insights across the business. Use dashboards and reports to present specific customer insights to relevant stakeholders and team members, ensuring that everyone is informed and engaged.
4. Collecting and Interpreting VoC Metrics
In order to evaluate the success of your VOC program, you have to measure its success. You'll have many metrics to measure it against and they will vary from one team to another. What success looks like for a product development team will be different from a sales, marketing or customer support team. It’s important to define benchmarks of what success looks like for the relevant teams before measuring and analysing it.
Different VoC Metrics
Real-time direct customer feedback
Businesses transparently ask for customer insights. This can be via customer surveys, online reviews, forums, focus groups or complaint forms for example.
Indirect, multi-platform customer feedback
Social media is a good example of this, when people are talking about the business rather than directly to it. Indirect feedback can be tracked on third party websites and social channels.
Inferred feedback
Customer data is interpreted to gauge a customer’s likely feelings towards a brand/ product/ service. This could be how much time they spend on the website, whether they repeat purchase or their contact with customer support (or the contact center) for example.
5. Present Actionable Insights and Measure Results
Present actionable insights derived from the VoC program. Address customer feedback and implement changes that are measurable. Align VoC insights with actions and improvements to demonstrate clear ROI and positive business impact. Having a Customer Feedback Analytics platform at your side can help in all of the above areas.
To evaluate the success of your VoC program, measure its impact using various metrics.
These metrics will differ across teams, so it’s important to define benchmarks for success relevant to each team before analyzing the results. Here are 4 metrics you could use to measure the impact of your voice of the customer program.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) - Measures likelihood to recommend your business.
- Customer Effort Score (CES) - Assesses the effort required to complete an action.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) - Evaluates overall customer satisfaction.
- Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) - Averages scores across questions to gauge loyalty.
6. Rinse and Repeat
Establish a feedback loop to follow up on changes made. Continuously gauge customer feedback and assess the impact of implemented actions. Use these insights to inform ongoing decision-making and improvements.
Voice of the Customer Tools Can Help You Collect and Analyze VoC Data
Several tools can simplify the VoC process. We breakdown the top 10 best Voice of Customer tools in this report. Below are some quick options.
- Chattermill - Integrates customer feedback for a holistic view.
- SurveyMonkey - Creates surveys, forms, and polls.
- AskNicely - Collects feedback using NPS-based software.
- Typeform - Builds surveys, forms, and quizzes.
- HubSpot - Provides ready-made surveys and VoC templates.
By following these steps and utilizing these additional insights and tools, you can build a comprehensive and effective Voice of the Customer program that drives customer-centric improvements and business growth.
Techniques for Capturing VOC Data
There are multiple touchpoints on a customer journey where brands can capture VOC data. This will build on your understanding of your customer and relationship with them. Different techniques can be used to maximise the responses to your questions and to gain valuable customer insights.
These include:
Customer interviews - direct communication between the brand and customer and a great way to build trust. It’s a more expensive technique but elicits more personal responses.
Online surveys - customer survey responses track direct feedback about the product/ service/ customer experience (such as CSAT surveys). The responses are only as good as the questions you ask. Online surveys can often be created in your CRM.
Live chat - online direct conversation between brand and customer in real time. It’s a really effective customer service tool and a way to capture VOC data. You can even follow up with an online survey - a powerful combination of techniques to glean feedback.
Social media - brand channels can capture direct, unfiltered customer feedback, but discussion of the brand on other social media channels can also be tracked. On your social media channels, you can develop two-way conversations and build customer relationships.
Website behaviour - using online data such as time spent on site, purchase history, and the customer journey (via a heat map) will reveal patterns, preferences and potential pain points.
Recorded call data - direct customer feedback gives broad insights into customer sentiment. It can be reviewed further down the line and is a useful tool for customer service teams.
Online customer reviews - as with social media, this can be on the brand site or a third party and provides specific feedback on their experience. A high proportion of potential buyers refer to online reviews before making a purchase. They’re pure gold for VOC data.
In-person surveys - direct and open customer feedback on a smaller scale and with minimal set up costs.
Net Promoter Score® - valuable insight into the customer’s likelihood to recommend the brand to friends and family. It’s a simple scoring system (0-10) that delivers reliable data quickly.
Focus groups - often used to test new functionality, developments or new products. This is an open dialogue between 10 or so people to share their thoughts and viewpoints.
Emails - target a specific group with specific questions or gain feedback from your whole database. It can be a fairly open email asking for responses or a link to a customer survey.
Dedicated feedback form - make it easy for customers to submit feedback anytime. It’s an essential form of VoC and needs to be readily available and using the right questions to provide you with meaningful answers.
Text analytics - increase efficiency by using technology like AI to interpret customer feedback via online forms, SMS, social media, emails, chatbots and customer support interactions.
Voice of the Customer Program Examples
Monica Vinader
The luxury jewellery brand, Monica Vinader, put the customer at the heart of everything they do. But the team wanted a single source of truth - one place to hear and react to the voice of the customer. So the customer experience department implemented Chattermill’s Unified Customer Intelligence Platform.
“Chattermill dashboards let us gauge customer feedback across different areas of our business – CX, support, product, eCommerce, and just about anything. We use them in our cross-functional meetings to get an accurate picture of what's happening and drill down into specific themes," Jade Roberts, Head of Customer Experience.
"We had all this data in one place where anyone could see it. Suddenly, even the tiniest issues started becoming focal points for the business. Because it was so easy to self-serve and find the data, everyone just felt energized and motivated to take action."
By using Chattermill solutions, the customer experience team was able to identify and rectify underlying causes of customer churn. They monitored customer sentiment in real time and could make relevant changes in response to customer pain points. This access to a pool of actionable insights has been transformative for the company.
Limehome
Limehome is the leading technology-based provider and operator of serviced apartments in Europe. The company needed to channel the voice of the customer into every department and educate employees and partners on how to build outstanding customer experiences.
With the help of Chattermill’s interactive dashboards, workflows and alerts, Limehome's operations team could uncover critical customer issues, potential risks, and incidents with external partners. The dashboards “enable us to identify critical issues...and then build an action plan,” explains Jennifer Möller, Head of Hospitality Operations.
Analysing customer insights was also impactful for product development and customer experience teams. They understood their customers better and were motivated by seeing the positive impact of their work. And finally, the data was used to inform business strategy. The overall result of this VoC program of work was:
- 20% increase in NPS score
- 81% increase in nights booked between 2021-23.
Conclusion
Creating a Voice of the Customer program is essential to compete in the modern world of corporations and enterprises. Adopting a customer-centric approach, and basing your decisions on them and their needs, will make a powerful impact. Actively listening to your customers, providing them with a feedback loop, will inform your decision-making. Implementing a Voice of the Customer program to collect, analyse and report your VOC data will empower your business to adopt a customer-centric approach and make informed decisions.
