Voice of Customer (VoC) programs are essential tools for businesses aiming to enhance their product’s customer experience (CX), boost customer loyalty and trust, and make informed product decisions.
An Oracle study highlights the stakes involved: 89% of consumers switched to a competitor after a poor CX experience. This underlines the critical importance of listening to customer feedback and acting upon it.
In this guide, we’ll delve into how you can effectively leverage VoC programs to your advantage.
Key Takeaways:
➡️ Voice Of The Customer (VoC) captures customer feedback to improve product development, UX, marketing strategies, and marketing campaigns.
🔍 A VoC program is a structured approach to collect, analyze, and act on direct feedback, aiming to close the feedback loop.
🎯 VoC programs aim to gather actionable insights, address feedback proactively, and identify customer behavior trends.
🛠️ VoC methodologies combine qualitative and quantitative data through interviews, surveys, feedback forms, and more.
🌟 Creating a VoC program involves identifying goals, customer segments, creating customer journey maps, selecting feedback methodologies, analyzing results, and sharing insights.
🎯 Setting clear, measurable goals for VoC programs helps track effectiveness and guide future improvements.
What is Voice of Customer?
Voice of Customer (or VoC) is the term used to describe the process of capturing customer feedback, and gathering more information about their experience with your product, as well as their uniques needs, preferences, and expectations.
It is crucial because it allows for deep customer understanding and provides enough data to make informed decisions about product development, UX optimization, marketing strategy, and marketing campaigns.
VoC is collected through VoC programs that are designed for gathering customer feedback from various sources and closing the feedback loop by acting on it. We’ll delve deeper into the nuances and specifics of VoC programs below.
Why is Voice of Customer Important?
Better Customer Experience (CX)
By listening to and analyzing the Voice of Customer, teams get insights into what parts of their experience customers like or dislike, which makes it easy to pinpoint areas of improvement.
Fine-tuning those, they’re improving the overall customer experience of the product, ensuring that customers’ needs and expectations are met at all touchpoints.
Improved Customer Loyalty
This one is just a consequence of improved customer experience. When your customers see that you care about them, value their feedback, and tailor the product to fit their needs – they’ll appreciate it and will want to come back. This also fosters brand trust and builds deeper connections with your customers.
A study by Bain shows that companies that excel in the customer experience grow revenues 4%– 8% above their market. That’s because a superior experience helps to earn stronger loyalty among customers, turning them into promoters who tend to buy more, stay longer, and make recommendations to their friends.
Increased Customer Engagement
Engaging customers through VoC initiatives makes them feel more valued and increases their emotional investment in the brand. Therefore, in the future, they become more likely to promote your brand or recommend it to a friend.
Better Understanding of Customers Needs and Preferences
As mentioned above, VoC helps product, UX and marketing teams understand customers better, and collect hidden insights about trends, patterns, and preferences. With that information you are able to predict their behavior, anticipate market changes, and adapt your strategy to fit those.
What is of Voice of Customer Program
A Voice of Customer program is a structured holistic approach to collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback. It’s essentially focused on closing the feedback loop and making informed improvements of your product or service.
Here’s how we can describe VoC programs in terms of goals, metrics and methodology:
Goals
- Gather actionable insights and feedback to improve business offerings and increase the level of customer satisfaction
- Proactively address customer feedback and concerns, ensuring effective problem-solving
- Based on collected insights point out the trends and patterns in customer behavior, learn more about their expectations and preferences with your product.
Metrics
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Time to Resolution
- First Contact Resolution (FCR)
- Churn Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Customer Lifetime Value
Methodology
VoC programs usually employ a mix of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis methods, some of which include:
- Customer interviews
- Customer surveys
- Focus groups
- Usability tests
- Feedback forms
- Social media listening
- Customer reviews
- Statistical and sentiment analysis
- Feedback categorization and prioritization
See VoC feedback collection methodologies in action in these demos🔥
Learn more about Voice of Customer Program Methodologies.
How to Create Voice of Customer Program
Creating a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program involves several strategic steps that ensure the program is effective, actionable, and aligned with business goals.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating one:
1. Identify Program Goals
Start by defining what you want tpo achieve with your Voice of Customer program. Goals could include increasing customer satisfaction or retention, enhancing product features, or refining the customer experience.
Make sure they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Here’s an example of a good VoC program goal:
Improve the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) by 10% within the next 12 months by addressing key issues identified in customer feedback related to customer service and product features.
2. Identify Customer Segments to Work With
Understanding the different customer segments of your business will help to make the VoC Campaign more specific, ensuring relevant and actionable results.
Based on factors like purchase history, loyalty, product usage, demographic characteristics, etc., identify the segments you’ll be working with in this program. Go back to your business objectives and program goals and don’t forget to align the segment with them as well.
3. Create a Customer Journey Map
Create customer journey maps for the identified segments to better understand all the various touchpoints they go through. A customer journey map is a visual representation of all the actions a person takes when interacting with your product.
By making the effort and visualizing customer experience like this you’ll better understand where you should collect feedback and look for online reviews, what channels to use and what areas to focus your attention on.
4. Create a Program Framework
This step is necessary for ensuring the feedback you collect gets effectively translated into valuable insights.
Create a VoC program framework that will outline how the VoC program will operate, including roles and responsibilities, feedback loops, and how insights and other changes will be integrated.
The framework should describe how you’ll collect the feedback, what customer experience metrics you track and what specific methodologies you use to analyze and put it into action.
5. Select Methodology and Tools for Customer Feedback
Based on your timings, budget and program goals, select the feedback collection methods that you’re going to use. Some of the most effective ones include customer interviews, surveys, feedback polls, focus groups, etc.
Keep in mind the type of data you’re looking for (qualitative or quantitative, or maybe both) and choose the methods accordingly. For deeper insights consider using a mix of feedback collection methods.
For example, let’s say your goal is to understand both the general user sentiment and in-depth user behaviors regarding a new feature on your website. In this case you might start with a survey to gather quantitative data on user satisfaction levels.
This could be followed by customer interviews to dive deeper into the qualitative aspects, exploring why users feel a certain way about the feature.
6. Analyze and Share Results
Analyze the feedback, identifying key themes, and translating them into actionable insights. Based on those insights, come up with a list of actions that need to be taken to implement the improvements. Prioritize the actions and point out the things that need to be taken care of first.
Put all of your insights and solutions together into a report or a research presentation. You can now share it with your colleagues and relevant stakeholders!
Voice Of Customer Program Best Practices
Now that we’ve clarieifed the steps of the VoC program creation, let’s also take a look at 5 VoC program best practices that, hopefully, will help to make the most out of your efforts:
Focus on Customer Experience Lifecycle
Our first tip is to focus your attention on the entire journey of a customer with the product, from initial awareness to post-purchase experiences. By doing so, you’ll be able to identify touchpoints that matter the most in customer experience, enabling you to make targeted improvements.
For example, if you’re a mobile phone company, you’d want to analyze the lifecycle from the moment a customer considers buying a phone, through the purchase process, to the after-sales support and eventual upgrade or replacement.
This will help you better understand their buying decisions and what influences those, as well as how you can tailor your communication and experiences to fit perfectly in this lifecycle.
Use Different Voice Of Customer Methodologies
Integrating diverse Voice of Customer collection methodologies will help to esure you’re gathering well-rounded holistic insights, understanding customer preferences and needs.
While in some cases it can be enough to just collect one type of data, for a more in-depth research you’ll need to look at the customer’s feedback from different perspectives. In such cases, gathering a mix of quantitative and qualitative insights from different channels can really help.
For example, you might use surveys for quantitative data, interviews for in-depth insights, and social media monitoring for real-time customer feedback.
Prevent UX Issues
Good UX is a huge part of Customer Experience. Therefore, proactively identifying and addressing user experience issues can significantly enhance customer satisfaction.
To ensure this, you need to conduct regular usability evaluations, and test your product with users. This way you’ll always be aware of the state of your product’s UX, and, more importantly, know what issues need to be addressed.
User behavior changes with time and conducting usability tests is an ultimate way to find out how customers interact with your product or where they encounter issues. This is also a great way of checking how well they understand your new feature, navigate the new landing page etc.
Apart from the regular preventive checks, usability tests help to quickly spot reported issues you get from customer inquiries and test the effectiveness of your proposed solutions.
Learn more about how usability testing can help you prevent UX issues in this quick video ⬇️
Endorse Team Collaboration
For the VoC Campaign to function effectively, you need to ensure constant collaboration across various departments. For example, the feedback collected by the customer support team about a usability issue should be immediately reported to the UX or product team, so that they can check and eliminate the problem.
Set Clear Goals
In order to successfully measure the effectiveness of your VoC program, make sure to set clear goals. This will really help to track the results after the program is finished, as well as improve over time.
Your program’s goal, for example, might be to increase customer satisfaction scores by 10% within a year or to reduce the number of reported usability issues by half.
What’s next?
If you’ve got to the end of this page you hopefully already have a good understanding of what Voice of Customer is and how VoC programs work.
Want to learn even more? Jump straight to the next pages of this guide where we cover VoC methodologies, tools for collecting and analyzing feedback and so much more!
If you would like to already start working on your VoC program, set your goals, choose the feedback collection methods and create an account with UXtweak to make it all happen. We offer various research tools for conducting surveys, customer interviews, running usability tests, etc!
