Voice of Customer: Why is it important and what are the benefits

Voice of Customer (VoC) is a term widely used in market research, that describes your customer’s feedback about their experience with your products and services. VoC is about the customer experience they have had while purchasing something from your brand or availing services.

Voice of customer is a platform that mainly focuses on what the customers need, what exactly are their expectations from your brand and a strong communication platform to tell the brand if their product needs improvement.

With 90% of the companies already using customer experience to compete with one another, you don’t want to fall behind as a brand or an organization. Most of the new age companies and their CEOs are focused on making their brand “high-growth” with a customer focus mindset. Does your brand have what it takes to compete with such businesses?

How does the Voice of Customer work?

The voice of customer can be heard through a variety of different platforms like interviews, focus groups etc. However, with the technological advancements, VoC can be conducted on a much larger scale because of the internet.

Online surveys, emails, SMS, social media platform help you gather customer feedback. This helps you build a complete picture of the experience you are delivering to each of your customers.

Once this information is obtained in a statistical data format, this information can be delivered to the business or organizations so they can make informed decisions.

Why is the Voice of Customer important?

There are many reasons why Voice of Customer is extremely crucial to a business or an organization. However, there are some important reasons why VoC plays a crucial role in any business:

• Voice of Customer is the first step even before an organization starts working on an appropriate marketing plan. The management may have a feeling that a product will perform extremely well in the market. VoC quantifies the guts. Real data from the customers will eliminate any doubts and a strategy or a plan can be implemented in a similar way.
• It’s a fact, if you know your customers well, there are very little chances that you will fail. In a competitive landscape understanding your customer needs is extremely important, they will buy what they need not what you want them to buy. A proper feedback received from your customer will help you make informed decisions that align with the needs of your customers.
• Another very important reason why voice of customer is important is market research always helps eliminate any risk. Whenever quantitative or qualitative research is conducted, statistical data is obtained based on the research, and numbers never lie. Through the gathered data it is easy to understand if any risk is involved with the product and analyze how to eliminate that risk.

What are the benefits of Voice of Customer?

The insights provided through a customer-centric program need to be acted upon quickly. Remember if the data is collected and not acted upon the entire purpose of having that data is defeated. Here are the 4 benefits of implementing Voice of Customer program:

• Helps improve your service: Customer feedback is a very important tool in not only improving the product but also the services provided by the brand. An impeccable customer service ensures, your customers are going to return to you for the way you have treated them. Not only will they be a returning customer they are most likely to refer your brand to their friends and family, thus making your Net Promoter Score (NPS) incline towards more number of promoters.
• Understanding and Managing your brand: As a brand, you need to understand how your customers perceive your brand. With a constant check on your brand status, you can keep a good reputation in the market while growing your market share. Provide direct means of communication to your customers and they are less likely to pull you into a discussion on social media platforms.
• Stay ahead with development and innovation: Hearing the voice of customer will help you keep pace with the latest development and innovation and will help you stay a step ahead in understanding what your consumers want and what are they willing to pay for these developments. Remember customer feedback will always help you improve your product and know the future trends.
• Market Fit: Listening to the voice of the customer will help you know perceptions in the adopter stages itself. Launching a new feature or a totally new product in the market first to the beta consumer will help you understand your target audience and also if you fit the bill or not. Voice of customer is an efficient tool in hitting the market at the right time with the right product!

What are the methods of collecting the Voice of Customer?

The value of retaining an existing customer over acquiring a new one is significantly higher. Below are some of the methods to collect the voice of the customer.

Surveys

Surveys can be conducted online or offline depending on the network connectivity of the respondents. You can use a free ready-made survey template to save on time and effort or create your questionnaire.

• NPS: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a score calculated based on how likely are the customers to refer your business to their friends or family. These surveys are generally short and often have one NPS question followed by an open-ended question.
• Feedback forms: Feedback forms are more descriptive than the NPS survey and request answers for a wide range of questions.

Interviews

The voice of customer interviews are done in person, however, they can also be done through one-on-one calls and emails. The interviewer asks a set of questions to the customer and notes down the responses.

Focus groups

In this voice of the customer method, 8 to 10 customers are selected to form a group. Apart from their answers, qualitative data such as their expressions, feelings, body language, and emotions are also noted.

Emails

Emails can be used to gather feedback when the sample audience is small. The benefit of this voice of customer method is people can respond to an email as per their convenience.

What is Voice of Customer program?

A good voice of customer program helps you better understand customers’ choices, concerns, and preferences. However, it is not enough to collect customer feedback through surveys. What makes the difference, is how the survey data is analyzed and more importantly, how businesses use the insights generated by a voice of customer program.

How to create a successful voice of customer program?

• Have clear goals: Before starting the program to collect the voice of customer, ensure you have clear goals outlined. List down what you want to achieve by the end of the program.
• Involve stakeholders: Involve the right stakeholders at every step. Create sub-accounts in survey software so that the other team members can contribute to survey creation and distribution.
• Share the reports: Share the reports with different teams so that everyone can benefit from the results.
• Integrate with third-party apps: Integrate survey software with other applications such as CRMs, marketing automation tools and data visualization tools to explore multiple dimensions of survey responses.
• Measure the ROI At the end of the voice of customer program, measure the ROI to evaluate the success and whether you should repeat the program in the future.

Once you have the insights ready, it’s time to put them in action! Respond to the concerns of the customers and take steps to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Identify the bottlenecks in providing the best customer experience and how it can be further enhanced.

Voice of Customer examples

Example 1: A leading airline customer conducted a program to collect the voice of customers and find out areas to improve their experience. The passengers were requested to answer a series of questions ranging from in-flight entertainment, comfort, meals, and crew service. Once the survey answers were collected, the data was analyzed to get the pulse of customer feedback. The changes in the service delivery were made in real-time to maintain customer loyalty and prevent passengers from switching to their competitors. Such a customer-centric attitude of the airline helped them to reduce the churn rate and maintain a dominant position in the market.

Example 2: Another example of how the voice of customer can benefit is that a popular SaaS company used an in-app survey to collect feedback from the users and usage data to improve the user experience. The company analyzed which features were being used the most and what new features would the users would like to see in the app. The survey responses were filtered based on the number of parameters. The company realized that instead of having a one-size-fits-all package, there should be different pricing models to suit the needs of different users. Soon, they saw a surge in the number of users and a spike in their satisfaction level.