Voice of the customer (VoC): definition, techniques, tools [+7 best practices]

We all realize that customer feedback is a goldmine of insights. But it’s easy to lose track of what your customers expect, want, and need from your business. That’s why you need a structured and organized feedback management system, a.k.a, a Voice of the Customer(VoC) program that taps into the voice of every customer segment to gain business value.

If you’re looking for more reasons, techniques, and best practices to kickstart a VoC program, then we’ve got you covered. You can use the links below to navigate through the blog.

– Definition: Voice of the customer

– Why is ‘voice of the customer’ important?

– 12 VoC techniques and tools to gather customer feedback

– 7 VoC best practices to run a successful VoC program

What is voice of the customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer is a systematic way of gathering feedback from your customers, analyzing the sentiment and needs that are voiced, and incorporating those insights for business growth.

So how does a VoC program work?

The overall VoC process comprises of three essential steps including,

1. Capturing customer feedback

Traditionally, surveys were the most popular method of collecting feedback from customers. But over the past decade, with the rise of digital communication channels, customers’ voice has gotten louder on other platforms like social media, online reviews, and community forums, calling for omnichannel feedback systems.

Gathering feedback now involves identifying the sources for VoC data that are relevant to your business, implementing feedback mechanisms across various touchpoints, and systematically collecting the data. 

2. Analyzing data to glean insights

Once the raw VoC data is collected, the next step is to understand the sentiment voiced in the feedback through VoC analysis. You should have the ability to break down the feedback data and extract useful customer insights to make your VoC data actionable.

AI-based text analytics VoC tools like Medallia help crunch the vast amount of texts you find in social media comments or open-ended surveys and find common themes and the true requirement stated in feedback.

Source: Sixsigma Institute on translating VoC data to requirements

3. Acting on the aggregated feedback

Insights and data turn powerful when translated into action. A successful voice of the customer program rides on the ability to close the loop on the feedback collected and analyzed by utilizing the insight mined for an improved customer experience.

An action could mean brainstorming and solving recurrent challenges or problems highlighted by customers across different interactions. Or, it could also imply the immediate intervention of an employee or team to act on negative feedback. For instance, a help desk tool like Freshdesk can be integrated with a survey tool like CustomerGuage to directly flag and assign upsetting feedback for support agents to work on. 

Make VoC data more actionable

Why is ‘voice of the customer’ important?

When you’re a startup or a small-scale business with a handful of clients, it’s relatively easy to personally connect with your customers and precisely know their needs and preferences. But as you scale, both your customer base and product range diversify. Though you may move to standard survey solutions like customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and NPS scores to tackle customer feedback at a larger scale, you might face certain challenges, including,

• Feedback data residing in silos across different channels and internal teams like sales, marketing, product, and customer support.

• Missing out on customer’s voice in non-survey feedback channels like social media or support tickets.

• Losing track of the nuances in customer needs that can’t be captured in a feedback score.

Ultimately, your customers feel neglected that their voice is not represented in your services and slowly begin to churn.

Here’s where a structured VoC program proves beneficial to your organization. In CX, by taking the effort to learn customer needs regularly, the voice of the customer helps you bridge the gap between customer expectations and experiences delivered. 

Listening to the voice of the customer,

– Enhances your overall customer experience

– Improves the quality of your product or service

– Strengthens customer relationships

– Cultivates customer loyalty and advocacy

– Builds a customer-centric company culture

Incorporating the customer’s voice in your business decisions gives you a competitive edge over your peers and boosts customer retention as your customers feel heard and cared for.

12 VoC techniques and tools to gather customer feedback 

To kickstart a voice of the customer program, you need to look at the different sources and ways to collect customer feedback that’s applicable to your business. Depending on the level of customer interaction involved in gathering the feedback, the VoC methodologies can be categorized as direct, indirect, or inferred.

Direct feedback methods:

When you intentionally initiate and collect feedback directly from your customers, it’s termed active or direct feedback. Here are a few examples of direct feedback methods.

1. Periodical customer interviews 

Scheduling interviews and calls with your customers periodically is a highly effective way of listening to your customers. When conducting these interviews, customer success teams and account managers can record specific highlights, roadblocks, and future business goals that customers want to achieve using your product. This method not only establishes a personal relationship with your customers but also helps you gauge how satisfied they are with your services.

2. Surveys

Short and simple questions framed well and pushed out on the right channels at the right time help gather authentic customer feedback. You can collect feedback instantly by triggering surveys after a purchase or support interaction or also during a customer’s in-app or website experience. 

Voice of the customer tools like InMoment enable you to aggregate feedback at different customer journey points like email, web, mobile, SMS, or in-app in a customer’s preferred language. Popular survey methods include,

– Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys that measure how satisfied a customer is with the experience you’ve delivered. 

– Net Promoter Scores (NPS) surveys that check how likely customers are to recommend your business to their friends and family.

– Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys that measure how effortless a business interaction is for customers.

While quantitative responses capture feedback to an extent, you can get deeper insights when you strategically optimize your CSAT or NPS surveys with additional questions for qualitative insights. For example, you can insert a dropdown of options and ask the feature or service customers found most valuable.

Additional survey questions give deeper customer insights

Freshdesk has built-in survey capabilities that can be auto-triggered after closing every support interaction to measure customer satisfaction. It also integrates seamlessly with popular survey tools like SurveyMonkey, Delighted, and Nicereply to customize surveys and measure NPS or CES scores.

– There are also custom Voice-of-Customer surveys that you can send when you launch a new service or feature or when you want to validate your findings of customer expectations and needs. Ensure you communicate the expectations and need for the survey before you reach out to your customers for better response rates.

Example of a custom voice of the customer (VoC) survey

3. Focus groups

In this method, you bring a group of customers together in a physical or virtual conference room and open the floor to discuss specific topics related to your services. Customers can discuss their needs and how certain features fulfill their needs as expected or where they fail to meet all their requirements. Focus groups work well to measure if you’ve had tangible results by meeting customers’ specific needs.

Indirect feedback methods:

Opinions shared by customers as comments on social media or complaints to support desks without your company initiating a feedback process fall under indirect VoC data. To aggregate useful data from a bulk of comments and reviews, you can utilize text analytics tools like Clarabridge or Sentisum to crunch the data and detect the true sentiment voiced in the feedback. 

4. Social media listening

The number of social media users in 2021 has crossed the 4 billion mark, and recent studies by HBR¹ reveal that the number of customers who want to vent their frustrations over social media has tripled since 2017. Brand monitoring tools like Hootsuite or Mention help you track and listen to what customers speak— both about you and your competitors— on social media.

If you’re a Freshdesk user, you can start tuning into relevant Twitter chatter right from your help desk software. You can configure the brand or keywords you want to watch the Tweet streams that matter most.

Start collecting social signals on Twitter with Freshdesk

5. Online reviews and ratings

Customers use the reviews and ratings features on websites and app stores to share the pros, cons, and overall experience with a product or service. While reviews on e-commerce sites like Amazon capture consumer feedback, dedicated review sites including G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot record reliable feedback from actual users for business software and services. 

Freshdesk lets you extract online reviews as tickets within the help desk by integrating popular review management tools like Appbot. The tags added by Appbot make it easy to understand the user sentiment voiced in the reviews and filter the critical ones.

Online reviews are an effective VoC methodology

6. Community forum discussions

A community forum, especially those hosted by organizations, is a treasure trove of customer insights aggregated from active and engaged users of your product. Keeping an eye on your community discussions helps you know what your customers like, dislike, and want to be improved in your product or services.

Community forums have actively engaged users sharing valuable feedback

7. Email and call center recording transcripts

Conversations that happen over a warm sales email pitch or customer support calls reveal the biggest concerns a customer may have when they’re evaluating or using your products. Analyzing these interactions by running text analytics on transcripts from these emails and phone calls helps in decoding the voice of the customer in their own words.

8. Messaging and chatbot conversations

2020 saw phenomenal growth in customers using messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger—a 110% rise in social messaging and a 17% rise in chat²— to contact businesses. Customers prefer³ messaging its speed and convenience, while they find chatbots attractive for their 24x7 availability.

With customer voice growing stronger in chatbots and messaging channels, you’re likely to lose a wealth of information if you don’t identify their needs there. AI-powered analytics tools like Chattermill help you analyze customer conversations in real-time. When integrated with your chatbot or live chat software like Freshdesk Messaging, you can gauge the sentiment and feedback expressed by customers on chat in real-time.

Tap VoC data from chat conversations

Inferred feedback:

In this type of feedback collection, you expand your scope for customer feedback by tracking operational and behavioral data along the customer journey. Let’s look at a few examples.

9. Support ticket data 

What do customers do when they have a query or complaint about your services? They contact your customer service team through email, phone calls, social media, chat, messaging apps, or support portals. When you have the customer inquiries from all these channels unified on one helpdesk software, you can look at the ticket data and find answers to pressing questions like,

• What do your customers contact you the most for?

• What are some common frustrations or challenges faced by them with your product?

• Is there a particular location that faces certain issues more than others?

To make it easy for you to sift through these tickets, Freshdesk integrates with sentiment analysis tools like Sentisum and Prodsight, which add intelligent tags to your tickets in real-time. You can quickly spot recurring topics and challenges voiced by customers in your support requests and also route tickets to the right teams for immediate action.

Sentiment analysis on customer support ticket data

10. Website behavior

About 87% of purchasing decisions⁴ begin with online research, and to serve digital-first customers, businesses of all sizes set up a website to promote their services. By monitoring user behavior on your website, you can infer valuable feedback on what services or features attract customers the most and also find the pages that don’t get a lot of traction.

While Google Analytics gives you vital information on web pages that garner more traffic, web analytics tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg provide heat maps that help you visualize user behavior on a specific page.

Inferred feedback from heatmap data

11. Product and app usage data

Like website analytics, customer behavior and product engagement data can be obtained from product analytics tools like Mixpanel or Heap. Data from these tools can be used in your VoC program to identify the most used features in your product and the points within your product where customers lose interest. This type of product feedback data is gold for product development. It helps you alter your product roadmap as per customer engagement, improve the onboarding process, and also promote lesser-known features in your services.

Deriving meaningful insights from product analytics

12. Customer success and sales teams 

Customer-facing functions like sales and customer success teams have closer contact with customers than the rest of the organization. Intelligence from these teams can be fed into your VoC program to understand your customers better.

Customer success software like Freshdesk Customer Success lets you gauge a customer’s overall experience with your services by automatically creating account-wise health scores based on customer behavior during interactions, NPS scores, and support ticket trends. 

Track account hygiene and feedback for every customer account with Freshdesk Customer Success

7 VoC best practices to run a successful VoC program

Once you get buy-in to initiate a voice of the customer program, it becomes easier to collaborate and set up a VoC program.

Colin Crowley, the current CX advisor at Freshworks, headed a comprehensive customer experience function in his previous stint at Freshly—a direct-to-consumer subscription meal company. The CX arm served as a VoC hub at Freshly, situated strategically between marketing and customer support operations, enabling them to gather a lot of survey-based, indirect, and behavioral data. Colin shares a few best practices for executing a coherent VoC program.   

#1 assign ownership for your VoC program

 “The first step in a VoC program is to make sure someone owns the program. 80% of the battle is over when you ensure there’s a person or team that looks across your organization, picks relevant data points, takes learnings, and passes it on profoundly to the rest of the company”, says Colin.

#2 have a unified customer view and understand customer journeys well

A well-mapped customer journey helps you understand your personas, analyze the touchpoints between your customers and the company, and know their preferred communication channels. All these are integral to learning where and how to tap VoC data. It’s also vital to have a single view of your customers across various teams to hear their voices loud and clear.

“Having a holistic view of your customers and their needs with the ability to view all the customer interactions helps give a single customer experience across the entire journey.”- Colin Crowley, CX Advisor at Freshworks. Click To Tweet

The Customer 360 solution by Freshworks aims to give this unified view by bringing together customer data residing in its sales, marketing, and customer support suite of products.

Get a unified view of customers across sales, marketing, and support with Freshworks’ Customer 360

#3 segment customers to collect helpful feedback

For your VoC data and analysis to be truly comprehensive and nuanced, it’s essential to segment your customers into cohorts based on their distinct needs. This ensures that you don’t ignore the voice of any customer segment and also helps you prioritize one segment’s feedback over the other.

#4 tap into customer insights from multiple channels

While survey data is important, don’t miss out on the feedback data hidden in remote and passive sources like websites, social media, and contact centers.

#5 tighten the gap between VoC data collection and analysis

After identifying and finding ways to collect customer VoC data from disparate sources, you have to bring it all together and analyze it to find out what exactly your customers are saying.  

#6 make your VoC program super collaborative

For your VoC program to be truly successful, you’ve got to take a collaborative approach. “You need to get multiple data points from multiple teams, which makes cross-team collaboration crucial between product, marketing, and customer experience departments,” remarks Colin

Finally, it’s time to act on what your customers voice out.

Act. That’s the final yet most powerful piece to your ‘voice of the customer’ initiative.

The efforts you take in gathering and analyzing customer feedback reap the expected benefits only if you put your learnings into action. ‘Action’ could be an instant fix to a broken experience, a change in policies, an improvement made to your existing processes, or implementing a new feature in your product.

Collect, analyze, and empower your team with actionable VoC insights to craft delightful customer experiences.

Source:

1.https://hbr.org/2021/04/why-you-shouldnt-engage-with-customer-complaints-on-twitter

2.https://www.statista.com/statistics/1260598/top-messaging-channels-for-customer-by-yoy-growth/

3.https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/chatbot-statistics/

4.https://cxl.com/blog/9-things-to-know-about-influencing-purchasing-decisions/