Voice of the Customer

Voice of the customer (VoC) is customer feedback that reflects expectations and real customer experience. It encompasses customer needs, desires, and preferences and enables a company’s team to improve a product or service.

In this article, we’ll review the importance and 6 methodologies of the voice of the customer. We’ll also unveil questions, 5 best practices, and examples.

Why is the voice of the customer important?

The voice of the customer plays an essential role for different businesses. With its help, brands can be more attentive to their customers and ensure a seamless customer experience. Once companies receive customer feedback, they can understand what influences the purchasing decisions of their customers. Entrepreneurs know what their clients need and expect from their businesses, and they can address those needs.

When companies know what consumers expect, they understand exactly what product or service to offer. Customers’ feedback allows them to hone their products and give clients something they desire. This way, they avoid long research and the process of collecting information about customers from third parties.

Brands can directly contact consumers and ask them about their expectations and experience. However, all feedback can’t be positive since people have different needs and desires. This is even better because constructive criticism can reveal the negative aspects of a product or service. Once brands identify specific issues, they can eliminate them.

Now that you know the reasons to employ the voice of the customer, let’s explore methodologies.

6 Voice of the Customer Methodologies

You can use different methods to capture customer feedback and enhance customer experience. We’ve prepared a list of the most effective ways to measure satisfaction and identify problems within your company.

1. Net promoter score. It helps you assess the loyalty of your customers. By asking consumers about their likeliness to recommend your company to friends, you can get to know how happy they are. Provide customers with an opportunity to evaluate your brand on a scale from 0 to 10.
2. Interview. This is the most traditional and reliable way to capture customer feedback. With its help, you can unveil the consumer’s point of view regarding different features of your product or service. You can prepare specific questions for one customer or a group of people and ask them by email, phone, or in person. As a result, you’ll understand your customers and establish stronger relationships with them.
3. Online survey. Once you succeed to create surveys with the right questions, you’ll be able to solve problems and instantly address consumers’ wishes. However, to design excellent online surveys, you need to choose an appropriate platform. SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and SurveySparrow are the best free online survey tools.
4. Website behavior. Although you might think that surveys are more effective, your website is also a source of useful information. Consider leveraging tools like heat maps to evaluate customer behavior on your site.
5. Live chat. Since around 75% of customers choose live chat over other channels to reach out to a company, there’s a point in implementing a live chat and gathering customer insights. With a live chat, you’ll get real-time feedback from your target audience. You can perform multiple actions to get valuable information. You can instantly solve customers’ problems and conduct surveys to assess user experience. As a result, you’ll be able to identify issues and boost customer satisfaction. With SendPulse, you can create a live chat for your website for free without any coding skills. Answer users' FAQs, help them choose a product, assist in their buyer journey, and accept payments via chat.
6. Focus group. It consists of 8 people who can discuss the product in person. They can freely share their opinions, expectations, and perceptions about a brand or its product. Later, a company can use this data to understand customers’ needs and priorities. Its team can also find out what consumers want to see in a business or product. A brand receives feedback on each of the company’s main areas.

The methodologies are clear, so let’s proceed to the questions.

Voice of the Customer Questions

Your survey can consist of different questions and depends on the goal you target. We’ve prepared a list of the commonly asked questions to capture the VoC.

1. What do your clients think about your company and product? Whom, where, and what do they say about your brand?
2. What are the feelings customers have when they talk about your brand? How do these feelings and opinions influence their buying decisions?
3. What is the main reason for having these feelings and sentiments towards your company?
4. What needs, expectations, intentions, and desires related to your product or service customers have?
5. What do customers think about your competitors? How satisfied they are with their products and services? Do they meet their expectations, desires, and needs?

Now that you know the main questions, it’s time to delve into the 5 best practices.

5 Voice of the Customer Best Practices

If you want to get the most out of your VoC, you need to follow the next practices. Keep them in mind when you decide to create the voice of the customer for your business.

1. Collect customer feedback regularly. Many customers engage with your brand every day. Each of them requires your attention. Your company reputation depends on the experience customers have with your business. They can shape a positive or a negative image of your brand and share it with their friends. To have your product work properly and customers satisfied, you need to conduct surveys regularly. This way, you’ll gather customer feedback and find out what areas need your attention and improvement. If you capture customer feedback often, it means that you interact with your target audience on a regular basis. As a result, you’ll know customers’ most recent needs, preferences, requirements, expectations, and pain points. They can also give you some suggestions on how to make customers happier.
2. Capture information from different touchpoints of the buyer journey. Clients while interacting with your brand can go through several touchpoints during their buyer journey. They can purchase online or go to the physical store. Depending on the type of purchase, consumers can encounter different teams and have various experiences. To have a full overview of customer experience, you need to identify all touchpoints during the buyer journey and analyze them. Once you do it, you’ll know what steps to take next and what areas to improve.
3. Examine feedback. Once you have all customer insights gathered, you should analyze them and highlight helpful information for your company. Try to understand consumers through their answers. Your main task here is to identify the main reasons for customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
4. Share the data with all your company departments. All your teams should know about the problems and negative experiences customers might experience when using your product since they play a great role in boosting customer engagement and customer loyalty. That’s the reason you should share customer data across your company. Complete customer insights will help your company develop strategies to improve business and customer experience.
5. Take measures regarding negative customer experience. You should not only listen but also act. Together with your core teams, you need to develop a plan to improve customer experience. The faster you solve the problems, the better for customers and your brand.

Now that you know about our best practices, it’s time to jump into some examples.

Voice of the Customer Examples

In today’s world with increasingly demanding customers, the voice of the customer techniques are widely used among businesses. We’ve prepared several examples for you to grab some inspiration.

Lawley

Lawley is an insurance company based in New York that manages risks and takes care of employees. The company used a net promoter score survey to find out what their clients think about the company, its service, and recommendations. With the voice of the customer, they succeeded to gather feedback from different regions and identify customers’ pain points. Lawley also improved customer service, experience, and reduced customer churn.

Subbly

Subbly is an e-commerce subscription based-platform that uses customer feedback to unveil what to do next, which improvements to implement, and features to release. The company has a special page where users can leave their feedback on its product, customer service, experience, etc. Besides, the platform’s team constantly conducts surveys to find out how clients feel about the pricing of its plans. Subbly pays attention to customers when deciding about pricing and new feature release.

Congrats, now you know the different peculiarities of the voice of the customer methods. Hope this information will help you once you decide to create such a survey for your customers.

References:

1. This article defines the term and unveils the importance of the voice of the customer.
2. In this article, you’ll find some excellent examples.
3. This article provides you with 6 best practices.

Last Updated: 30.06.2023