Voice of the Customer Best Practices and Tips in 2024

When we aim to understand someone or something, the first step is to listen or observe carefully. The same rule applies for customers. 

If you wish to truly meet your customers and understand their concerns and goals, you must not only solicit and gather their feedback but also act on it. This is precisely what Voice of the Customer (VoC) is all about. 

In the following text, we will cover all you need to know about VoC, including Voice of Customer best practices that you can apply today to improve customer experience and retention and, finally, boost your revenue growth. 

Let’s go!

What is the Voice of the Customer? 

Like with any other relationship, the one you create with customers relies heavily on clear communication. 

Voice of the Customer programs (VoC) refer to the process of capturing customer’s expectations, preferences, and pain points. It includes collecting and analyzing customer feedback through surveys, customer reviews, social media, and direct interactions. 

Some of the main Voice of the Customer objectives are to understand what customers want and value, identify their concerns and pain points, and recognize opportunities for improvement. By understanding customer perspectives, you can better visualize the gap between their expectations and real experiences. This is how you can start building your Voice of the Customer program, which can empower your customer success, product development, and business operations.

Why is VoC Important?

Voice of Customer Feedback allows companies to make better data-driven decisions, improve their products and services, and finally, enhance the overall customer experience. Now, let’s break this through and see some of the main voice of the customer goals:

• Customer-centric decision-making
  • VoC allows businesses to get insights based on real customer feedback instead of assumptions. This is how you can create an effective voice of customer strategy that aligns with customer needs and expectations. 
• Improving customer retention
  • By addressing customer needs, you are directly improving customer satisfaction and experience and, therefore, preventing churn and improving customer retention. Once the customer feels valued and heard, they will most likely stick to your product and improve customer loyalty. 
• Continuous improvement 
  • The voice of customer process includes gathering customer feedback. Once you understand the areas where your product or service can be enhanced, you can take concrete steps to make it happen. 
  • By refining your product based on customer feedback, you can stay ahead of the competition as well.
• Boosting revenue
  • One of the main responsibilities of your customer success team is to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities. By implementing voice of customer analysis and understanding customer data, they can better identify these opportunities and target the right customer segments with adequate messaging. 
• Brand advocacy 
  • Happy customers will most likely recommend your company to others, which drives organic growth through positive word-of-mouth marketing. 

Voice of Customer Methodology

Since we answered the crucial question, “What is the voice of the customer?”  let’s see how to collect the voice of customer feedback. 

Customer surveys

If you just started building voice of customer programs, surveys are a great option for you thanks to their cost effectiveness and accessibility. You can implement in-app surveys that pop up after customers interact with a platform or a feature, allowing you to understand what they think at the exact moment. 

Customer interviews

Although one-on-one customer interviews require a bit more effort than mass surveys, they provide better insights. This form of more personalized VoC technique shows that you care about what customers have to say. It is a good idea to offer some sort of reward for the customers who share their experiences, as they take up more of their time. 

Social media

By observing VoC data on social media, you can also gather valuable customer insights. Search for brand mentions, comments or discussions about your product on social media to assess the overall customer experience. 

Reviews 

Online reviews are one of the most common voice of customer methods that help you gauge the customer experience. They are not only great for nurturing customer loyalty with your existing customers but also for acquiring new ones. 

VoC Programs

What is a VoC program? The Voice of Customer Program refers to a well-structured initiative with the aim of collecting, analyzing and acting on customer feedback. Let’s break it through:

1. Collecting data 
   • We already shared a few of the most common VoC channels, but there are a few more that you can use to assess customer experiences and include in your voice of customer framework. The Net Promoter Score or NPS, is one of the crucial VoC metrics that measures customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend your service or product. Also, you can organize focus groups to get familiar with customer opinions in a collaborative environment. 
2. Analyzing data 
   • We’ve already explained how to collect it, but let’s see how to analyze the voice of customer data. You can use text analysis tools to identify the sentiment behind customer feedback – neutral, negative or positive. Also, by continuously examining customer feedback, you can better identify trends and patterns over time. Finally, by performing customer segmentation, you can break down customer feedback easily to understand how different cohorts feel about your product or service. 
3. Taking actions
   • Once you get familiar with the customer feedback, it is time to take some action. The first step and one of the most important voices of customer examples is identifying the root causes of customer dissatisfaction and discovering opportunities for improving services and products. Then, you need to develop VoC program plans to address the insights gained from VoC data. It is important to keep in touch with customers to inform them about the improvements and changes based on their feedback. Make sure to update VoC programs regularly to adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs. 
4. Tracking key metrics
   • Track key VoC metrics like Customer Satisfaction Scores, NPS, and Customer Effort Score and share data with the entire team and relevant stakeholders. 

Voice of the Customer: Best Practices

The first step towards improving products, services, and overall customer experiences is implementing effective VoC best practices. Now, let’s see which are the most common and efficient ones:

• Having clear objectives
  • Make sure that your VoC program objectives align with your business goals. Setting specific, clear goals will help you create effective strategies to achieve them. 
• Use multiple VoC feedback channels
  • To get as much customer data as you can, make sure to deploy various types of surveys, direct feedback, social media feedback, and reviews. Also, implementing ongoing surveys and using automated systems for feedback collection can speed up and facilitate the process. 
• Customer segmentation
  • Perform customer segmentation based on demographics, behavior, and other criteria to understand the needs and preferences of different customer segments. 
• Feedback analysis
  • Use text analysis tools to identify root causes of issues. This is how you can identify trends and patterns in customer feedback and better identify areas for improvement. 
• Developing action plans
  • If you truly want to learn how to improve the voice of the customer program, make sure to first understand how to create effective action plans based on customer feedback. Examine customer feedback carefully, prioritize issues based on their impact on customer satisfaction, and make sure to communicate with customers about the improvements you have made. 
• Integrate VoC with other data sources
  • To get comprehensive customer data, you can combine VoC data with other data sources like CRM, customer success software, sales data, and customer support data. 
• Nurture a customer-centric culture
  • Train employees to incorporate customer feedback into their daily activities and act on it. Make sure to reward teams that make great contributions!

The Best Software for Analyzing the Voice of the Customer

Choosing the right VoC software for analyzing VoC data is essential for developing effective VoC programs and getting satisfying results. Now, let’s see our recommendation for VoC software:

Qualtrics XM comes with comprehensive survey creation, sentiment analytics, text analytics, and dashboard reporting. It has a user. friendly interface and can be integrated with various business tools. It is widely used by large enterprises and organizations that require an all-in-one solution for VoC.

Survey Monkey comes with data and sentiment analytics and customizable surveys. It is easy to use and quite cost-effective, so it is widely used by small and medium-sized businesses that require straightforward and affordable VoC solutions. 

Conclusion 

By taking time to listen to your customers, analyze their feedback, and act on it, you show that you value their presence and that you are willing to adapt to their unique needs and preferences to make them as satisfied as possible. 

By implementing the Voice of the Customer best practices that we mentioned above, creating effective VoC strategies based on real customer data and using high-tech customer segmentation software, you can improve customer retention and the customer experience, and finally, drive revenue growth and business success.