8 Best Practices For A Successful Voice of The Customer (VoC) Program

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Consumers are constantly evolving, and so are their needs and expectations. Businesses that will thrive in the long term are those that understand the needs of the changing customers and take positive actions to meet these needs.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a research method used to gather feedback on what customers think and feel about their experiences with a business and its products/services. The goal of a VoC program is to understand what the customers need and their expectations from a business.

Insights from VoC enable leadership teams to steer their business in a direction that helps the brand stay competitive, add more value and create loyal customers.

A study of 207 businesses by the Aberdeen Group revealed that companies that invest in customer feedback programs experience much higher client retention, employee engagement and spend less on customer service.

Image: superoffice.com

All companies in the research by the Aberdeen Group had VoC programs in place, however, the top-performing companies using VoC best practices retained 55% more clients compared to other companies (87% vs. 56%).

This means simply collecting customer feedback and tracking sentiments is not enough to achieve optimal results with a VoC program.

In this article, I highlight 8 best practices that would supercharge your VoC program and deliver positive ROI.

#1. Choose the right VoC tool

A great VoC tool integrates feedback collection, analysis, distribution and action into a single platform. This makes it easy for an organization to understand and improve the customer experience. 

Some VoC tools are focused on helping businesses collect customer feedback, others dive deeper into unstructured feedback data to provide insights, some are focused on reporting and analysis and some can do all of the above.

Choosing the right VoC tool for your business needs is important for the success of your VoC program. Some key features you should look out for in choosing a VoC tool include;

Robust survey features

A good VoC tool should make it easy to gather feedback through surveys, features such as language translation, Multichannel distribution options (Email, SMS, Social, Chat, Web) and Logic would make deploying surveys seamless and efficient. 

Dashboards & Reporting

Having the ability to create or customize dashboards with available feedback data would make it easy to see how organizational CX metrics being tracked are performing at a glance.

A great VoC tool should be able to measure and display performance metrics from various VoC campaigns in real time.

Ease of integration

Choose a VoC solution that would be easy to integrate with legacy systems existing within your organization. This is very important in order to achieve automation of feedback collection and trigger-based events in your VoC program. 

Data security

Your VoC solution will have to handle a lot of sensitive business and customer data. Ensure the solution chosen have adequate security measures to keep this information safe and secure. 

Text analytics

Customer feedback from your VoC program will contain both structured and unstructured data. While it is relatively easy to analyze structured feedback data, analyzing unstructured feedback is not a walk in the park and it cannot be overlooked. 

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A VoC tool with an NLP (Natural Language Processing) engine to help in the analysis of unstructured feedback data will save you a lot of time in analyzing open response texts and identifying key action items. 

#2. Collaborate with other teams

A great Voice of Customer (VoC) program is never run in a silo. To get the best out of your VoC efforts you need to collaborate with other teams/departments within your organization to create feedback surveys, organize customer forums and implement action items from your VoC program. 

It is essential that feedback from the VoC program is visible to everyone within the organization. This would help in creating awareness throughout the business of the customers’ needs, pain points and preferences.

#3. Look beyond surveys

Your VoC program should not be limited to customer surveys, consider other sources of customer feedback such as social media, complaints, 3rd party review sites e.t.c

Considering feedback from these sources in the program gives a more accurate view of what customers really think about your brand (and its products/services), as well as areas where you are failing to meet their expectations. 

#4. Personalize your VoC campaigns

Your VoC campaigns should be personalized to drive customer engagement and participation. The goal here is to create strong communication ties with the customer through personalized interactions. This goes beyond using their names in content.

As much as possible, you should engage the customers in your VoC program right after they have had an experience or interaction with your business.

Ask the customers questions that are relevant to them. For instance, asking customers who never registered to use your mobile app to give feedback on their experience with the app would likely put them off from sharing any feedback. 

#5. Do Not Neglect Employee Feedback.

While getting feedback from your customers is important, you should also hear from your employees. Without employee feedback, the business will have a blind spot in understanding the customer experience and in achieving positive business outcomes.

For instance, Feedback from customers might point you to processes that are not working, but employee feedback will reveal insights as to why those processes are not working. Considering the Voice of Employees (VoE) and their perspectives often reveal unique and powerful insights. 

#6. Beware of Survey Fatigue

Survey fatigue is what happens when customers become overwhelmed with your requests for feedback. It can happen before and during a VoC campaign. 

Overwhelmed survey participant

When it happens before a survey, it is usually because the customers are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of requests for feedback from your organization. This discourages them from participating in the program. Evidence of this will be seen in increasingly low responses or participation rates. 

When survey fatigue happens during a survey, the most influencing factor will be poor survey design elements such as asking too many or irrelevant questions, grammatical errors or too many open-text responses. Having low completion rates often highlights this problem. 

Always remember that having customers participate in your VoC program requires effort on their part. The more effort you ask of them, the less likely they are to participate.

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There’s no hard and fast rule to this, but it is important to pay attention to both the number of questions in your survey and the frequency of your survey requests. 

#7. Take Action Items Seriously

The most eloquently designed and personalized VoC campaign amounts to nothing if no action is taken on the feedback and insights gathered.

Take action

When analyzing feedback, look out for patterns and trends in what customers are saying and how they are rating a product or service to identify the areas where they have challenges with the products/services. The feedback should be categorized to create an accurate picture of common problems, pain points, and improvement recommendations.

The next step is to share your findings with relevant stakeholders within the organization and prioritise what action item/recommendation is to be acted upon. Acting on feedback from your VoC program and monitoring the impact of actions taken is critical to the success of your VoC program.

#8. Close the loop

Closing the loop in VoC simply refers to the act of responding directly to customers who have given feedback to your organization. This is beyond acknowledging their feedback, it also involves sharing findings from your campaign with the customers and letting them know what you have done or intend to do with these findings.

Closing the loop is an opportunity to demonstrate to participants in your VoC program that their feedback is really important and that organization is committed to putting the feedback to use.

If you would to learn more about how to effectively close the loop on customer feedback. Check out this video by PeopleMetrics. It contains great nuggets on Closing the loop. 

 

Conclusion

The well-designed Voice of the Customer program will provide a priceless glimpse into the customers’ minds. This helps businesses understand the customer needs, expectations, perceptions, and pain points from their experiences with the brand, wherever they are in the customer journey.

These insights drive crucial initiatives that impact positively on long-term growth and profitability.

Check out our ebook, ‘A Comprehensive Guide to Collecting, Analyzing, and Utilizing Customer Feedback,’ on Amazon Kindle. Packed with actionable tips and real-world examples, this guide will help you unlock the secrets to building long-term customer relationships.

Kelechi Okeke
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