Voice of the Customer
A visionary CEO is an indomitable asset to leap forward in the business. Apart from that, employees giving their blood and sweat and working for hours to deliver the product also contribute a major share in the progress of a business. But, in today’s competitive world, businesses actively capitalizing on the voice of customer feedback are due to get an edge over the competition.
VoC feedback is a suggestion or opinion given by a customer to businesses. Customers opinions and suggestions matter because they are willing to pay more to get an awesome customer experience. Remember, your customers are well aware of what they like and what they dislike, better than you or better than anyone else. Therefore listening to the voice of the customer and not letting it slip from the crack must be your prime concern.
VoC Feedback: why you need it?
Businesses these days are becoming more customer-centric. Businesses are now at the mercy of the customers and their demands. The predominant shift of power from businesses to the customers has already brought customers at the forefront of the business.
A comprehensive product and a decent customer service are not the only norms for a business to succeed, but the focus has moved beyond to expectations, needs and wants of a customer. This is why businesses need to be more cautious about how customers voice is being heard and how they are treated.
Importance of VoC Feedback:
It is because of the VoC feedback, businesses understand customers expectations, what they need and what their expectations are from your product or services. Once businesses get a chance to peek inside the minds of their customers it becomes easier for them to fulfill their expectations and deliver mindblowing customer experience.
According to studies, about 36% of businesses have developed a successful Voice of the customer program and many are following the same path to connect with customers at different touchpoints in the customer journey.
What can you use VoC feedback for?
A VoC program is not just limited to sending surveys to the customers and asking them for feedback, but it is acting promptly on the insights to make your customers satisfied. For any business to success, constructive criticism plays a major role.
A good VoC survey questionnaire contains probing questions that are not just limited to get positive feedback. Instead, the responses deliver your insights regarding your products or services like, are customers satisfied with your product or service? Are they unhappy about the price? Can they use your product easily? Does your product or service has made their life easier? etc.
Here are the top five reasons you might want to include a VoC feedback program
- To identify the needs, opinions, and expectations of the customers
- Understanding and prioritizing crucial issues related to product or service affecting customer satisfaction
- Ideating strategies and finalizing approach to deal with customer challenges for providing them a better customer experience.
- To collect raw customer comments and sentiments, training concerns, understanding the reasons behind lost sales opportunities, analyzing churned accounts, and to appreciate repeat customer stories.
- To gauge Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Rating
VoC Feedback: How it drives change
Now you have known how to get the voice of the customer feedback. You have collected the relevant data also, now the question is – what to do with it? Very few organizations act on the collected insights, this is because they lack ownership and accountability to act on the incoming insights. Therefore it is necessary to assign and roles and responsibilities and get your employees involved in the process to make the most out of VoC feedback data.
Segregate the data: Select an appropriate online survey software offering enough features and functionalities to create, distribute and analyze a Voice of the customer feedback survey. In addition to that, ensure the platform integrates with the CRM and other business systems so that it has access to the customer metadata such as industry, account type, location, version of the product, etc.
Use the analysis tools to identify how many customers have similar issues and how many customers are providing opinions related to a specific feature or functionality of the product. Having all the collected at one place and segregated according to the issues faced by different lots of customers helps in simplifying the monitoring the progress on actions taken.
Assign ownership: Once everything in place, you need to assign teams to address each type of issue raised by the customers. Ensure the assigned teams take responsibility and ownership to act on the insight for improving those aspects of the product or service. Give each team access to measure and analyze the incoming voice of customer feedback.
You as a program owner need to monitor the progress on the actions taken and send a followup survey to the customers for gauging improvement in the NPS score. It is better if you create a VoC feedback program part of your culture at the organization.
Take action: Taking action on the feedback is the most critical step of a successful VoC program. If you fail to take any kind of action, then obviously customers will feel like their voice isn’t heard and from next time onwards they will not even bother to share their voice. For different types of feedbacks, there is a different set of actions, you have to analyze what actions need to be taken and by whom.
If the insights show that a specific action you have taken had a positive outcome, then you do not have to do much to satisfy the customer. Nevertheless, there are few insights for which you have to change the bring about a massive change like overhauling the process.
It is a better practice to thank every respondent saying “thank you for your feedback” irrespective of whether they gave a positive comment or criticized you. A reply message conveys respondents that their feedback is read and there is someone who is acting on your response and available for a conversation.
Other best practice is to engage in a conversation with the customer who has responded with a completely negative approach or a negative comment. If the stakeholder understands his/her issues then resolving the becomes easier leading to one more conversion of unsatisfied to satisfied customer.
