A voice of customer (VoC) program is a crucial aspect of any business strategy to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. By actively listening and gathering feedback directly from customers, companies can gain valuable insights into their needs, preferences, and areas for improvement.
Whether you are a startup company or a household name, the voice of customer is an essential tool for driving customer satisfaction and growth.
What is a Voice of Customer Program, Exactly?
A Voice of Customer program, or VoC program for short, collects feedback on customer experience before, during, and after purchase, including ease of ordering, timeliness of support, and product understanding.
A VoC program gathers crucial information for evaluating customer experience (CX), but many organizations fail to analyze the data to determine the effectiveness of their CX strategy. Implementing a voice of customer program effectively drives positive change.
Voice of Customer Examples
The data collected is essential to establishing key performance indicators, goals, and metrics. With these channels, companies can measure the voice of customer more effectively and accurately.
Establishing effective VoC customer experience metrics
Before creating a VoC program, you need to clearly define your CX end goal. The program’s framework—from the questions you ask customers to the feedback implementation—should revolve entirely around those end goals.
To set achievable goals, ask yourself, are you looking to:
- Increase customer retention?
- Cut down on average call resolution times?
- Introduce new customer support channels?
An audit of your program helps your company determine whether the VoC is truly helping improve CX, whether the data you’re collecting meets the established business goals, and whether any part of the process should be improved.
Here are some commonly used VoC CX key performance indicators worth considering.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty and the likelihood of a recommendation.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Measures customer satisfaction with a specific product or service.
- Customer Retention Rate: Measures the percentage of customers who continue to do business with a company over time.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): Measures the percentage of customer issues resolved on the first call or contact.
With a strong VoC program, we can answer the age-old question: “How to increase customer satisfaction?”
By engaging customers through various channels, analyzing their feedback, and acting on insights, organizations can drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and growth. However, it’s important to approach the implementation of a VoC program with a well-defined strategy.
Implementing a Voice of Customer Program: Do’s and Don’ts
When executed right, voice of customer programs can be powerful tools for understanding and improving the customer experience. But like any other initiative, it’s important to approach it with the right strategy to get the most value from it.
Do:
- Look into scaling methods to support your VoC program. Regularly review and analyze customer feedback and make necessary changes to improve the customer experience.
- Incorporate survey questions, studies, or dedicated focus groups into customer communication channels. Analyze customer feedback from omnichannel sources to identify patterns, trends, and areas for improvement, By doing so, you’ll increase customer retention. Once you segment your customers, consider how you want to hear their voices.
- Customer support surveys provide valuable analytics on how the VoC CX is performing. Live chat support software often has feedback form functions. For phone support, survey questions can be worked into the overall support experience, or as a post-support follow-up.
- Open up communication with your customers. Determine what you want to achieve with your VoC program and how it aligns with your overall business strategy. The information should be used to improve your VoC CX strategy and identify weak points at any part of the process.
- Research new solutions for soliciting feedback in your channels. New feedback applications and methodologies are always in the works, so a new voice of customer survey method may get a much higher response rate than your existing solution. Do A/B testing or another method to determine whether a new data collection method is more effective.
- Increase customer trust with data transparency. Let customers know you want to improve customer support, your product features, or other areas of the company with feedback.
Don’t:
- Generalize customer feedback. You can’t identify trends if your customers provide information on a hundred different metrics. Instead, focus on the voice of customer data that’s useful for establishing your end goal. Look into your typical customer’s day-to-day life and identify where your solutions fit in.
- Ignore negative feedback. Responding to negative feedback with empathy and taking appropriate actions can help turn negative experiences into positive ones. Training customer service representatives and employees to deal with negative feedback will improve customer retention and satisfaction.
- Disregard the importance of data privacy. Ensure that customer data is collected, stored, and processed securely in compliance with privacy regulations.
- Overlook the role of technology. Technology such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems and analytics tools can help streamline the voice of customer processes and make it easier to analyze customer feedback.
Many companies know what their customers want, but the market is ever-changing. The VoC program is in place for more than data collection; it serves as another way for companies to know their customers more.
Your organization may have many ways to differentiate itself through its product selections and pricing but using a VoC program to improve digital CX makes a world of difference in customer conversion, loyalty, and retention.
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As your expert partner in customer experience, we care about your customers as much as we care about your business. We can help implement voice of customer programs and CX support services to improve your overall customer experience.
Whether you want to improve your omnichannel support, enhance your Risk+Response capabilities, or drive customer engagement through digital platforms, TaskUs has end-to-end solutions and expertise to help you succeed.
- 1^A Refresher on A/B Testing
- 2^What is CRM
