In a business landscape where customer preferences and expectations shift rapidly, a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program can be the cornerstone of your customer engagement and product development strategies. This guide explores how to launch an effective VoC program, detailing each critical step and providing insights into making the program successful and responsive to your customers’ voices.
Contents
What is the voice of the customer program?
The Voice of the Customer (VoC) program systematically captures, analyzes, and acts upon customer feedback. This feedback, collected through various channels, provides insights into customer needs, desires, and frustrations, offering a foundation for strategic decisions and innovations. A well-structured VoC program can elevate customer satisfaction, enhance product quality, and drive business growth by aligning the company’s objectives with customer expectations.
The purpose of a voice of the customer program
The primary purpose of a VoC program is to make strategic business decisions that reflect the needs and wants of customers. A robust VoC program aims to:
- Enhance customer satisfaction: Understand and address the factors that affect customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Drive product improvements: Use customer feedback to guide the development and refinement of products.
- Identify trends: Spot emerging trends to stay ahead of the market and adapt to changing customer preferences.
- Reduce customer churn: Identify the reasons behind customer dissatisfaction and address them to improve retention.
- Foster customer-centric culture: Embed customer-focused thinking at all levels of the organization to enhance service and product offerings.
Steps to build a Voice of Customer program
Step 1: Define your needs and objectives
As with any company effort, purpose should come before action.
- What is the goal of your VoC program at your company?
- What metrics are you hoping to impact?
- What are you hoping to enable other teams to do?
Setting clear, measurable objectives is the first step in creating a VoC program. Determine what you want to achieve, whether it’s improving specific aspects of the customer experience, enhancing product features, or increasing customer retention rates.
Step 2: Gather stakeholder buy-in
Securing the support of key stakeholders is essential for the success of the VoC program. VoC is fundamentally cross-functional so there are probably VoC needs on every team at your company. (E.g., executive team wants the overall sentiment, product team needs to deep dive into the reaction to each feature launch, etc.)
Engage leaders and teams across the organization by demonstrating the value and potential impact of customer insights on business outcomes. Educate your team on the importance of customer feedback and train them in collecting, analyzing, and responding to customer insights effectively.
Step 3: Identify your customer touchpoints
Map out all points of interaction with your customers, from initial contact through post-purchase. Understanding these touch points is crucial for determining where to collect valuable customer data.
Step 4: Choose the right customer feedback sources and tools to analyze the data
Define your customer feedback sources. Every company is different, but most have some subset of customer operations data, reviews, surveys, or social media comments. Most companies start with surveys but this is a mistake as often there is already a treasure trove of customer operations data such as support tickets, in-app feedback, etc. You can mine this already existing and usually un-utilized data before you have to ask your customers survey questions.
If you want to start feedback sources from scratch, make sure to create feedback mechanisms that are accessible and easy for customers to use. This might include mobile-friendly surveys, feedback buttons on your website, and proactive live chat services.
Also, consider the benefits of qualitative data (e.g., customer interviews, open-ended surveys and focus groups) versus quantitative data (e.g., close-ended surveys and behavioral analytics).
Step 5: Choose the right tool to analyze the data
To analyze the customer feedback data, choose a tool that can integrate well with your feedback sources and technology. Your tool should seamlessly do the counting, categorizing and analyzing for you so that you can focus on crafting the reports, organizing the communication of the insights and acting on the insights to accomplish your objectives. Also, choose a tool that can scale as your business grows and customer base expands. A VoC software like Idiomatic can analyze your customer feedback from different sources such as help desk, surveys, social media, product reviews, app reviews, forums, and seamlessly integrate with your technology stack.
Here’s how you can build your VoC program with Idiomatic:
Step 6: Act on the insights
Implement changes based on customer feedback and monitor the impact of these changes on customer satisfaction and business outcomes.
Establish clear metrics to measure the success of your VoC program.
Click here to learn more about how to operationalize VoC insights across your company
Additional Voice of the Customer resources
If you’d like to learn more from the customer support/experience professionals who have built and managed VoC programs, we recommend you to watch this webinar:
Click here for a downloadable voice of customer template
Click here for more information on voice of customer analytics
Conclusion
A Voice of the Customer program is an essential element for businesses aiming to stay competitive and responsive in the modern market. By understanding and implementing a structured approach to collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback, companies can ensure they not only meet but exceed their customers’ expectations. With careful planning, the right tools, and a commitment to action, your VoC program can transform customer insights into valuable business improvements.
