Everything You Need to Know About Voice of Customer

It's not new that customer direct feedback plays a crucial role for businesses in crafting their marketing decisions. However, in most cases, brands are having challenges with overloaded customer data resulting in ineffectively identifying customer purchasing patterns. 

Brands must focus on enhancing their Voice of Customer (VoC) to drive customer satisfaction, increase retention and effectively adapt to customers' changing wants. To know more about Voice of Customer (VoC) and how to utilize it to help you create marketing strategies and better understand your customers.

We will explore VoCs impact on your business's growth and effective ways to use it.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is…

A data-driven research strategy in discovering what customers feel and think about your business, product, or services. It's a term that describes consumer communications with a brand and provides customers opinions and insights to make better decisions. 

So what should brands do to know their customers' needs and wants? What data needs to be collected?

VOC data is everything you collect from customer interactions. Each of these interactions opens opportunities to discover insights about your customers. These opportunities include improving your customer experience, reducing negative feedback, and conducting follow-ups to add more context to your customer's feelings.

Aside from that it collects a lot of customer touchpoints. VOC allows brands to discover unique ways customers communicate their frustrations, needs, and questions.

How VoC Affects Overall Business Decisions

Listening to your customers is key to gaining customer trust for every business. You must respond quickly to your customer's feedback and queries as a business owner. 

But how exactly does VoC affect your business decisions?

• Build your Customer Service Priorities.

With the ever-changing customer service landscape, businesses need to continually reassess their services to see if it still matches the needs and customers' voice of priorities. To do that, brands need a continuous flow of feedback– paired with a solid VoC program– to identify their service gaps and work on steps that prioritize meeting customers' needs.

• Revamp Customer Experience

One key benefit of utilizing Voice of Customer data is businesses can deliver better services and experiences to their customers. Making sure your customers are satisfied with your products and services is an integrated effort that fuses customers' voices and feedback.

When you engage with your customers, you can learn about their common

pain points, create an effective action plan to resolve these issues, and improve your product or services. Ultimately, using VoC can help create new business solutions, identify customer experiences and help prevent the risk of negative reviews or losing customers. 

How to Collect VoC? 

After knowing what VoC is and its impact on business decisions, let's start discussing techniques for collecting VoC data. 

Interviews

This is the traditional approach to capturing VoC data. This technique not only allows businesses to hear from customers directly, but they are also able to guide the flow of the interview with questions to dig deeper into customer sentiments.

You can conduct customer interviews in person or digital. But it's highly encouraged to have it in a face-to-face setting to holistically capture the Voice of Customer data.

Surveys

Surveys are probably the most common way of collecting VoC data because they are easy to gather, cost-effective, and quickly give customer data. However, before starting the survey, figure out first what you want to achieve so you can design your survey questions around your objectives.

Creating survey questions needs to be neutral and not guided because you want your customers to be free from the phrasing and get relevant answers.

Support Interactions

Interactions are independent of businesses' control. While these cannot be designed like surveys and interviews, it still has their benefits. Customer interactions can be the gate to learning new insights on how your customers feel about your brand as well s customers may want to tackle issues that you might not have considered. Looking at interactions, consider the various customer types; who are the customers unhappy or have problems with your brand? But you may get the wrong idea of looking at interactions only with their negative side. You can also look at the positive interactions of your customers and sustain or even improve the service or product that made your customers feel good.

Social Media

There's no denying that social media is the platform where most customers engage. The conversations customers have in your comment sections, stories, or posts can give you much information on customer behavior and how they react. While it may seem informal compared to the three mentioned above, it is still valuable because it provides VoC data and context about your customers. 

Be careful not to look aggressive or invasive while encouraging social media involvement. At the same time, analyze how your audience talks on social media and aim to establish a brand voice and image that lines up with their interactions, which is critical to being objective and not alienating your consumers.

Conclusion

To have a better shot at your business success, you must establish a loyal customer base committed to using your product and services and ensure their voices and feedback are valued. The Voice of Customers (VoC) data makes your business understand your customers' needs and complex purchasing patterns. Utilizing your VoC findings, you can make improved efforts across your marketing campaigns and brand presence. 

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