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With businesses competing for the attention of the same target audience, it’s more crucial than ever to understand the needs and expectations of customers.
The VoC or Voice of Customer process enables you to do just that. It helps you gather unfiltered customer feedback so you can better understand their preferences and requirements. Gathering customers’ own expressions of what they need and require to have a successful experience can help you drive your business in the right direction.
In this article, we will be looking more into how the Voice of Customer program works.
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The Voice of Customer refers to the customer experience with respect to your products, services, and overall performance. A well-structured Voice of Customer program in your organization will deliver loads of valuable data from your customers, indicating their perceptions, opinions, feedback, and issues regarding your organization.
VoC process has gained elevation over the years as customer experience and satisfaction have started to drive businesses on a large scale.
Given how much the Voice of Customer program has been helping businesses stay on top of the market, it does have a defined structure in which the program is carried out. This is called the voice of customer process. It refers to the process of capturing, analyzing, and implementing customer experiences and feedback.
Before you even start the Voice of Customer process, you need to set a goal for your research.
Answers to such questions will give you an objective or agenda to conduct your feedback survey.
Why is it necessary to have a goal?
Well, imagine you have designed a very generic questionnaire for your feedback survey, and you have distributed it. Your data is flooding in, and you are excited to see what you can conclude from that. But once you have your data, you don’t know what to do with it. You are confused so as to how to put this information into use and which areas you need to improve.
Defining a goal and objective for your Voice of Customer process will give you data that is specific to your goal. Your goal can be feedback on a newly released product, customer service improvements, knowing what new products the customers want, etc.
Now that you have your goal set, the next thing you want to do is prepare a questionnaire for the survey. Make sure that the questions you frame are totally focused on the topic you chose to get feedback on.
Example: Your goal is to get feedback on a newly delivered product. You will ask questions like “Which features do you wish to have more in our product?” in such cases, ask questions like “How do you think our customer service is serving you?”.
As you can see, this question just sounds out of the topic. So, it might confuse the customers when they have to jump from topic to topic in one single survey.
After framing a perfect survey and running the mock tests through it, you now have to deploy the feedback form to the customers. Identify where you are more likely to get your customers’ attention to have a successful Voice of Customer process.
These days most people prefer to use social media platforms and brand websites to interact with them. This is where technology has taken over the way businesses communicate with their customers. You have to decide which platform you are going to use to distribute your feedback survey.
Another thing to focus on more is the sample customers. Choose your customers carefully and make sure they represent the entire population. Any sampling bias in the survey will lead to skewed results, further leading to inefficient business decisions.
After you have distributed your survey, the data will start flooding in. normal business feedback has huge amounts of data that cannot be analyzed manually. In such cases, you can make use of various available data science and automated tools. These tools will help you to segment your data and label them.
Segmenting and labeling your data means nothing but categorizing your data depending on what it means.
Example: You have asked the customers for their overall experience with your brand. They have sent all sorts of feedback, positive as well as negative. The analytics tools that you will use will identify the keywords like “bad,” “amazing,” “poor,” etc., and will categorize them based on positive feedback and negative feedback.
This way, you will have the information on which areas are getting bad reviews and which of them you need to keep the way it is.
The reason why you started the Voice of Customer process is to bring in some improvements and changes in your organization. When you gather the data from the customers and analyze it to draw conclusions, you will understand which areas of betterment.
The key to making your Voice of Customer program a success is when you will be able to implement it in practice. Make sure you plan your strategies according to customer feedback and make the necessary improvements.
Customers tend to stick to a brand when they see constant improvement. After gathering the voice of customers, you will know how to be better for your customers and enhance their experience.
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VoC process offers a wide range of benefits for a business. Here are some of those Voice of Customer program benefits.
The Voice of Customer process enables you to understand customers’ needs and preferences in their own words. It allows you to tailor the products, services, communications, and overall experiences to meet those needs.
A tailored and personalized experience, in turn, leads to higher customer satisfaction.
Listening to customers’ feedback and opening up can help you identify what you are missing compared to your competitors. Customers use a mix of products, which means, they must have used your competitors’ products as well.
Gathering customers’ unfiltered opinions can help you identify areas of improvement and points of friction. Analyze customer insights to take the right initiative in becoming the top performer in the industry.
The Voice of Customer program can help you not only evaluate your products/services in the market but also the product/service concepts.
You can conduct concept testing pre-launch and involve customers in the product/ service development process. This way, you can identify areas your products are falling short of and also gather unique ideas from customers.
Catering to customers’ needs and expectations in a more targeted way can help you attract the right customers. With tailored experiences and targeted products/services, you can increase customer satisfaction. This will help you increase customer retention and acquisition, and sales, leading to an increase in revenue.
The VoC process is a powerful tool that can help you drive continuous growth, become customer-centric, and achieve long-term success.
The VoP and VoC process are two methodologies that help you drive your business growth. While the two might sound similar, there are some key differences.
Voice of Process Vs. Voice of Customer program.
The Voice of Customer process focuses on capturing and analyzing customers’ feedback about the product, services, and overall experience.
The Voice of Process analyzes a business’s capability to meet customers’ needs and expectations. It evaluates the internal process of the business.
The goal of gathering customers’ voices is to understand how you can meet their expectations and requirements.
While VoP helps you identify and eliminate inefficiencies impeding business growth.
For a VoC process, you can gather data directly from the customers using customer surveys or feedback forms.
However, data for VoP comes from internal sources such as employee feedback, operational data, etc.
The focused outcome of the Voice of Customer program is to improve customer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, and increase retention.
On the other hand, the focused outcome of Voice of the Process is to improve operation efficiency, increase productivity, and reduce operational costs.
VoP Vs. VoC process may have different focuses and purposes, but both are valuable tools. The key to business growth is to find a balance between the two so that the desires of customers align with the process capability of the business.
In conclusion, the Voice of Customer process is a valuable tool that enables you to enhance customer satisfaction, improve product/service quality, and drive success. By gathering insights into customers’ needs and preferences, you can make data-driven decisions and improve customer experience.
Prioritizing the VoC process helps you to become customer-focused and retain loyal customers in this highly competitive business landscape. Leverage robust online survey tools that enable you to create effective VoC surveys and analyze quantitative and qualitative data.
The VoC process involves gathering customers’ insights on their experience with the brand, the products, and the services. The process helps you gain insights into customers’ needs, preferences, expectations, and requirements.
The purpose of the VoC program is to improve customer satisfaction using meaningful customer insights.
The Voice of Customer program helps you understand your target audience better. That, in turn, helps you make data-driven decisions to improve operational efficiency & the customer experience.
Listening to customers’ voices enables you to take effective actions to improve customer experience and loyalty.
The frequency of your VoC surveys depends on the industry, company size, customer base, and survey goals.
However, to leverage the Voice of Customer process to its fullest potential, you should conduct it as frequently as you can act on the data. The frequency can be monthly, quarterly, or half-yearly. You should only conduct the next survey when you have taken action on the previous survey.
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