Voice of customer survey What is a Sentiment Analysis Tool

Voice of customer survey

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What is a voice of customer survey?

Voice of customer refers to gathering and capturing customer feedback. Business use voice of customer program to bring out the best from customers about how they feel and perceive their brand. This helps businesses to understand new market trends and opportunities, customer opinions and perceptions, and product and service improvement gaps and insights. 

As we know there can be various methods of capturing customer feedback like interviews, surveys, focus groups, social media, etc. The most effective way is to conduct voice of customer surveys. As the name suggests, this is a method to collect customer feedback through a well-framed questionnaire designed to focus on a particular research topic or question. 

Voice of customer survey What is a Sentiment Analysis Tool

How your voice of customer survey comes out to be depends on the quality of questions you ask in the survey. The key lies in investing time in framing questions. The questions need to be:

  • Focused on the research/survey topic
  • Should be customer-centric
  • Short and simple to understand
  • Not too complicated or twisted for the respondents to answer
  • Should use varieties of question formats
  • Close-ended – if you want to have quantitative or numeric data
  • Open-ended – if you want to have qualitative or descriptive data

Websites like questionpro and surveymonkey provides you with various templates for the voice of customer surveys.  

Step by Step guide to Descriptive Research

Get ready to uncover the how, when, what, and where questions in a research problem

How to create an effective voice of customer survey?

In this section, we will see how to form and regulate a voice of customer survey for it to give you the best insights on the market research:

Decide a goal

For obvious reasons, any survey or a research needs a goal to start with. Using one generic template for all sorts of surveys is just a waste of time. You need to design different surveys for different topics focusing on different issues in your business. Let’s say, you might want to understand new trend in the market through voice of customer, or understand issues your customers are facing with your product or services, and much more. 

According to your goal, your voice of customer survey questions need to focus on that one goal. You will understand how much you were successful in this practice after you have gotten your results and how much it gives you valuable insights on the decided topic.

Many but short surveys 

Say you have decided on a goal and your team sits down to frame the questions. Due to some reason, the entire survey turns out to be a long-lasting exam paper. 

Research and studies say that respondents can stick to any survey for 5-10 minutes. In such cases as the above, the best way to cut down your survey response time is to divide the same survey into various short surveys. 

These short surveys will still focus on the same topic, but as the time taken to complete those is now less, respondents will prefer less to bail on your survey and actually respond to it. 

Keeping it simple

As discussed earlier, the understanding of your voice of customer surveys needs to be as simple as possible. Don’t forget that your survey is going gout to a lot of people and they all won’t have the same understanding or intellect. 

You need to frame your survey in such a way that the questions are:

  • Pretty direct
  • Not too long or not too short
  • Self-explanatory 
  • Directed to the topic

First question impression 

This focuses on the very first question of your survey. As we are on the first question and now that we have all the respondents’ attention, the first question should ask about the overall experience of the customer. 

There is a chance that you will ask a narrower or just direct topic related question, and it will influence the respondents’ views. Asking all the small nit-picky questions at first and then getting to the overall performance question will only reduce the validity of the overall rating.

Both qualitative and quantitative questions

The two most important aspects of any survey are qualitative and quantitative questions. Quantitative questions will give you numeric data which you can analyze using statistical methods. Whereas qualitative questions will give you brief and descriptive data which you will have to analyze using labelling and making a conclusion.

Quantitative questions have a fixed range of options as their answers from which respondents are supposed to choose the option that fits their views the most. Qualitative questions allow the respondents to express their views freely as a paragraph. A voice of customer survey should have both of these questions included depending on what kind of data that particular question is going to give you. 

Relationship and transactional surveys

The two categories that a voice of customer survey will fall into are relationship surveys and transactional surveys.

Relationship survey: this focuses on how your customer feels about your brand as a whole. This survey method mainly gives you a big picture of customer experience. 

Transactional survey: this focuses on gathering customer feedback on specific transactions. This survey gives you a more specific detail about a customer experience. 

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Suggestions and improvements

Don’t forget to ask your customers what products or services they would want you as a brand to come up with. 

Ask questions like “What services would you like us to provide you more?” “What new features do you want us to include in our mobile app?”  Such questions help the customers to think in all the innovative ways. Leaving no room for undelivered needs, this way of taking feedbacks proves to be the best source of ideas for product development. 

Service feedback

Another most important factor that contributes the most to customer experience. Through the voice of customer survey, you can gauge their experience with your customer care agents and other employees. Ask them for their experience with such brand representatives.

As a precaution, you can train your representatives to handle all sorts of customers, right from the patient to the angry and frustrated ones. 

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Ask about competitors

The voice of the customer survey is supposed to be honest and transparent. Ask them that who according to them is your equal competitor. By doing so you send out a message that you are interested in knowing your market competition and willing to keep up your development to be on the top and serve your customers more efficiently. 

Loyalty check 

Ask your customers “How much do you trust our brand?” This question will give you an answer which will probably be descriptive. Customers will justify their answers so you should be prepared for all sorts of answers. Take the negative feedbacks in a sporting way and train your employees for the same. Never forget it is the negative feedbacks that keep a brand growing. 

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