Voice of the customer program Voice of the customer

Voice of the customer program

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What is voice of the customer program?

Voice of the customer program Voice of the customer

Also known as customer voice or simply the voice of customer, Voice of the customer program program deals with the response to the customer feedback. It refers to capturing, analysing and reporting on all customer feedbacks and the expectations and likes-dislikes that come from it. These feedbacks are directly associated to your company. 

Your customer defines your brand. It is considered extremely important for the brands to have a voice of customer program in place. If said in other words, voice of customers actually brings you close to what your customers think and feel about your brand. So in a sense, it takes you to the “voice” of your customers. Hence, a voice of customer program helps an organization reach, or even exceed the expectations of its customers. 

Voice of customer program not only helps you to have a real-time view of your customers’ expectations. But also it provides you with the insights of the on-going trends and opportunities in the market. By building your products accordingly, you can get a better CX and serve them with what they wanted. 

The key to having a good and progressive CX of the brand depends on how the organization plans on regulating the voice of customer program. 

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5 steps for building an effective voice of customer program

Voice of the customer program Voice of the customer

In this section, we will be looking at how you can plan your voice of customer program effectively in just these 5 steps:

Step 1: Define brand’s mission and value

The values and goals that your brand is standing on, make sure your customers stand for it too. It is important for the company and its customers to have a goal and mission oriented common ground to some extent, if not completely same. Let’s say, your brand stands for transparency and your customers just don’t trust you enough, well then it is safe to say that those two wouldn’t mix well. 

Once you find the customers who resonate with your goals very well, it is safe to build your voice of customer program around a bunch of like-minded customers. It is always beneficial to have customers who align well with your brand’s goals, represent the voice of customers. 

Step 2: Target audience 

Now that you have your ‘favoured’ customers on your side, focus on your target audience. You will have to customize your messages according to the people you are sending it to. Let’s say, marketing officers of an IT company and an ecommerce company are going to have very different messages specially designed for them.

Hence, your content has to be personalized according to its audience. Developing a persona for the target audience would really help in this situation. Form a persona and define what kind of messages to send to each target audience type depending on their personas. 

Step 3: Involve the entire organization

Planning a voice of customer program is surely a marketing team’s job. But the best ideas come from excessive brainstorming right? Keeping in mind how each person in the organization is connected to customers indirectly, if not directly, it is a great idea to take their help in designing the voice of the customer program. Depending on their expertise and the area in which they work, different people can help build a Q&A rather than you doing it yourself. 

Hence, it is best to combine different people from departments and plan your voice of the customer program in a way that is highly focused on the customers and the deliverables.

Step 4: Pillar strategy 

After completing step 1, you will have a picture of which areas are your potential. Pillar strategy needs 3-4 of such potential areas. Once done, make sure to cover your content from all those four focus areas. And do not forget to highlight your customer through blogs, Q&As and other engaging content. 

These pillars will define what your brand is recognized in the market for and that is definitely a score outside of the voice of the customer program. 

Step 5: Customer satisfaction first 

No doubt voice of the customer program is beneficial for your brand, but don’t forget that your customer is your main focus. These latest years of outraging technology, there are very low chances of retaining customers and this is, well, terrifying for most brand marketers. 

So even if you are at some point meeting your customers’ expectations, decide not to stop just there, but to go ahead and exceed them too. Make sure that this give and take of the feedback is a vision of growth for both the brand and its customers. 

10 sources of data for your voice of customer program

  • Customer interviews 

One way to gather your voice of the customer program data is through interviews. Though they are pretty time consuming, they have the potential of providing the most valuable and primary data. 

When you go to interview the customer in person, it gives you an opportunity to dive deeper into the feedback process and study the customer, customer segment or a few samples of customers. 

Interviews can be conducted in person, over the phone or through online video calls. The agenda is to get to know the customers’ gestures and speech to make more sense of what they actually mean to say. 

  • Customer surveys 

This is the most common way of gathering your voice of the customer program data. You need to build a questionnaire that best suits the target customers and then distribute it through efficient channels to amplify it. 

The benefit of using surveys as your data gathering technique is its scalability. The results of surveys will give a close to an accurate idea of which customer base is more responsive and which of them you need to survey again to get more meaningful feedback. 

  • Social media

We can straight up say that social media is a realm of brand engagement. For obvious reasons though. You will see almost all of the customers are always interacting with the brands through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram. Twitter and whatnot. 

It is a great opportunity for the brand to gain the customers’ attention on such platforms and conduct small and short surveys then and there. These surveys should not be very bothering and time-consuming as it will push them to just skip the whole process. 

It is important that you also monitor how your brand is being discussed on such platforms and what people are saying about it. This will give an indirect idea of where your brand stands in the market. 

  • Recorded customer calls 

These are the most easily available data for your voice of the customer program. Whether it is a feedback call, a follow-up call or just an enquiry call. Any of those can prove to be a gem. These voices of customers will be from one of these three types: very interested in your product, very happy with your product or very unhappy with your product. 

Since you have the recorded calls of the customers and they keep coming anyway, you will have your hands on this data anytime you want. 

  • Customer reviews 

Watch what customers have to say about your brand. Customers leave their reviews on various social media sites and shopping websites. 

It is important that you have a close look at how customers are reacting to your products after they have bought them. You can make a lot of sense of how your brand is being reflected on the users. 

  • Net Promoter Score®

NPS® or Net Promoter Score® is basically a loyalty measure that is determined by asking the customers how likely are they to recommend your product or brand to someone else. This won’t give you any direct data for your voice of the customer program but it will give you an idea of the customer engagement with your brand. 

  • Focus groups 

Similar to the interviews, focus groups are rather a small group of customers and there is no one-to-one interaction. A group of customers gather and the moderator pitches in a discussion about a product or a brand. The customers then start to freely talk about their views and opinions about the same. 

Focus groups provide you with more detailed and explanatory research for your voice of the customer program. 

  • Feedback form

As the voice of the customer program focuses on the feedback, it is a good choice to ask them to fill a feedback form. 

This form is generally seen on the brand’s website. Despite that, you can send this after purchase or at regular intervals to have real-time views of the customers about your brand and the products. 

  • Customer-facing employees

Talk to the employees that are in touch with the customers on regular basis. They can be salespersons, customer service agents, etc. they have an idea of why people call, what are their queries and what their needs from the products are. 

Others can be the people from the sales team who are also on the front line with the customers. They can provide you with customer views on certain offers and deals. 

  • Customer behaviour against their experience

Most of the times customers don’t say what they feel. In such cases, it will be a good benefit to watch their behaviours. 

There is various software that helps you determine the customers’ visit to your website. Which sections they surfed the most and how many times did they looked up your website also tells a lot about their behaviour. 

Exploratory Research Guide

Conducting exploratory research seems tricky but an effective guide can help.

Benefits of the voice of the customer program

  • Voice of the customer program to understand how customers interact and perceive your brand. 
  • You can keep a good market image while progressing in it and maintaining customer loyalty.
  • Provides a private means of communication for the customers to express their frustrations rather than them making use of social media platforms. 
  • Voice of the customer program can be used to gather new trends in the market and future developments.
  • To understand your customers’ needs and design the product accordingly. 
  • Makes marketing the positive customers easy. 
  • Voice of the customer program tells you how effective your marketing strategies are. 
  • Voice of the customer program is highly customizable and scalable. 
  • It can be designed to meet your projects and goals. 

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Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score℠ and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

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