There’s a loyalty crisis in today’s consumer market. According to McKinsey, 38% of US consumers have switched brands, searching for better value. But a robust Voice of the Customer (VoC) program may be just what’s needed.
To gain market share – amidst economic pressures, shifting generational values, and heightened customer expectations for things like personalization – brands need, more than ever, to deeply listen to their customers and understand what they actually want.
VoC is a marketing research technique that harnesses the collective insights of your customers’ needs, wants, perceptions, preferences, and expectations. Considering customers are less likely than ever to provide direct feedback to brands, you need to meet them where they are to hear what they’re saying about your products.
Countless studies have shown how much the customer experience (CX) impacts the bottom line. Creating an engaging CX that fosters loyalty starts with a deep understanding of consumer sentiments and needs.
Collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback is essential for brands that compete primarily on customer experience – which today is most brands.
So, how can you set up your VoC program for success? What resources do you need to make it happen? Let’s take a closer look.
What is a Voice of the Customer program?
A Voice of the Customer program engages your customers for feedback at key moments of their customer journey – before and after they purchase. The purpose of such a program is to better understand customer needs, expectations, preferences, and perceptions, so you can use these insights to tailor a better customer experience.
Unlike one-off or standalone surveys, a VoC program covers the customer experience, both online and offline. It captures customers’ perspectives at all your brand’s touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
VoC tools facilitate this feedback collection, which is commonly conducted through online surveys on your website, mobile app, or email.
10 Voice of the Customer best practices that drive successful programs
Every business is unique, and so is each VoC program. However, the same fuel drives every successful program.
According to Forrester, all VoC programs should support the following activities:
- Listen (Collect feedback across channels and departments)
- Interpret (Analyze the customer feedback for actionable insights)
- Act (Put these insights to use)
- Monitor (Measure the impact of your actions)
What can you do to make sure your VoC program follows this cycle? Let’s start at the beginning.
1. Get internal buy-in, and find your champions.
Successful VoC programs often require multiple stakeholders across departments to work together to launch, manage, and get the most out of them (more on this later). Getting buy-in from management is essential to ensure your VoC program is given priority internally and can take full flight.
How can you get this buy-in? Focus on the potential impact that customer-driven insights can have on improving experiences, which could boost the bottom line. For example:
- Increase conversions (e.g., Improve the online purchase experience)
- Lower support costs (e.g., Deter calls to your contact center)
- Enhance customer service experience (e.g., Provide context to customer complaints)
- Improve the product experience (e.g., Understand snags customers experience with your offerings)
2. Set business and research goals for your VoC program.
Before launching any survey, you’ll want to clarify your business goals and research objectives and communicate them to all stakeholders. That will focus your efforts on obtaining the insights you need right now and produce less fluff that distracts from your goals.
Determining what you eventually want your VoC program to tackle is also important. At Emplifi, we recommend laying out your current and ideal customer feedback and data collection efforts across a Customer Experience Landscape plot.
This approach helps you visualize what you are currently collecting and identify gaps across stages and channels.
3. Pick the right VoC methodologies for your needs.
There are many ways to gather customer feedback, and the best results will come from choosing the most precise method for your purposes.
A pop-up survey invitation on your website will garner a different type of feedback than a comment card. Some methodologies are ideal for gathering feedback representative of all your customers, such as using a pre-post invitation method, where website visitors are invited to provide feedback at the end of their visit. Other methods, such as comment cards, are better suited to collecting tactical feedback that flags urgent issues.
Once you pick the right VoC methodology for your research needs, you’ll also need an intuitive and accessible survey experience on all devices. One way to do this is to use skip logic to make your surveys responsive.
4. Ask only the questions that help you tackle your customer experience goals.
Once you have your research goals and your methodologies picked out, it’s time to finalize what you want to ask your customers. There are probably a million things you want to know and an infinite number of metrics you can use for your Voice of the Customer program. But asking too many questions in your surveys could lead to survey fatigue and lower your collection counts. Finding the right balance is critical.
There are many Voice of the Customer templates available to give you a jumpstart, but of course, the questions you choose will depend on your personal research goals.
5. Implement your surveys in organic, non-intrusive ways.
Depending on how you’ll be engaging customers for feedback, launching your surveys can involve adding code to your site or mobile app, putting a survey link in emails, or distributing polls and questions on social media.
In addition to performing Quality Assurance (QA) before pushing everything live, consider your customers’ survey experience and aim to create a positive, seamless process. For example, if you launch multiple surveys on the same website, ensure visitors can’t be invited to the same survey or another survey within a certain timeframe (e.g., 30 days).
The last thing you want to do is turn customers away due to an annoying survey experience.
6. Integrate your Voice of the Customer feedback with other systems.
From web analytics and session replay to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, companies collect an enormous amount of behavioral data that tells them how customers interact with their brand.
Your VoC program can provide critical context for these behaviors and give you a more complete view of your customers’ experiences.
Linking feedback to your existing marketing and customer data technologies can open new analysis and segmentation opportunities. That allows your team to get more out of your VoC program and your other tools.
Injecting your customer feedback into your existing technologies can help add valuable context to your customers’ behaviors and give you a more complete picture of the customer experience.
7. Use reporting tools to continually analyze your feedback over time.
You’re collecting a steady stream of insights from your Voice of the Customer surveys. Now, it’s time to extract insights from this feedback.
Depending on your collection levels, continually reviewing your latest feedback in search of insights can be tricky and time-consuming. This is especially true if you collect a lot of open-ended feedback.
Thankfully, the advent of AI-powered reporting tools has made it easier for companies to take on this task. For example, some text analytics tools now use AI to automatically process each comment and categorize it based on topic or sentiment.
8. Share insights across your organization.
Your program’s insights can help drive changes to your CX at all your touchpoints, online or offline. As CX is an organization-wide initiative, insights from your VoC program should be easily accessible to key internal stakeholders.
Using and sharing customer experience dashboards tailored to key stakeholders can be a great way to help share the insights from your program throughout your organization. In addition, scheduling alerts to be sent to specific stakeholders when you receive feedback that meets certain criteria (for example, when someone rates their experience a “0” or uses the word “buy” in their feedback) gives the right people timely insights they can use to act quickly.
9. Act on your Voice of the Customer program’s insights.
The insights from your VoC program are only as valuable as what you do with them. The best programs not only help you inform your overall CX strategy long-term – they also help you gain insights you can act on right away.
You’ll want to design your program so key stakeholders can act quickly and efficiently on its insights. For example, this can include ensuring your website managers have real-time insights to fix UX issues or that your customer service team has customer feedback handy to help them more effectively close the feedback loop.
10. Instill a governance structure
VoC programs are not set-it-and-forget-it.
Acting on your insights shouldn’t be the last step. Regularly reviewing each component of the program is key to your program’s lasting success.
This can include:
- Revisiting your research goals to ensure they align with the latest business objectives.
- Ensuring your existing research still provides the types of insights you need today and making modifications or launching new research as necessary.
- Identifying and addressing gaps in how your insights are shared and disseminated across your organization.
What resources do you need to run a Voice of the Customer program?
A VoC program can be a treasure trove of key insights from your customers. But what’s involved to get one up and running and successful over the long term?
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Research Design
- Researching best practices
- Setting up data integrations
- Choosing sampling methodologies
- Keeping your research up to date
- Technical Implementation
- Researching best practices
- QA (is the code working as you would want?)
- Branding survey invitations
- Customizations to survey experience
- Project Management
- Monitoring collection counts
- QA
- Troubleshooting issues with collection
- Ensure projects remain aligned with objectives
- Reporting and Analysis
- Deep-dive into customer feedback
- Creating and sharing dashboards internally
- Generating recommendations
- Objectivity in data analysis
There are many moving parts to any successful VoC program. Whether or not to implement it yourself depends on your company’s unique requirements and resources.
You’ll want to consider what’s required to set up, manage, and extract insights from your Voice of the Customer program.
If you’re looking for a partner, Emplifi can help.
How Emplifi can help you launch a successful Voice of the Customer program
A VoC program requires time and resources to set up, maintain, and analyze over time. But in today’s ultra-competitive market, having a continuous source of customer-driven insights streaming in is worth it in the end.
At Emplifi, we’ve helped clients launch thousands of VoC programs for global consumer brands, providing guidance along the way to help ensure our clients get the most out of customer feedback.
As part of our unified CX platform, Emplifi VoC gives you the tools to launch, manage, and analyze your VoC program via an intuitive platform. Request your personalized demo today.
