For any business, making sure that your customers are happy is priority number one. Customer feedback can help companies know what items to ramp up production on, where to make cutbacks, and even what to post to social media to attract additional business.
That’s where voice of the customer, or voice of the consumer, programs come in handy to assure customer satisfaction and analysis to pave the right steps forward for any company.
What does Voice of the Consumer mean?
Voice of the consumer, or VOC programs, are designed to take customer feedback — expectations, likes, and dislikes — associated with your company, and provide real-time operational data for companies to utilize for their long-term and short-term benefit.
A voice of the customer program will give immediate insight through a registered dashboard on customer experience, or CX, while can then turn into customer retention. These programs identify trends and opportunities to improve CX across the customer journey, meeting their needs and building better customer relationships. The more advanced a VOC program, the greater chance of a company having a deep analysis of consumer behavior.
What do your customers like? What do they want? Why are your unhappy customers displeased? How do your customers feel about employee engagement? These are just some of the questions that can be answered by an effective VOC program.
Benefits of VOC
A better understanding of your consumers is the goal of any VOC program. When you start listening to what customers want, you can better identify what it will take to meet customers’ needs, and prevent a poor experience. This allows you to predict their behaviors before they happen, and intervene before a dissatisfied consumer jumps ship. Through both positive feedback and negative feedback, a product manager could recognize what a repeat customer is looking for.
After all, voice of customer data can help with customer acquisition by sharing those examples of better customer experience, and recruiting new customers to your brand. These VOC dashboards utilize what is referred to as a sentiment analysis. This benchmark gives insight into what draws particular consumers, like understanding why some customers sign up for a loyalty program, while others do not. Collecting VOC data can even inform product decisions and marketing strategies to figure out the right time to unveil new items or advertise sales on particular products.
Improving Your VOC Program
Whether it is product design or a marketing team, voice of customer programs can take even the best organizations to the next level. The metrics of VOC data are expanding constantly, moving on from just the what of customers’ expectations to the why. This allows programs to better meet customer needs by capturing emotion and analyzing sentiment.
The VOC programs are able to determine these emotional needs of consumers through NPS and CSAT. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer preference and loyalty measurement taken from asking customers how likely they are to recommend certain products and services to others. This is done by calculating the percentage of promoters and subtracting the percentage of detractors. CSAT stands for Customer Satisfaction and is a score that indicates how happy a consumer is with the overall experience.
Voice of customer programs also prioritizes roadmaps for the future of the company, with an understanding of what phrases and qualities of items are luring customers in and driving revenue growth. This gets down into the specifics of the persona of the average consumer. Now more than ever, the number of satisfied customers a business has is crucial. With so many companies hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is loyalty that has gotten some businesses through, and it is that same loyalty and expanding to new customers that will help them in further growth.
