Understanding the Voice of the Customer – A Comprehensive Guide
Understanding the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a program that helps companies understand customers’ wants, needs, and expectations. This is done through various methods, including surveys, interviews, and focus groups. The best practices help companies create a consumer-centric mindset in their product and company. This allows them to deliver ever-improving experiences that draw customers back.
Customer Surveys
Customer surveys are a time-tested, reliable way to gather customer feedback. In identifying what is voice of the customer is, several survey techniques, including open-ended questions, allow respondents to provide additional information about their experience or needs, and more quantitative measurement methods such as customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and more.
Regardless of the type of customer survey you choose, make sure to keep these tips in mind:
Keep your survey short. The Longer the surveys, the lower the response rates. Make sure you explain how long the survey will take in the invitation, and consider offering a progress bar to show respondents how much longer they have to complete the questionnaire. Using multiple-choice questions for a rating scale of one to five is a good idea. However, it’s also essential to include open-ended questions, allowing respondents to express their opinions in their own words.
Finally, follow up on any changes you’ve made based on your customer survey results. This will help you close the curiosity loop and keep your customers happy, as they’ll feel like their feedback is valued. You can send this communication via email, through your website, on chatbot and messaging apps, or even in person. The key is to be consistent and always look for ways to improve.
Focus Groups
Focus groups are customer research where customers meet to discuss their experiences with your product or brand. A trained moderator presides over the discussion, which can be either free-flowing or structured. Like customer surveys, focus groups allow you to collect qualitative data. However, the conversations of customers in a focus group often cover topics you may have overlooked through a survey alone.
The main benefit of a focus group is the ability to identify and understand customer perceptions. In addition, a focus group can help your company develop hypotheses or questions for a survey or interview. It can also help you understand people’s language to discuss a topic, their values and beliefs, or their experiences.
Another advantage of focus groups is that they can lead to change in both the short and long term. For example, in research conducted by Goss and Leinbach, participants of a hospital focus group discussed their views about the quality of service and provided suggestions for improvements. The result was a positive shift in the attitudes of hospital staff toward patients’ concerns.
A focus group’s main limitation is that it can be difficult to generalize its findings. This is mainly because of the small number of participants and their potential not to represent a representative sample. It can also be challenging to gain the trust of some participants, who might feel uncomfortable sharing sensitive or personal information with others.
Online Reviews
Online reviews are voluntary consumer-generated evaluations of products or services posted online. They serve as a form of word-of-mouth (WOM) and influence customer purchasing decisions. Online shoppers are 63% more likely to trust a brand with positive reviews than those without reviews.
Whether positive or negative, online reviews provide valuable insights that help businesses improve their product and service offerings. This is why using the right tool to collect and analyze online feedback is essential. The best online review analysis tools allow you to organize positive and negative feedback into valuable categories to prioritize the most critical issues.
It’s also important to remember that online reviews are a two-way conversation. A business’s response to a review is as critical as the review itself. Harvard Business Review reports that 89% of consumers read business’s responses to reviews. This is an excellent opportunity for a business to show that it cares about its customers and their opinions. A solid response to a review can boost customer loyalty and reduce churn. It can also increase sales and customer retention. So, use online review management tools to capture and analyze feedback in real-time. This way, you can take immediate action to improve your product or service offering.
Social Media
Whether you cringe at the memory of your Myspace page from the early 2000s or are constantly unsettled by too-relevant ads on Instagram, social media is something that most people have in common. Though social media has caused its fair share of harm, it is a powerful tool companies can leverage to drive consumer behavior and build brand value.
Social media is a group of internet-based tools that enable people to create, share, and interact with content in real time. It can also communicate directly with other individuals, build communities, and share information. It is often used to promote and sell products, though it can also be an excellent platform for customer service.
Any calls your team makes with customers are a gold mine for Voice of the Customer data. Whether it’s sales calls, demos, or support calls, they can provide both macro and micro feedback to identify trends in your customers’ needs.
A successful VoC program allows companies to gather meaningful customer feedback and act on it. When businesses can use their customer feedback to make changes, it shows that they care about their customers and want to meet their needs. This, in turn, builds loyalty and can even boost revenue.
