Voice of Customer

What is voice of customer?

Voice of customer (VoC) is the process of tracking, analyzing, and acting upon customer feedback. It consists of positive and negative experiences shared by your customers on different media, including social media, review sites, and online surveys.

A well-executed VoC program gives you insights into your customers’ needs and pain points, bridges the gap between customer expectations and customer experience (CX), and helps you boost brand loyalty.

For example, if you are a sports brand like Nike, you can use VoC programs like online surveys to understand what your customers are saying. This allows you to track responses and gauge if your pricing is appropriate, delivery and returns are easy, or customer support is accessible. Analyzing these responses will help you make more informed decisions for your customers and your business.

What are the benefits of a voice of customer program?

You can use voice of customer programs to collect and analyze user feedback, make recommendations to CX strategists, and regularly track the outcomes of these efforts to create a distinctive customer experience. A well-implemented VoC program enables you to:

Identify positive and negative reviews

Voice of customer programs use technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to identify and gather a massive amount of information from social channels and structure it into actionable insights. Engaging with positive feedback ensures high customer satisfaction, and negative feedback shows you the gaps to close in your product strategy.

Learn more about review management.

Improve your CX strategy

Insights from VoC programs allow you to make data-driven changes to your CX strategy. Studying the outcomes of these changes over time helps you enhance your growth, return on investment (ROI), and other key metrics.

Improve product strategy

Analyzing VoC programs gives you data to help you reduce losses while investing in the right product strategy. For example, McDonald’s plans to use less packaging by 2025 based on customer feedback, meaning customer-approved and cost-effective packaging.

Keep your brand relevant

Following through on data insights from the voice of customer programs in your CX strategy helps keep your product features and benefits in line with customer expectations.

Increase customer retention 

VoC programs help you recognize and address your customers’ concerns quickly, which greatly increases customer satisfaction. This, in turn, boosts brand loyalty and the chances of high-quality customer referrals.

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What are the techniques for a voice of customer program?

Voice of customer programs consist of a mix of techniques that help you reach out to your customers to understand how they feel about your brand. Here are some techniques and when you can use them.

Customer interviews - Gain VoC insights in a more personal manner.

Online customer surveys - Gain quantitative and qualitative insights by asking the right questions.

Live chat - Get real-time feedback from your visitors.

Social media - Talk directly to your customers and stay up to date with customer conversations about you and your competitors.

Website behavior - See customer behavior on your website using heatmaps, visitor recordings, etc.

Online customer reviews - Gain more visibility and use reviews to make more informed decisions for product strategy.

Emails - Customize emails to ask questions or get feedback from your mailing list.

Feedback forms - Ask for feedback from your website visitors.

Recorded calls - Get historical data using sales calls, customer service calls, etc.

What is the voice of customer process?

Voice of customer programs should be designed such that you are able to capture customer intent at every step and channel in the customer journey. The four key steps in a typical voice of customer program are:

1. Listen to your customers

Gathering structured data, such as name, demographics, and age, as well as unstructured data, including reviews and social media comments, makes you aware of how your customers feel about your brand.

2. Learn from customer data

Analyzing customer data and discovering emerging trends help you understand customer sentiment. 

3. Act on customer feedback

Your VoC program builds value as you act upon the insights you gained, as customers are more likely to stick with your brand when they see that their voices are heard. 

4. Track outcomes of VoC programs

Monitoring outcomes regularly and identifying whether you see an increase in essential metrics, such as ROI and CSAT, can significantly help you revamp your business strategy.

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To learn more about harnessing consumer insight and expressing your brand authenticity, download our strategic brand management handbook today.

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Gain valuable insights into the voice of your customers with Sprinklr Modern Research.

Customers use multiple channels in their customer journey to express their views on a product or service. Tapping into the voice of the customer from all these channels and converting that data into actionable insights is made possible with Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform. 

Equipped with industry-leading AI, Sprinklr Modern Research enables you to listen, learn, and act based on real-time customer data and lets you: 

• Tap into 30+ digital channels, 1.5B+ webpages, 5,000+ print sources, 1,500+ TV and radio sources including paywalled sites, 1,000+ podcast sources, and 3,100+ classified sources, and monitor brand and customer conversations from over 500 million messages across the internet 

• Understand trends, preference shifts, and customer behavior based on product, images, location, and more. 

• Categorize content based on tone, themes, objectives, and customer journey stages.

• Get real-time notifications to stay ahead of events that can impact brand reputation.

• Monitor VoC insights on customizable dashboards and share them externally or with concerned teams for immediate action.

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