Companies are increasingly recognizing the power of the customer voice. However, executing a robust VOC strategy requires a structured approach to collecting and analyzing data.
Implementing best practices in VOC strategies enables businesses to stay relevant, enhance products and services, foster loyalty, and gain an edge over competitors.
Create a Customer Journey Map
Experts highly recommend implementing the voice of the customer and customer journey map. But what is voice of the customer? A customer journey map visually represents a customer’s steps through a process or purchase with your brand. It includes touchpoints, channels, content, and the emotions customers feel. It’s a good idea to use qualitative research (like field studies, contextual inquiry, and diary studies) for this kind of mapping to get the most accurate, truthful narrative. Involve your team members in the journey-mapping process to promote buy-in and foster interest.
Create a buyer persona to ensure the map’s scope targets your business goals. This persona should include demographics and psychographics that represent your typical customer. Include solicited and unsolicited data, such as customer feedback, surveys, and reviews. A buyer persona is crucial because it provides context for your customer journey maps and helps you develop more empathy with your customers. It will help you identify the areas of your customer experience that are most important for your business goals and those that need improvement. You can then make changes that result in a more seamless, enjoyable customer journey.
Collect Feedback
As you plan your customer feedback strategy, decide how and when to request feedback and what kind of data you need to measure success. You will also need to determine your goals for the feedback you collect. For example, you could improve the customer experience, increase brand loyalty, or generate revenue growth.
Once you’ve determined what you hope to achieve with your customer feedback, you can begin collecting it. Ensure you have enabled closed-loop feedback so your team can respond to customers quickly and efficiently. This will allow you to identify any churn risks and address them accordingly. It will also help you prioritize highly unhappy customers for a more in-depth review.
After you’ve collected the data, create a spreadsheet for the raw feedback and another to store the categories, themes, and sentiments that will be coded for your analysis. Sorting the data can help you find patterns and trends and develop your next steps.
It’s also essential to involve all teams in collecting and analyzing feedback. This will help ensure everyone has a voice and feels invested in its success. For example, sales teams may use the insights gained from customer feedback to alter their conversations with prospects or shift their selling approach. Product managers can use the feedback to update features that address specific pain points.
Analyze Insights
It is crucial to have the right tools to analyze data and turn it into actionable insights. But it’s equally important to make the insights easily accessible to stakeholders. This means tailoring analytics based on the needs of different teams. For example, suppose you’re analyzing customer feedback about a specific app. In that case, it might be useful to provide a dashboard that only includes the data that applies to the team working on that project. This will prevent key findings from getting lost in a sea of information. It’s also a good idea to structure your workflow so that insights are shared in real-time. This will help you to address issues before they become too big of a problem for customers. For example, you might consider setting up a Slack channel for CX insights where team members can receive alerts and insights about what customers tell them. This will ensure that you can react quickly to changes in sentiment or demands.
Share Insights
Using insights from your Voice of the Customer program to make data-driven changes to your business strategy is key to driving growth. But it’s important to collect the right data and insights and share them at the right time. The best way to do this is to have an active collaboration and communication process that brings together multiple departments.
Sharing customer insights at the right time allows your organization to act faster, and it helps your CX and marketing teams create experiences that perfectly align with customer expectations. For example, suppose you analyze your Voice of the Customer surveys and discover that most customers are unhappy with your pricing strategy. In that case, it’s a good idea to implement a change before churn increases.
This can be done through various methods, including direct feedback from customers through surveys and indirect feedback through customer service interactions. For example, if you receive 200 inbound calls daily to your call center and your speech analytics tells you that most of the feedback is negative, it would be a good idea to communicate with those customers directly to find out the problem.
