How to Analyze Voice of Customer

How to Analyze Voice of Customer

voc voice of customer

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is precisely that: listening to your customers. VoC entails gathering, understanding, and analyzing customer feedback to improve product and customer experience (CEX) directly.

You might be thinking to yourself, “this isn’t new; businesses the world over have been listening to their customers for centuries.” You are right; well, partly at least. Customer feedback has always been a fundamental part of growing a business, no argument there. But here?s the difference, Voice of the Customer focuses on responding to customers, collecting feedback, and then incorporating all that into a product or service.

It is essentially a focus shift from collecting general aggregate data to individual and personalized data. Through a coordinated and all-department inclusive approach, a great Voice of Customer program will improve customer experience, problem-solving, and business growth.

How important is it to Analyze?

As opposed to merely collecting customer data, the Voice of Customer analysis focuses on understanding needs. Good VoC helps businesses model their product or service into something that customers genuinely want.

Knowing that customers are experiencing challenges or unmet needs means you must quickly find solutions for any business. On the flip side, if you obtain information showing that customers are enjoying a particular product or service, you would do well to build upon it.

Voice of the Customer is much more than just sending out questionnaires or surveys and hoping for the best. Anyone with a dream to become a great singer, for example, would want honest feedback from their voice coach. Constructive criticism is a necessary pain in the quest for improvement.

VoC best practices emphasize asking pertinent questions and accepting feedback, both positive and negative. The insights that drive change derive from customer experiences, complaints, compliments, and suggestions.

A business without a solid VoC plan misses out on the opportunity to leverage satisfied clients and placate dissatisfied ones. Investing in a VoC program allows you to truly listen to your customers, act on their responses, and analyze the resultant data to improve your business holistically.

customer sentiment monitoring

Building an Effective VoC Analytics Program: Three Key Steps

VoC programs include a range of tasks, including data collection and insight extraction, and putting them to work for you. Here?s a simple yet effective three-step strategy you can use to build a VoC program that works. Following these steps will empower you to act with speed and build a better business.
? Listen: Give your customers a platform where they can freely give feedback. The data captured from customer responses is gold.
? Act: Customers respond to action, so ensure that your follow up on any issues raised is prompt and in line with their needs
? Analyze: Employ text analysis to determine appropriate steps to achieve resolution and progress.

Step 1: Listen

So critical is the listening step; it will determine the overall success or failure of your VoC program. Collecting actionable feedback involves asking the right questions to the right audience and at the appropriate time. It is a great idea to create customer profiles before sending out any surveys.

Building client profiles will help you accurately identify interaction levels and enable you to direct questions accordingly. Doing this will help you collect direct and indirect feedback. Everything from CSAT scores to behavioral metrics will be available to your team.

Listening out for feedback is just as important as who you listen to. It is essential to align your surveys with customer journeys. Timing is critical as it can directly affect the feedback you receive and also ensures customers are satisfied.

An excellent practice is following every support ticket with a one-question survey to close the loop. Asking clients if they?re satisfied with the support they?ve received lets you know how they feel and whether or not further action is necessary.

It’s important to note here that too much of anything is counterproductive. The same applies to surveys. Do not fall into the temptation of bombarding your clients with endless surveys. Setting your surveys at appropriate intervals has a significant impact.

Step 2: Act

This step is all about providing value to your customers. When it comes to Voice of Customer action, it needs to be healthy, decisive, and above all else, prompt. You need to demonstrate to your customers, through quick action, that you are listening and that you care by acting on feedback immediately.

VoC action requires a closed-loop communication; customer issues should be addressed and resolved within the shortest time possible. Left unanswered, even a positive response would be just as damaging as a negative one.

A highly effective way to ensure you close the loop at scale is by providing adequate and relevant resources to your team members. Further, a set of guidelines on addressing and escalating customer feedback or complaints will result in quicker turnaround time.

For any outreach team, insights into a customer’s needs or concerns are valuable as it saves them time and the uncertainty of relying on their instincts when mediating situations. Keeping support manuals handy means agents can quickly access the resources necessary to take action when customers raise issues.

A culture that values feedback needs inculcating in every department of the company. When every team member fully understands the value and positive effects of feedback, the motivation to act accordingly will come naturally.

Step 3: Analyze

On the heels of your feedback gathering, the analytical data generated comes into play. The data gathered can be classified into business and outreach analytics as well as program insights. Business analytics encompasses the various metrics for tracking and benchmarking purposes. Chiefly for internal consumption, business analytics help teams generate reports.

On the other hand, outreach analytics score the performance of your customer outreach efforts, such as the number of surveys conducted, the number of respondents, subscribers, bounced emails, and so on. Using these metrics, you can better optimize your outreaches.

Often overlooked, an important metric to keep an eye on is the number of people who didn?t respond to your survey. This metric will help adjust your strategy to become more engaging. Finally, as a result of what you glean from both business and outreach analytics, you get valuable program insights.

For example, survey answers, while extremely valuable, can be harder to analyze at scale. Thankfully, technological advancement has seen the development of cutting edge software like Tatvam, which has analytical tools that can extract tone and intent from text analysis.

Using Tatvam technology, your business can accurately identify previously ambiguous themes in feedback and get a much more accurate view of your customer experience. With these insights, text analysis will no longer be akin to rocket science. You will comfortably be able to apply the lessons learned to your strategy and then track your results.

How to get actionable VoC insights through Text Analysis Software

Investing in a great VoC software program such as Tatvam can help you by offering a complete guide on Text Analysis. Some benefits include:?????????

? Centralized Analyzing, measuring, and customer feedback reporting.
? Significant savings on time and money by offering a much more efficient way to organize, read, and act on customer feedback.
? Translating customer feedback into actionable insights?
? Measuring and tracking progress ?against the competition.
? Checking trends and aligning customer experience accordingly.
??Identifying key audience segments for personalized experiences and selecting SEO keywords for more effective marketing campaigns.

Success Stories

Still not convinced? Here?s a couple of Voice of Customer examples used by real-world businesses to great success.

? Microsoft: Software giant Microsoft is perhaps one of the best examples of how VoC positively impacts business. Microsoft’s Customer Market Research team monitors more than one thousand brands and products across social media and integrates that data into their campaigns.
? Sky TV: Sky TV famously used the insights gained from feedback to identify the negative impacts in their net promoter score (NPS) occasioned by a price increase. The analysis revealed spikes in NPS, as well as what triggered the most significant impact.
? Vodafone: As one of the largest telecoms companies in the world, Vodafone attributes at least some of their success to the continuous monitoring and improving customer experience on their website using VoC. They can identify issues and prioritize improvements quickly and conveniently.
? Lufthansa: German national carrier Lufthansa is yet another prime example of the power of VoC. Using Voice of Customer software, they can better reproduce and understand customer concerns.

If you truly grasp how closely your business matches customer expectations with your service, Voice of Customer is a must-have. A wide gap between expectations and customer experience means there is work to be done.
Using a great VoC program allows your business to shift its model to a more customer-centric approach. In essence, VoC is a move from words to action.

Final Thoughts

We hope you have gained more insight into what VOC is and how it can drive your business change. Putting all the insights, VoC affords you into action will help you better identify and respond to your customers’ needs.

With a great VoC program, you will be well on your way to an increased customer retention and conversion rate. A trailblazing your organization invests in the right products, feature enhancements, and services that make them stand out from the crowd.