Most industry leaders are known to collect surveys, develop marketing strategies, and frequently collect customer feedback, but how well do they listen to their customers?
In today’s world, customers have developed a diverse and unique voice throughout their customer journey. It’s impossible for brands to leverage experience if they are not putting every word the customer says into action.
If you want to gain a competitive advantage, businesses need to focus on what customers are saying and how their feedback adds value to their experience. Brands need to utilize effective listening tools. Voice of the Customer (VoC) best practices show businesses how to track future references and empower the brand.
What is VoC?
Voice of the Customer is the process of understanding, describing, analyzing, and acting on a customers’ needs. VoC results from the information you capture from surveys, social media, or other channels and how the data you collect gives you an overall perspective of your brand.
VoC plays an essential role in customer experience (CX). It identifies the gap in customer experience and helps you improve products and services to build customer trust. Through VoC, brands can enhance goal-based engagements and enhance organizational collaboration.
Capture Feedback Frequently
Every day is an opportunity for a business to attract new customers and retain old ones. Customers interact with your brand frequently, and every minute is an opportunity for you to know how they feel about your products and service. If you miss a day in your updates, you miss out on important information that can build or damage your brand.
VoC best practices require you to frequently capture feedback and forward it to your team for assessment. By regularly collecting feedback, you give your team enough time to recognize and reply to negative comments.
Regular engagement enables you to connect with the immediate needs and concerns of your customers. This allows you to create a targeted marketing campaign that satisfies customer needs.
Collect Insight From Every Customer
Personalization is an essential element in every customer-centered marketplace. You may not notice it, but every touch-point holds a unique experience for various customers.
To understand how each point affects you and your customers, collect information about every customer at every point of contact with your brand. Analyze the results to identify areas that need attention. Use every instance of feedback to personalize the service delivery and ensure consistency in interactions.
Analyze Customer Feedback
To make sense of the information you collect, you need a deeper understanding of what the customer says. Keep a close eye on where customers’ feedback is coming from and analyze the positive, neutral, and negative comments.
Use a VoC program to read the data, collect relevant information, organize in order of priority, and respond to requests. An effective tool presents visual data with date, location, channels, region, and brand. Adapt the use of a customer feedback tool, such as Tatvam, to improve customer experience and build your brand.
Distribute Information Across the Company
In an organization, every team member plays an essential role in building the brand. To help your business grow, team members need to know what customers are saying and their expectations with your brand. Employees need to know the results from customer feedback to understand their impact on customer satisfaction.
When you share customer feedback across the organization, the executives, sales team, or other employees can confidently deliver services, knowing that their roles play a crucial part in elevating the customer experience.
Take Action on Customer Feedback
The best Voice of the Customer practices dictates that we have to collect customer feedback, but we also have to take action. As a successful brand, you need a tool that collects the information and a team that responds to requests.
Customers show loyalty to a business that responds to their issues on time. To ensure consistency, create a feedback management plan that explains how employees can resolve different sentiments. Though it is important to give priority to negative comments, don’t fail to acknowledge the positive and neutral responses. Engage with each customer and make them feel most valued in your organization.
Measure Insight from Multiple Channels
An effective VoC should use different channels to measure customer experience. By collecting information from multiple channels, you can tell if your brand meets the current market standards and whether the standards fulfill customer expectations.
While direct feedback, like Q&A, is important, a mix of indirect feedback, such as surveys, makes it easy to identify trends. Using multiple channels gives a clear picture of how various customers view your brand at different levels of engagement.
Conclusion
If you want to grow as a business, you need to understand your customers and deliver products and services that fulfill their needs. Voice of the Customer is a useful tool for listening, analyzing, and understanding customer experiences. VoC best practices will help your brand offer value to customers and build a reputation. They will help employees to collaborate effectively and become more productive.
Tim works as the VP of Sales and Marketing at NetServ Applications and oversees the development and client relationships for NetServs’ proprietary product Tatvam. Tatvam is a Customer Feedback Analytics product that leverages technologies like Machine Learning and AI to help companies monitor and improve their customer experience. Tim both manages the product log and the development teams to ensure they are consistently innovating and delivering a true value-add product, as well as continuously works with Tatvam customers to help them improve their data strategies and customer experiences.
