Amazon chief Jeff Bezos is an avid VoC fan who personally handles and forwards emails from aggrieved customers to his team for immediate response. Even Apple CEO Tim Cooke reportedly handles roughly 100 emails a day in a bid to improve customer experience. So if top Forbes admired companies take Voice of the Customer seriously, why shouldn’t you?

If you are in an online business, are you engaging well with customers to serve them better? Or are you just dragging along and hoping for the best? This Is a critical point to think about because studies show that US businesses lose a whopping 83 billion dollars each year due to poor customer experience.

Whether the setbacks come in the form of abandoned purchases or defections, the toll on businesses is huge in sales, traffic, or competitive advantage. It’s even worse when you consider that customers are more likely to remember their negative experiences than their positive ones. So how can businesses ensure they don’t repeat this oft committed business sin of being unresponsive or tone-deaf to customers?

There is no better way to do this than hearing the voice of the customer. Better still making sure this voice is as distilled as possible, free from the noise of the crowd. Listening keenly to the customer is the key to not being part of the growing list of losing companies with poor customer feedback.

This is where Voice of the Customer (VoC) comes in. It’s a strategy that has been widely adopted by successful online business owners to make a difference between success and failure.

Voice of the customer (VOC) is a technique that is used in market research to identify the preferences, expectations and dislikes of customers. Usually conducted before a new product or service launch or to improve existing offerings, it aims to guide the marketer to know the customer better in terms of his needs and wants.

The result is usually a rich and detailed set of customer information that gives a unique picture of the customer. Typically it involves both qualitative and quantitative approaches to fully capture the required information.

VOC has gained great importance in the online landscape particularly because of the massive data the internet interactions typically generate. This data is tedious to process manually. It is also complex as it is increasingly unstructured data that is not easy to interpret. Deploying people to process this data scales poorly as it is not cost-effective. You get slow and inaccurate results at more cost of paying your personnel. It’s no wonder that many enterprises have turned to the VoC path for answers.

Voice of customer data is typically complex and voluminous. It can seem frustratingly hard to handle unless you have an effective means of probing it and extract the precious gems of meaning buried in it. When properly analyzed with the appropriate tools, such data can be a goldmine to transform your business or brand.

The voice of the customer is usually received or transmitted in the form of text. This kind of data is unstructured rather than structured, which makes it difficult to be analyzed and interpreted in the classical way. So it needs to be translated into a structured form to facilitate interpretation.

This means that with the help of a great Voice of Customer tool, the text which is qualitative feedback can now be quantified to ease analysis and used to aid consumer experience (CX) decisions.

Here is an example customer comment who uses a software product for developing apps. The comment combines more than one topic with the customer giving different feelings or reactions for each.

Customer Comment: ?My feeling is it works cool, but for my usage level, it’s too costly. The dashboard is intuitive so it’s easy to troubleshoot on issues.?

An analysis from a voice of customer tool would show three categories from this which are Price, UI/UX, and Setup. Based on the feedback of the customer, it would then give a negative sentiment score to price but a positive one to UI/UX and set up each. From this, it would assign an overall sentiment score of mixed or neutral. This score would prompt action from the marketer to adjust the price to produce a more overall positive sentiment. This kind of information can be aggregated from a sizable number of text communications so that the business can properly evaluate its product performance and troubleshoot any problem areas.

Sometimes totally unexpected insights can be drawn from customer reviews. For example, a hospitality company was attempting to select which furniture pieces needed upgrading. They found many reviews that had strongly negative sentiments with words such as ?smell? and ?trash?.

After further investigation, the company found that a bad odor was coming from the dumpsters in the parking lot and was assailing guests in the hotel. So here is a case where management obtained actionable customer feelings from unexpected quarters.

With so much data to analyze and the immediate need for results, sentimental analysis tools are a real game-changer in understanding customer voice reliably and in real-time. They can give a headstart on your competitors by handing you the means to react faster to customers? needs and capture market share.

A Gartner Group study revealed that just about every company in the marketplace makes customer experience a top initiative.

This means no business can survive unless they can offer a stellar customer experience consistently. To do this, it is imperative to choose the best tool that will help solidify superior customer experience over your competition.

There are a handful of sentiment tools that have emerged to give just this service.

They fall into several categories such as website VoC tools, Small Medium Business (SMB) VoC tools, Enterprise VoC software, or traditional research survey tools. These tools help you to dig into data and extract the core of what customers are saying.

To accurately and efficiently analyze your VoC, you need the perfect VoC tool. With the Tatvam analysis tool, you will be getting an unprecedented way of knowing your customer to drive your brand to new heights. The Tatvam platform utilizes machine learning and natural processing techniques which gives it powerful learning capabilities. So it delivers smarter results with time.

No matter how sizable the data, it executes these tasks rapidly in near real-time. This tool is designed to ensure that what was once impossible is now delightfully within your reach.

This is an excellent way to keep toxic churn away from your business, boost revenue, and elevate the customer experience.

Tatvam can give you a comprehensive picture of your business as it offers you valuable insights into the separate parts of your company. At only a fraction of the cost, you can quickly visualize all the elements that affect your customer journey and act quickly to fix issues. With Tatvam, you never play catch up with your customers. You are always in lockstep with them, making you a true companion attending to their issues.

Through its text and sentiment analysis, Tetvam can analyze data from all your channels whether it is open-ended surveys, social media, customer support cases, or open-ended survey questions. It also offers you a nice intuitive interface for maximum ease of use. For many enterprises, this tool is the natural choice to solidify and elevate brand value.

VOC programs aren’t just a fancy new way of doing things. It is an essential and proven way of making a discernible and positive impact on your business. More than ever, no business can afford to do without it. It promises exciting new ways to upgrade your customer service and reap almost instant rewards such as more referrals, retention, and driving up your business value.

By giving your business the ability to listen to the voice of the customer, you always know exactly what to do to enhance the customer experience in real-time. It offers you an early warning system and helps you keep crises at bay.

With VOC programs, you are no longer making decisions for the customer but making those decisions together with the customer. This puts the customer back where he belongs – at the center of your business. Make the smart choice for your VoC strategy by choosing Tatvam.