We live in an era where technology has revolutionized how people interact with each other, as well as how they purchase goods and services central to daily life.
In order to thrive, businesses must understand customer needs on a personal level. This can be achieved by keeping track of customer feedback, analyzing the feedback and using insights to anticipate what they will require in the future.
What Is Voice of the Customer?
Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the process for analyzing customer needs, and using them to inform your customer service strategy. Put simply, VoC is a process for listening to customers to create a better product or service and customer experience.
Data from customers can be used in a variety of ways to make business decisions better suited to your customer base. Understanding VoC can help you improve products, create new marketing strategies, uplevel your advertising, and even rebrand your company.
Now, let’s look at the three steps that are part of the Voice of Customer process.
1. Gather Feedback
The first step to understanding what your customers are looking for is to gather data. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as through live chat, surveys, social media, and customer reviews.
Live Chat: Live chat allows you to learn about your customer’s issues and questions in real-time. It provides an opportunity for 1:1 interactions which can be stored for later analysis with the right tools. Surveys can be sent at the end of each session to better understand the customer’s experience and satisfaction.
Surveys: Speaking of surveys, they allow you to create target questions that help you understand the customer experience. Survey questions should be clear and easy to understand, and kept to a reasonable length.
Customer Reviews: Customer reviews are an extremely effective way to see what is working and what needs improvement within your business. Reviews help detail the customer experience and demonstrate the best and worst cases in your transaction history.
Social Media: With so much time spent engaging with friends, family and media publications on social media, it’s logical that consumers expect to be able to interact with brands on their preferred platforms. Each platform’s analytics tools offer a wealth of data about your target consumers that can help inform their preferences. You can also use messaging features to respond to inquiries and handle customer complaints. And of course, social sentiment analysis lets you see what is being said about your business and its products.
2. Analyze the Data
Data is great, but it’s what you do with that data that really matters. According to Six Sigma Institute’s philosophy, brands get more value out of understanding customers’ needs over wants, and optimizing their process and products to meet those needs. Analyzing feedback to understand what your customers really expect from your brand will help you determine where to focus your product and customer experience efforts.
3. Take Action
Armed with insights from customer interactions, you’re ready to initiate change. Say, for example, a customer cancels their hair-care product subscription, leaving the feedback that they were receiving too many bottles of shampoo. The customer’s feedback might indicate that they need more flexibility in how often they receive their product. Offering a less frequent shipping option could be the solution to keeping them, and many others, subscribed.
The Voice of Customer allows brands to better understand their customers as consumers and individuals. In a fast-paced world with high customer expectations, companies need to utilize VoC to understand customer needs and quickly adjust to those needs.
Kustomer continues to improve the way businesses handle customer service. Learn more about our valuable and revolutionary software.
