When did you last avoid a brand because of something you heard? Or did you stop purchasing from a company that disappointed you?
How often did you reach out to tell those businesses why you won’t buy from them?
As someone tasked with improving the customer experience (CX), you can’t expect consumers to seek you out. Instead, you must start the conversation by championing, implementing, and maintaining your organization's Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.
Voice of the Customer definition: Voice of the Customer is the systematic collection, analysis, and monitoring of customer interactions with your product, service, or brand.
A VoC program is important to your overall customer experience (CX). It’s essentially a commitment to taking action on customer feedback. Your initial goal is to close gaps between customer expectations and your organization’s performance. When you maintain an effective VoC program, you’re empowering your employees to exceed customer expectations, too.
Many organizations ask customers for feedback through surveys, feedback forms, and focus groups. But a Voice of the Customer program isn’t just feedback collection. When you build a VoC program for your business, you’re making customer engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction a core part of your business strategy. A good VoC program includes:
Most important, a good VoC program is actionable. Companies make it a priority to close the customer feedback loop by identifying pain points, fixing issues, and communicating these changes to both employees and customers.
Keep reading to learn how to build your own Voice of the Customer program, from planning to implementation and maintenance. You’ll get tips, key VoC metrics, and resources like these Voice of the Customer survey templates to help you get started.
Setting up a VoC program, or even refreshing one you already have, takes time and resources. Before you launch into a full plan, gather the following information and get in front of leadership to make sure everyone is on board:
Once you’ve got leadership on board, collaborate with different teams across the company. Each stakeholder will have a unique perspective on the customer experience—and different ways you can improve it.
Each of these teams might have different goals or ideas of success. To start, you could choose one company-wide goal (e.g., "improve our customer satisfaction rating by 10%") and encourage each team to set their own goal.
Just remember that this is a customer-centric effort. A product team might want to improve an onboarding experience to increase sign-ups. But in the context of a Voice of the Customer program, it would be better for your product and customer service teams to connect. Customer service could point out key pain points with an onboarding experience, and the product team could address these with the goal of reducing the number of customer service tickets.
Sit down with key stakeholders to think about how a customer or potential customer interacts with your brand before, during, and after they purchase from you. This is called customer journey mapping, and it can help you highlight opportunities to collect feedback, learn more about a particular touchpoint, or fill in any gaps in the customer experience. Common customer touchpoints take place before, during, and after a purchase. Some examples include:
When creating your customer journey map, you should also note when, where, and how often you ask for customer feedback. This will help you refine your surveys and better plan and track them.
Learn how to create a customer journey map to align stakeholders and achieve your business goals.
When you listen to customers, you’re collecting structured and unstructured (quantitative and qualitative) Voice of the Customer feedback.
Structured data is quantifiable or measurable. For example, you send a survey that asks customers to rate the likelihood that they’ll purchase from you again. Because you’re asking them to choose from a set of options, the results have a numeric value: 76% of customers say they’d buy your product again.
Unstructured data is qualifiable or immeasurable. For example, in your purchase experience survey, you ask someone to explain why they’re “very likely” to buy from you again. You provide a text box so they can tell you more. The text responses you get will help you understand the “why” behind the numbers.
To get the full picture of your customer experience, it’s a good idea to collect both data types. Here are different ways you can regularly listen to customers as part of an effective Voice of the Customer program:
There are a few industry-standard VoC metrics that companies use to understand the customer experience. Here are three of the most popular VoC metrics.
How likely is someone to recommend your company to a friend or colleague? The Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey gives you a quantifiable, easily trackable answer to this question. Here’s an overview of the NPS survey.
While NPS shows you customer loyalty over time, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) helps you understand how a customer feels after a specific interaction with your brand. Here’s what to know about a CSAT survey.
How difficult or easy can customers achieve certain tasks when interacting with your company? The Customer Effort Score (CES) helps you pinpoint major customer friction points, like when they’re using your software or trying to solve a specific problem. Here’s why you should use CES surveys to round out your VoC program.
Once you start collecting customer feedback across touchpoints, you must examine each dataset and compare your findings.
Once you figure out your customer listening strategy, you’ll want to pay attention to–and deal with—any immediate issues, like a declining NPS or poor customer satisfaction score.
In the long term, you need to create a framework for maintaining a solid VoC program for your organization. Here are some ideas.
When your customers are happy, they’re more likely to stay loyal to your brand and recommend you to others. But there are other benefits of Voice of the Customer program that might not be as obvious.
When you create a Voice of the Customer program, you’re empowering employees to make a direct impact on the customer experience. You can even encourage teams to set customer-centric goals and reward them for their achievements.
A lot of feedback collection is reactive, meaning you’re only able to understand how customers feel after their interaction with your brand. A VoC program accounts for proactive feedback collection as well. Focus groups, customer interviews, social media listening, user research–these are all ways you can find opportunities to develop new product ideas, solve consumer pain points, and more.
You can use positive customer feedback and interactions to tell powerful stories about your brand across channels, from marketing collateral to your website and social media platforms.
Market research, user insights, customer service feedback, social media interactions, survey results: The data work together to provide a full picture of your customer experience. But if the data live in silos, it’s difficult to pick up on trends and highlight important opportunities for teams across your organization to act.
Make each stakeholder or team responsible for reporting on their findings or sharing it all in one place. You can simplify feedback collection and management with survey integrations for Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Zendesk, Zoom, and more.
Sending surveys but not getting enough responses for statistically significant results? As a part of your Voice of the Customer program, consider a survey audit, running each survey through a survey best practices checklist.
Customers might be ignoring your surveys if they’re too long or confusing. It’s a good idea to use expert-written survey templates and customer satisfaction survey questions for reliable responses.
Still not sure why your surveys aren’t performing well? Check out these tips for increasing CSAT response rates and CSAT survey question best practices.
If the idea of keeping customers happy isn’t enough to get teams to prioritize solving customer issues, you need to tie customer satisfaction to revenue. For example, you can showcase the ROI of improving customer satisfaction by tying the lifetime value of a retained customer to the number of people who say they’d buy from you again.
Build your case by sharing compelling research with reluctant teams. Our research shows that 75% of customers lose trust in a business after a poor in-product experience, among other important findings.
Design a VoC program that captures the pulse of your customer sentiment. Use the following best practices to engage your customers in a dialogue, align your company’s stakeholders, and create impactful change.
Send a survey in minutes using one of these expert-written Voice of the Customer survey templates. If you’re looking for a little more help, learn how SurveyMonkey can power your VoC program.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
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