An easy guide to the voice of the customer
What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?
VoC, or Voice of the Customer is a research method used to capture customer expectations and experiences with your product or service. The VoC can be ascertained by collecting feedback from customers through voice-of-customer surveys as well as through other means.
The feedback can be collected through direct methods, which include surveys like NPS, CSAT, CES, brand perception surveys, and more. Direct feedback can also be collected by interviewing customers through focus groups, feedback sessions, and more.
Another way of collecting feedback is through indirect methods. Feedback shared on social media, on online reviews are all ways of capturing the voice of the customer through indirect methods.
Why do we need to capture VoC?
VoC helps businesses understand how they’re perceived by their customers. Having this information can help business understand the why behind customer behavior. For instance, Voice of the customer can help businesses understand why detractors and passives from their NPS survey were left feeling let down or underwhelmed.
Implementing changes that address these needs can not only boost customer loyalty and bring in referrals, but also increase customer satisfaction.
Knowing what customers think helps move the needle on the aspects of the business that you wish to improve.
When to collect VoC data?
Timing is important when it comes to collecting VoC data. Customers hit business-critical milestones in their journey with you.
Measuring the top-level metrics such as customer retention rate or returning customer ratio can’t help you move the needle. Instead, these metrics are a good indicator of how you are progressing. Invest in understanding the key milestones in a customer’s journey and what you would like to know when a customer crosses these milestones. In short, have a listening post at to every milestone.
If you’re in online retail, these are some milestones that may apply to your user journey.
- Abandonded cart
- Purchase completed
- Order canceled
- Customer reached out to support
- Smooth delivery of goods
- Purchased product’s review
What to ask in a voice of customer (VoC) survey?
Whether you’re conducting a survey, an interview or a focus group, there are three things to keep in mind
Have a goal in mind
When sailing through the rough seas of collecting customer feedback, having a north star guiding your way is the difference between success and failure. Before anything, establish what you wish to achieve/improve/learn more about first. This will ensure the questions you ask are relevant and the insights become more actionable.
Ask only what’s relevant
Even if customers are incentivized, there is an upper limit on the number of questions they’re willing to answer. Ensuring your audience is engaged during the feedback collection process is important to get complete and accurate responses. By asking questions relevant to the goal you’ve set and skipping questions that may not be relevant to the customer, you can ensure better feedback is collected.
Wish to improve your survey response rate? Read our blog on avoiding survey fatigue.
Don’t miss out on the qualitative data
While qualitative questions yield easier-to-analyze responses, qualitative and open-ended questions are often more effective in helping you understand what customers want. They’re also good at helping companies discover the ‘why’ behind the insights gained from quantitative data. For instance, a customer may have scored you low when it comes to your customer service and explained why when asked.
Analyzing VoC data
The end goal in this step is to take stock of the experience offered to customers and identify the changes that need to be implemented. While NPS, CSAT, and CES data can tell you what customers think, the answer to ‘why’ could be in the form of quantitative data.
In the case of quantitative data understanding the underlying themes, understanding the sentiment behind the feedback, and looking for patterns could yield key insights into what customers think. While this can be done manually, modern survey software use language models to separate the wheat from the chaff and present insights on easy-to-understand dashboards.
Reporting the insights
The final step is to share the insights with the various stakeholders in the organization. Often we take too much time slicing and dicing the data to ensure each cohort is shown a cut of the data that’s most relevant to them. While this is a good practice, it’s often better to limit the number of cuts to ensure the reports are shared in a timely manner.
Once the changes have been implemented, the final step is to start over and monitor how your VoC changes and the impact it has on key metrics.