The plethora of reviews across different sites and the increasing adoption of Voice of Customer (VoC) have helped many organizations leverage the VoC program in establishing a solid CX function.
In recent times, VoC programs have been employed as one of the most radical instruments to develop an incredible customer journey for businesses. Organizations investing in VoC programs see higher client retention, improved employee engagement, better brand visibility, and reduced customer retention costs.
Understanding the "Voice of Customer" Framework
Voice of the customer or VoC involves the process of capturing consumer feedback to improve business processes and products. VoC programs assist organizations to better understand their customers' requirements and concerns. Businesses can then tailor their solutions and services to address those needs.
Effective VoC programs involve a variety of methods to collect and analyze customer feedback, incorporate defined objectives, and methods to proceed based on the insights gained. VoC programs today include automated analysis of online content, including social media comments and reviews.
Building an Effective "Voice of Customer" Framework
To build a step-by-step plan for achieving customer experience maturity, businesses need to set the stage and align all the necessary factors to move forward in order to create and foster a customer-centric organization. By focusing on the following factors, they can successfully establish organization-wide customer centricity.
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Strong Leadership
Establishing a customer-centric culture begins at the very top. Leaders help in setting the right tone for their teams. Without executive-level buy-in, there is a critically low probability of creating maximum impact for customer-centric initiatives. To garner the support of employees, leaders need to move the needle on improving the customer experience.
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Vision and Clarity
The vision for VoC should be specific so that everyone can understand the common goal. By focusing on the language and messaging, organizations can start by creating a short and simple vision statement to help increase understanding and buy-in.
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Listening and Understanding
By incorporating a systematic method to monitor and collect customer feedback, organizations can improve the overall experience. Customer feedback can be collected from multiple channels and is critical in building any program on a robust platform.
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Patience and Commitment
Building and fostering a world-class customer culture is not an overnight exercise. To build successful customer-centric organizations, organizations need to establish an iterative framework that can be slowly altered. By refining their practices, analyzing the complexity, and initiating aspirational action, leadership will be able to demonstrate patience and commitment to their process and vision.
Benefits of implementing a well-designed VoC framework
A well-designed VoC program enables businesses to deliver multiple advantages, along with greater customer satisfaction and higher customer retention rates. It helps in building an improved brand image. Here are some of the most common benefits of a well-designed VoC framework:
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Improved customer satisfaction
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Higher customer retention rate
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Improved brand reputation
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Competitive advantage
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Increased revenue
"Voice of Customer" Framework: 5 Common Mistakes
VoC is comprehensive qualitative research undertaken by companies to understand customer behavior, expectations, requirements, and perception of your product or business. However, designing, planning, implementing, and communicating an effective VoC strategy isn't always easy. As a result, most brands fail to extract value because they fail to identify small yet critical flaws while drafting a proper VoC framework.
Read more: Things to Consider Before Buying a ‘Voice of Customer’ Solution
Here is a list of the five most common mistakes VOC practitioners make and how to avoid them:
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Asking the Right Questions to the Right Audience
Before drafting any question, it is vital to understand your target audience. A VoC program provides insight into your customers' expectations, preferences, and desires. Customers with the same demographic and psychographic profile may have different needs and perceptions of the same product. Collecting contextual data about the customers' pain points/touch points and personas will help brands provide superior customer experience orchestration and optimization.
Another imperative thing to keep in mind is the timing of feedback that affects the quality of your VoC framework. Feedback should be collected at the right time and place, from the right person, and through the right channels. Asking for customer feedback in a setting where people feel uncomfortable sharing their thoughts freely may result in people not speaking openly or not saying anything at all.
Similarly, asking customers about some aspects of the experience sets an expectation among the audience that the management will do something about it. However, it is best to refrain from asking questions that promise a resolution that you cannot see through.
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Poor Survey Design
Survey design is one of the most crucial components of a strong and successful VoC program. Asking directly for data, endlessly long and boring surveys, navigation and UI issues, and poor grammar will do nothing except frustrate and annoy your audience and will lead to friction in relationships.
Before starting any program, initiative, or journey, always try to outline your goals, objectives, outcomes, and metrics. Poor survey design can lead to low response rates, poor quality responses, and low re-engagement from the audience. The size of survey questions, word choice, intuitiveness, and flow can directly affect how your customers perceive your business and their willingness to complete your survey.
Survey design is massively impacted by the channel you choose to survey your customers. A strong VoC program may have different touch points for different channels. While the live chat option on your website is excellent for collecting real-time customer feedback, social media platforms let you tap into relevant ongoing conversations, connect with participants, and/or listen quietly. Many companies rely on one or two channels to measure and optimize their interactions, limiting the coverage and depth of insights assimilated. Brands should ideally collect customer feedback from everywhere possible to create a more seamless customer experience.
Read more: What Do Customers Want? 3 Key Learnings From the Most Disruptive Year of Our Lives
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Failing to Act on Feedback
Most organizations mistake VoC for a market research study. One of the most certain ways to annoy the respondents is to ask them questions and not put them into action. Customers will most certainly stop giving feedback in the future if they notice their feedback is not taken seriously.
VoC is not just about asking; you must listen, plan, and implement the right course of action. The difference between ‘ask’ and ‘listen’ is of paramount importance when it comes to VoC. Be sure to keep an eye on social media, online reviews, and customer advisory boards.
Most organizations fail to share feedback with their respective departments to learn and act upon it. Your VoC program helps you make changes to operations, marketing, and strategy to improve the customer experience (CX). Completing a VoC and not using its insights will not help your organization and, more importantly, your customers.
Fear of negative feedback can also slow down the VoC data collection process. It is important to note that you may risk losing out to competitors who listen and act swiftly on negative feedback.
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Focusing on the Metrics, Not the Factors
Most of the companies' surveys rely too much on the metrics and not enough on factors that may influence that outcome. CX metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) are all insightful, but each score measures a unique and different aspect of a customer's behavior. No doubt, VoC is best understood with text, predictive, and sentiment analysis technology, but focusing too much just on metrics will result in yielding wrong customer psychology or behavior.
Read more: 95% Consumer Interactions to Be Monitored by AI by 2025 - Voice of Customer and Technology
While measuring the results of the VoC program, it is prudent to understand why customers gave these ratings. This will help analyze and identify customers' pain points behind the negative rating or touchpoints for a positive rating. The proper amalgamation of pain points and positive attributes would help the organization access the qualitative data needed to formulate proactive CX initiatives.
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Viewing it as a one-time Process
Most brands conduct VOC programs annually or quarterly to be viewed solely by senior team members. This siloed approach to acting on VOC data would result in missed opportunities and ideas. The strategic intent of any VoC program should be a continuous improvement to identify sudden casualties. It is very important to revisit your customer listening efforts to ensure that they meet today's respondent preferences, new features, and product enhancements, competitors' offerings, and the industry's rapidly changing landscape.
The customers' needs are continuously evolving, and so are technological advancements. Therefore, what delights a customer today may turn out to be an expected or indifferent product feature tomorrow.
Your VoC must be updated frequently to ensure that you are working on improving based on the feedback previously heard. Creating a process-based VoC will assist in listening to the customer's evolving needs and acting accordingly to provide maximum satisfaction.
Read more: Over 50% US Customers Prefer Word-Of-Mouth – Voice of Customer Trends 2021
Key Highlights
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Voice of the customer (VoC) programs assist in collecting and analyzing user feedback in order to understand customers' needs and expectations.
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VoC techniques involve surveys, focus groups, and analysis of content.
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The benefits of VoC programs involve greater customer satisfaction and increased revenue.
Conclusion
We have highlighted the most common mistakes companies make while drafting VoC programs. How many of them are you guilty of? A good VoC program requires immense commitment. Always keep an eye on pitfalls. Frequently audit your program to note if you are moving to the wrong territory. A powerful VoC program is always a resource and time-consuming investment, but it would reap infinite returns.
All you need to do is set it in such a way as to get the right feedback to design and deliver a solid customer experience.
Real-time customer insights help in enabling data-driven decisions. iNava empowers decisions through the power of customer insights. Are you still not sure how to renew your VoC program? Still pondering where you went wrong? Let one of our team members help you. Fortify your business from within with iNava’s ‘Voice of the Customer.’ Get in touch with the iNava team.
FAQs - Voice of Customer Framework
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What exactly is the 'Voice of Customer' framework?
Voice of the Customer (VoC) is used to describe the customer's feedback about their experiences with a brand as well as their expectations for the products or services. The voice of the customer framework is used to measure, analyze, and improve the insights gathered through VoC surveys.
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How does a well-designed VoC framework benefit businesses?
A VoC framework enables organizations to gather, analyze, and act on customer feedback to design a customer-centric culture. With a successful voice of the customer program, organizations can put their customers' needs at the center stage and drive brand, product, and service improvements.
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Why is it crucial to consider diverse customer personas in a VoC framework?
Customer personas help in designing a more personalized, relevant, and engaging customer experience. Creating customer personas further ensures that the entire team has a precise understanding of the target segment as well as their desires and behavior patterns. This assists the team in making strategic decisions based on a solid picture of their target consume. By knowing who the customers are, what they want, and how they behave, organizations can tailor their products, services, and interactions to meet their specific expectations.
