In the past, businesses focused on their strengths and leveraged them to earn revenue and market dominance. Changing times and technological advancements caused an irrevocable shift in business priorities and operations, compelling companies to opt for an outside-in approach. Embracing the outside-in approach called for businesses to create value and experiences that satiate their customers' needs.
It is a known fact that customers' needs and wants are volatile. They are subject to change, given a myriad of reasons. Knowing what your customers want and need is vital if you wish for your business to survive and thrive in a competitive landscape.
Then and Now
Over the decades, the means businesses have used to know their customers have evolved. What used to be an over-the-counter discussion changed into leaving feedback in a suggestion box. The increasing volume of customers made it difficult for businesses to keep tabs on the varied opinions/feedback/perceptions that customers carried. The influx of technology in the equation brought a reprieve that companies were seeking to find. Numerous intelligence solutions are now available for you to understand your customers better or, in other words, to feel the pulse of the market.
What is the Voice of the Customer (VoC)?
Voice of the Customer or VoC refers to strategies, processes, and techniques employed by an organization to understand their customers’ perspective. It offers ways to dig into customers' needs and what they are saying about a brand, product, or service.
Today, understanding customer needs is critical to achieve sustained competitiveness. VoC programs assist businesses in tracking customer satisfaction, preferences, and concerns. By adjusting their products and services in response to insights gained from VoC programs, businesses can innovate faster.
VoC is all about collecting customer feedback through a mix of traditional methods like surveys and new techniques like live chat and social media listening. VoC programs help in identifying product deficiencies that cause problems for customers. These deficiencies can be addressed quickly to generate increased revenue and profitability. Responding to customer feedback further helps foster customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Ways to Listen to the Voice of Customer
While many companies with considerable workforce and financial muscle choose to adopt the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) way, others prefer to use third-party service providers or an intelligence platform to listen to the Voice of the Customer.
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DIY approach: The DIY approach often involves creating and circulating a questionnaire with questions you desire to ask your target audience/customers. However, the reach of these surveys and the lack of obligation on the part of the respondents to share often hinder the collation of data that eventually culminates into actionable insights.
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Hire a third-party service provider: A third-party service provider could do the same for you while sparing your resources to focus on revenue-generating operations. However, the fact remains that running surveys have a confined reach, among other limitations.
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Voice of Customer (VoC) solution: If you want to garner insights not just about your offering but also your competitors, or if you want to just keep track of the direction in which customer discussions are tipping toward, these surveys will not hold up. If you are interested in gaining a 360-degree overview and deep-dive into granular insights that could fuel your decision-making process, it would be best to opt for a VoC intelligence platform.
Based on your business needs and resource bandwidth, you can choose one of the above-listed options to keep tabs on what your customers are saying. However, businesses have been found tilting toward having a VoC solution as part of their repertoire of resources rather than taking on the other available options, thereby establishing that an intelligence platform that crawls the web to pick up relevant data that could yield valuable insights is one of the top options.
Benefits of the Voice of the Customer Solution
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Building a Deeper Relationship with Customers
The earliest benefit of a VoC campaign is to strengthen the relationship between the brand and the customers. By listening to what the customers have to say and acting on it, businesses can provide an improved customer experience. A deeper customer relationship implies building and fostering deeper trust. This further helps in increasing survey response rates over time as customers come to learn they’re being listened to.
VoC enables businesses to give customers the products or services they need. In short, happier and more engaged customers help in bringing better opportunities for growth.
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Identifying opportunities for growth
Customer satisfaction and business performance are directly linked. The value of VoC helps in further clarifying opportunities for growth. This is considered the most important benefit of VoC for business growth as it enables them across different domains ranging from sales teams to marketing.
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Optimizing products
Product development teams within organizations continuously strive to build the best products they can. However, without data-backed insight into what the customers want, it can be difficult to assess the desired outcomes. In such scenarios, the voice of the customer steps in to help identify the answers about the products.
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Making processes more efficient
Efficiency and convenience are two critical things customers expect from their experience with a business. This comes even above brand design and personalization. Efficiency lies at the heart of every business—both in handling the customers as well as the internal operational processes. VoC helps by offering reliable data to work with. It further assists in boosting employee experience and cutting down on the costs of customer acquisition or poorly targeted referral campaigns.
Why is the Voice of Customer (VoC) Important for Businesses?
Every business has multiple touchpoints throughout marketing, sales, and customer support. When customers move across these, businesses need to collect their opinions and use the insights in a well-timed way. Facilitating a high-quality customer experience is one of the best forecasters of customer loyalty for a business. Having a positive customer experience compels the customers to purchase more products and services. Here are a few ways the VoC framework can help impact businesses:
Voice of the Customer empowers businesses to understand the customers’ needs and expectations related to products and services. Businesses can implement these VoC insights to improve customer experience (CX) and meet the needs and wants of the customers to maximize their overall profits further.
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Identification of customers' needs and wants
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Strengthening customer loyalty
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Boosting innovation, thus encouraging the team to try new ideas
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Identifying areas for customization of products or services.
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Prioritization of critical issues related to product and service
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Framing of new ideas and solutions to enhance customer experiences
Things to consider for your Voice of the Customer Solution Research
To make the most of the insights gathered through the Voice of the Customer program, organizations can incorporate the following best practices to start on the right foot.
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Collecting customer feedback across multiple channels
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Personalizing the Voice of the Customer request
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Increasing collaboration across departments with a CRM
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Making changes based on the collected data
If you are considering adding a VoC solution to your list of assets, here are a few points to get you started.
Off-the-shelf product vs. Customizable solution vs. Custom-built solution?
There is no dearth of intelligence solutions in the marketplace. Numerous off-the-shelf products are available for you to procure, plug in, and play. However, the question is
Will such a product offer you what you are seeking to find?
In other words, does it offer features (UI, data visualization, competitor scan, analytics, reporting, among others) and intelligence that enable you to decide without a second thought?
The answer is a
Yes!
Suppose you have a jotted agenda that the solution can cater to; off-the-shelf solutions are a perfect fit. They are designed to cater to a broader audience and come with standard design and functional modules.
No!
Suppose you are looking for a solution that serves as your eyes and ears in the marketplace that spans the globe. In that case, it's best to opt for a customizable VoC solution that gives you the flexibility to make modifications to match your intelligence and operational needs. These platforms are better suited to solve pain points and tackle your organization's unique challenges.
A notch higher than this is a custom-built intelligence platform. These solutions are built to offer snug-fit features that meet the needs of the user to the T. When compared to the previously mentioned solutions, the custom-built ones are easy to use, require minimal training, and offer the desired solution quickly. While off-the-shelf and customizable solutions offer a fixed or mildly alterable iconography, a custom-built VoC platform offers customized iconography that matches your organization's reporting needs.
Read more: 5 Commonly Made Mistakes While Designing the ‘Voice of Customer’ Framework
Deciding on what type of VoC platform will suffice your intelligence needs is the first and most vital step to take. After zeroing in on the kind of solution you desire to own and leveraging your strategy formulation and other decision-making scenarios, you can think about the points listed below.
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Fuel for the Machine - Data
Having a Voice of Customer solution at your disposal is a significant asset for any business to have. However, once that hurdle is crossed, you will have to work on fueling the platform with data that will eventually culminate into valuable insights. VoC solutions are now known to extract data from sources with your target audience's footprints and process it to furnish intel.
If a VoC platform is to be utilized to the fullest, it would be best for you to connect it to more than one source of data. Sticking to a single source or maybe two will curb the farsightedness of the data at your disposal. Therefore, gleaning from varied sources, making the platform an Omni-channel customer feedback tool, would serve the purpose better.
An omnichannel feedback tool pulls reviews from numerous sources, giving you a holistic feel of the market's pulse. Furthermore, inputs from multiple sources not only give you a bird's eye view of customers' feedback but also allow you to dive deep into the data thus collected. Many solutions pull reviews from structured sources; however, not including semi-structured and unstructured sources in the mix leaves out the laud, banter, and discussions that play a significant role in painting a realistic picture of the marketplace. Unstructured sources such as Reddit and Twitter are rich troves of insights that are often left unexplored. An omnichannel tool can furnish insights derived from all mentioned types of sources. You will, therefore, have valuable insights at your fingertips, equipping you to make sound, timely decisions.
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Intelligent Needs – Proactive vs. Reactive
With the VoC solution up and running while being fueled by relevant sources, your next focus needs to be the output you desire to find. Most VoC platforms capture customer feedback from sources and present historical patterns of thoughts that might have culminated into actions. Is that enough? While tracking historical patterns and laying out intelligence that can serve as an input for reactive measures, proactive watch, and action help foresee and prep for future events.
Reactive and proactive intelligence are two sides of a coin, and businesses need one as much as they need the other. Let's take a quick look at both.
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Reactive Intelligence
Reactive Intelligence requires you to track and note the changing trends in the marketplace, including keeping tabs on customer behavior and spending patterns. This type of intelligence ensures that businesses understand customers' preferences while keeping in mind their company's capabilities and market conditions to frame strategies in response.
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Proactive Intelligence
Proactive Intelligence, on the other hand, attempts to identify potential problems that could have a detrimental impact on the business, allowing leaders to address the issues before customers begin to point them out. With tools like VoC thrown into the business decision-making mix, the forward-looking approach is being leveraged as much as the backward-looking approach.
Both reactive and proactive intelligence are vital for a business. However, deriving the said intelligence via a VoC tool will prove to be an added edge as the solution covers more touchpoints and holds the ability to furnish needed intel on a real-time basis. The AI/ML-driven VoC platforms are not just beneficial in current competitive times but have become crucial for a business's survival and ability to withstand competition.
Read more: Exploring the Latest Data Analytics Trends: Industry Insights
Conclusion
Listening to the 'Voice of Customer' is no longer a whim that companies can take lightly. Instead, it has proven to be a business essential that forms the base of lucrative business decision-making. Today's VoC tools are often easy to use, offering users real-time targeted feedback with intelligent analytics. Many businesses are transitioning from a DIY VoC approach to owning a solution that grants them multi-dimensional intel on a single pane for viewing. If you want to listen to the lucid Voice of the Customer and allow it to guide your path in the foreseeable future, it is highly advisable to go by what tech and business experts say – Get a Voice of the customer solution that suits your business needs best.
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.
