The Voice of the Customer gives your organization a clear picture of what customers want and need from your products or services.

Without understanding customer feedback, you are sailing blind and may not be able to deliver what they truly desire.

This is why mapping the Voice of the Customer is so crucial – it provides insights that can help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, increase profits, and much more!

What is the Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

The Voice of the Customer is a process by which organizations gather customer feedback.

This feedback can be collected in many ways, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, or even social media monitoring.

Here, it is important that feedback is collected with the intention of using it to improve the customer experience.

The benefits of deploying the Voice of the Customer

There are many benefits to deploying the Voice of the Customer process in your organization, including:

• Improved customer satisfaction
• Increased loyalty and retention
• Better understanding of customer needs
• Identification of new product and service opportunities

In other words, by listening to your customers, you can make improvements that will grow your business. So how do you get started?

How do you deploy the Voice of the Customer in your business or organization?

Now that we know what the Voice of the Customer is, let’s see how to use it well.

There are three steps in the VOC process:

1. Identification & Gathering: In this step, you identify your customers and their needs. Then you collect all the responses. Make sure you have the entire customer journey mapped out and measure all touch points: from your marketing department to customer service.
2. Analysis: Once you have all the data, it’s time to analyze it and look for patterns and trends.
3. Action: Finally, you take action based on your findings to improve the customer experience.

Step 1: identify your customers’ needs

Your first step in gathering your customers’ needs is to identify their needs. This can be done in a few ways, but the most common is through surveys.

By asking customers targeted questions, you can get a good understanding of what they are looking for from your product or service.

Other methods of gathering feedback, such as interviews or focus groups, can also be useful in getting to know your customers.

You can also measure the Net Promoter Score or the Customer Satisfaction score.

However, it is important to ensure that data is analyzed and trends are identified so that you can take action to improve the customer experience.

Therefore, it is important that you conduct a quantitative study.

Tools to use

There is a lot of software or tools you can use. Some of the most popular are Typeform and Surveymonkey. These tools allow you to create surveys that are easy to use and understand.

You can also use social media monitoring tools, such as OBI4wan, to track customer reactions on social media. This can be a great way to get a quick snapshot of what customers are saying about your product or service.

By using different methods, you can get a good understanding of what they expect from your product or service.

Step 2: Analyze

Next, it’s time to start analyzing the feedback. When analyzing, pay attention to the following:

• Your customers’ needs: what really stands out?
• Your customers’ needs: are there things they miss that you can easily address? Then put those high on your list.
• Your customers’ satisfaction: how’s the flag hanging?
• Complaints: what do they really think is not going well and what can you do about it?
• Suggestions: customers like to think with you and you are only really a strong organization when you give your customers influence over your product development. To the extent possible, of course.

Step 3: Taking action

Once you’ve analyzed customer feedback, it’s time to take action.

This is where many companies fall short – they do not take action on the feedback they have collected.

And quite honestly? If you’re not going to take action anyway, you might as well not ask anything of your customers.

To take proper action you must do the following:

• Understanding what needs to be changed: After analyzing the feedback, you need to understand what needs to be changed to improve the customer experience
• Make a plan: Once you know what needs to be changed, you need to make a plan for how to approach those changes
• Implementing the changes: Finally, implement the changes and see how they affect the customer experience

This can be a long process. Rome wasn’t built in a day either. It may take quite a while for your customers to notice changes in your organization.

Keep them informed about your process and just tell them what you are doing. That, in turn, is good for your loyalty. Investing in your customer experience is something that takes a long time, but is incredibly beneficial to your customer satisfaction.

Why is the Voice of the Customer important for customer retention and loyalty programs?

The Voice of the Customer is important for customer loyalty and loyalty programs because it allows you to understand what your customers want and need from your organization.

By understanding your customers, you can create a loyalty program that meets their needs and helps them stay loyal to your brand.

Moreover, by using VOC to improve the customer experience, you can increase customer satisfaction and retention. Ultimately, this leads to more loyal customers and a more successful loyalty program.

Best practices & tips

Want to get started with the Voice of the Customer in your organization? If so, we have a few tips:

1. Be sure to gather customer feedback in a variety of ways. This will give you a good understanding of what they want and need.

2. Analyze customer feedback and understand what needs to be changed.

3. Take action on the changes and keep your customers informed of your progress.

4. Rome was not built overnight, so don’t expect the same from your project. Be patient and persevere – success comes naturally!

Implementation challenges

One of the biggest challenges for companies in implementing Voice of the Customer is making sure they are collecting data from customers in a variety of ways.

This can be tricky because it requires the use of different methods to reach customers and get their opinions.

Another challenge is analyzing customer feedback once it is collected. This step is important because it allows you to understand what needs to be changed to improve the customer experience.

However, discovering patterns in customer responses can be time-consuming and difficult.

Finally, it can be challenging for your organization to take action on the changes identified through customer feedback.

This is often because it requires making changes to processes or products, which can be difficult to do quickly or efficiently. Moreover, tracking the effect of these changes is also sometimes difficult.

It is important to keep in mind that challenges are to be expected when implementing any change – especially one as large as the VOC.

The key is to persevere and overcome these challenges by taking small steps and learning from your mistakes. After all, the only way to fail is to give up!

How to move forward?

Now that you understand what the Voice of the Customer is and how to use it well, it’s time to put it into practice

If you’re not sure where to start, we encourage you to check out our blog post on collecting customer feedback. This will give you a good overview of different methods you can use to measure customer satisfaction.

Cool software can help you

Is your customer data scattered across different systems? Then it makes sense to centralize everything in one system. Steam-connect helps you keep track of all your customer interactions, no matter what platform the conversation is running through. That way you always have a 360-degree customer view and never lose the story line.