Selecting appropriate channels of communication to collect VOC (Hotline/Chat/Social Media/Email/SMS/Mobile App/WhatsApp/Self Service)

What is VOC in Customer Service?

Voice of the customer (VOC) is the component of customer experience (CX) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) that focuses on the perception of a customer’s needs, wants, expectations and preferences. Insights from VOC data should then be used to inform actions in most businesses, the quality of customer experience is a key differentiating factor against competitors. Therefore, VOC is important for ensuring that customer input is requested and valued.

To determine the VOC, an organization will analyze indirect input, or data that reflects what a customer does, and direct input, data that reflects what a customer says. Indirect input includes a close examination of data gathered from monetary transactions, market research, product usage data and Web analytics. Direct input includes social media monitoring for brand or product mentions, collecting customer feedback and conducting customer interviews

Once all data is gathered, it is analyzed to spot patterns and trends. Qualitative input may identify product bugs that need to be fixed or customer service processes that need to be improved. Quantitative data may identify high or low usage rates in some features, indicating the usefulness or success of those features. Insights from VOC data should then be used to inform actions. Examples of actions include making improvements to customer support and launching new products and services

Voice of Customer is imperative for business functions like customer success, operations, and product development. These groups use this research to identify and improve all stages of the customer’s journey by working together to enhance their products and services.

By collecting the voice of customer, companies not only develop a closer bond with their customers but also improve their internal collaboration.

How Voice of the Customer Impacts Your Business

By capturing the voice of your customers, you can connect and engage with customers at every touchpoint in the customer journey.

This technique helps you:

Spot early warning and potential brand crisis
Evaluate new concepts, ideas, and solutions
Customize your products, services, add-ons, and features to meet the needs and wants of your customers
Increase customer retention
Serve your cus
tomers with what they really need

VOC Techniques

Regardless of the industry, it costs organizations five to 25x more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Thus, the value of retaining existing customers over acquiring a new one is obvious. With this in mind,

Customer interviews are one of the traditional techniques to collect VOC data. It is commonly used to understand particular customer point-of-view regarding product or service issues, attributes, and performance measures. You can choose to perform this for either a particular customer or for a group of customers with some common attributes. Usually executed in person, on the phone, or through email.

While the cost of in-person interviews is the highest among all forms of interview, it is still considered to be the most useful form for building trusting customer relationships. This is because customers perceive this type of interaction as more personal.

However, if you don’t ask the right questions with the help of the right platform, you may never get reliable answers. That’s why you need to put in a lot of thought while designing your surveys. With platforms like VWO or SurveyMonkey, you can choose from the different types of surveys available, such as yes/no type, multiple option-based surveys, drop-down surveys, and textbox-based surveys.

According to a study, 44% of online shoppers feel the best feature an ecommerce website can have is a live chat.

Having an on-site chat is an incredible method of collecting real-time customer feedback and reducing the possibility of your customers feeling unsatisfied.

The use of live chat is not limited to listening to customers complaints and resolving them. It is also a good tool to capture Voice of the Customer data. For this, you can schedule a follow-up survey of all the customers connecting with you through a chat

Social media is a potent ingredient of the feedback cocktail, as it provides you the opportunity to have a two-way communication with your customers.

On any of the most commonly used social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, you can tap into relevant ongoing conversations, connect with those customers by actively participating, or quietly listen (while lurking and taking notes). The core strength of social media lies in allowing you to have a more direct and real-time conversation with the people using your products or services.

Your website is a great place for you to capture the voice of customer data. Besides chat and on-site surveys, another way to collect this data is by analyzing your customer behavior on the website. You can do it in a jiffy by leveraging tools like heatmaps, scrolls, and visitors’ recordings. You can also opt for a single platform that’ll allow you do all this, and you won’t have to invest in multiple tools.

If you’re planning to leverage historical data, recorded call data might come in handy. Recorded calls with your customers can give you a broad overview of how they perceive your brand, what sort of objections do they have, and what else do they expect from the brand.

Though this technique requires a lot of time, it is always advisable to do this every now and then. What it’ll also do is help you with training your customer support team with better objection handling and enhancing your customer service.

Your online reputation isn’t just the result of what you generate at your end it includes all instances in which your business appears online, including online reviews. With online review it’s essential to understand the impact they have on your business and how you can use reviews to earn your online reputation.

The examples of negative and positive reviews below can help you understand your customers.

Opting for an off-site survey is yet another method to capture the Voice of Customer. Although this may not be a popular method for large business setups, it’s leveraged by lots of medium-sized businesses when conducting customer research and it can be done using a tool as simple as Google Docs.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that is used to measure the loyalty of a company’s customers. This customer loyalty metric was developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems.

NPS gives you quick and reliable feedback from customers. The way the system works is easy. Customers need to answer this simple question on a scale of 0–10:

“How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or a colleague?“

The last option is to have a dedicated feedback form on your website, and this is really more of a mandate than an option. No matter which other methods you plan to choose to capture VOC, you cannot skip having an on-site feedback form.

Give your existing customers and website visitors the opportunity to share their feedback at any point in time. Don’t make them wait unless you feel that there is a need to capture their voice.

Another detail to note here is that the majority of these techniques will help your team derive qualitative information from your customers. That means you’ll need to ask thought-provoking questions that motivate participants to provide insightful answers. For some companies that may be easy, others not so much. Keep in mind that it’s not the customer’s responsibility to provide you with any feedback, let alone productive feedback.

This is where a group of eight to 12 customers meet in a room, where they are asked to share their perceptions, beliefs, and opinions about your product or service. The group participants are free to openly talk with one another.

This data collection method is used to gain insights into customers’ prioritization of needs, or to test concepts and get feedback. Focus groups are sometimes used in addition to interviews and surveys as the last step to further investigate and understand the Voice of the Customer for each of the company’s touch points.

This method can be as informal or as formal as you want it to be. You can send highly personalized emails to particular customers or create a template that can be used for the entire target. You also have the option to either ask for feedback as a response to your email (which might be unstructured and time-consuming) or add a link in the email body to one of your surveys.

Collecting VOC

will provide you with all the insights that you’ll need to understand customer preferences, problems, and complaints. However, the drill doesn’t end here it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The entire process of capturing VOC should be data-driven and at no point should you make any assumptions.
In-depth knowledge of your user’s journey and customer lifecycle is a must.
Don’t forget to skim through historical data.

Now, you have to put these insights into action, and then identify and respond to the Voice of the Customer to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Use VOC to increase customer retention.

Voice of The Customer Data Can (and Should) Be Used Across Your Organization

No matter what type(s) of VOC data you’re collecting, you’re likely sitting on a treasure trove of valuable insights. Here are five practical ways to extract that value and begin to transform your organization from the inside out.

Collecting voice of the customer data isn’t supposed be a cerebral exercise that serves the C-suite, insights teams, and data scientists. You should use the data to set goals for all your teams and to hold them accountable for achieving those goals.

Unused voice of the customer data does nothing but drain revenue. When used across the organization especially in combination with objective data—VOC data can help change the corporate culture, align teams, improve cost efficiencies, and create a virtuous cycle of improvement and growth

It’s easy to make policy changes in the corporate ivory tower to improve cost efficiencies or keep up with the Joneses. But what if that new return policy is confusing? What if your latest omnichannel initiative falls flat? Could these well-meaning efforts to improve your brand position or bottom line be costing you customers?

If you use your VOC data collection programs to answer these questions definitively, you’ll know which policies are working, which are working against you, and what steps you should take in response.

Voice of customer data is often used to gauge customer reactions to new products. Brands congratulate themselves for a job well done, or they admonish the product team for messing up on the latest product release.

It’s important to understand how customers feel about new products, and to learn from your mistakes. But to gradually improve your chances of success, you must also read between the lines (both verbatim comments and aggregate responses) and use those findings to guide future product development.

If you’re collecting VOC data in real time, you can use it to do what you can’t with QA reviews at a meaningful scale. You can tap agents on the shoulder in the moment and provide fresh examples of how they can improve their performance on the very next call. Correcting or rewarding agent behavior in this way, rather than in traditional training sessions, can improve team performance by as much as 12%.

If you’re looking to improve first-contact resolution to increase customer satisfaction and lower costs, micro-coaching can accelerate your progress.

Front-line VOC data collected in real time improves agent performance in more ways than one. Not only can managers identify high and low performers at a glance and intervene in a timely way, but agents can see the impact they’re making. And nothing does more to build brand pride, enthusiasm, and morale on the contact center floor.

With a steady stream of customer feedback flowing through dashboards and leaderboards in the contact center, agents will be motivated to raise their own scores, compete with each other in a friendly way, and congratulate top performers. In a matter of days or weeks (versus months, perhaps, after corporate-level VOC data trickles down), you’ll begin to see a positive impact on the customer experience.