In this brief guide, learn about what the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is, its benefits to an organization, the various VoC data collection methods, and some steps and tips to follow in building a successful VoC program.
The Voice of the Customer is a research method or technique used by businesses to collect and validate customer feedback about their products and services. It’s also considered an important component of Customer Experience (CX) which focuses on the needs, expectations, and preferences of customers.
Since the primary purpose of gathering and maximizing the Voice of the Customer data is to help businesses improve their overall CX, it’s a must for key stakeholders such as those involved in customer service and support to be passionate about customer feedback. They stand between the business and its customers, so the process of utilizing the VoC gathered through customer interactions must be well-implemented.
In the context of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is essential for developing effective action plans and strategies to meet customer needs and expectations. QFD serves as a tool for incorporating VoC into an organization’s quality processes, aligning with the holistic methodology of Six Sigma. It identifies Critical to Quality (CTQ) factors that translate customer needs into measurable standards for product and process performance.
The first stage of QFD involves using a product planning matrix known as the House of Quality, where customer requirements are gathered.
The Six Sigma methodology’s overall purpose is to improve the quality, value, or intent of the products or services of a business. As the Voice of the Customer analysis becomes the foundation of the organization’s product life cycle and process improvement projects, the application of Six Sigma becomes more streamlined and targeted to the intended direction of how the organization can improve its processes toward stellar CX and customer service.
Conducting Voice of the Customer research and having relevant insights at your disposal also presents the following benefits to your organization:
Competitive product innovation and optimization
Increased customer retention and acquisition
More opportunities for continuous improvement and business growth
Alignment and prioritization of continuous improvement activities with customer expectations
Enhanced control of churn rate
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Although different companies may have their own unique methods to collect VoC insights, the following is a list of the most common data collection techniques and Voice of the Customer tools:
Customer satisfaction surveys and interviews – These can be conducted using forms, live calls, and video conferencing, among others.
Mystery shopping program for customers – Instead of the traditional mystery shopping tactic wherein you hire people to be “mystery shoppers,” you can ask your customers to be your “secret shoppers” and record their experiences with your products and/or services.
Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) – If you’re aiming to capture deeper, more personal responses from your customers, FGDs are a great way to expose them to an open discussion about their insights, motivations, reasons, and preferences.
Customer calls – Recorded customer calls can also be a gold mine for garnering historical data and Voice of the Customer insights. These can give you an overview of how customers perceive your brand as a whole, along with their specific observations and suggestions they may have.
Live chat logs – This tool can also be used to conduct customer surveys, apart from it being something that customers can use in real-time to interact with you.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) – This is used to help you gauge how much your customers are likely to recommend your business to other people.
Social media monitoring tools – Some Voice of the Customer examples that use these tools are the following:
Kustomer: This tool serves as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that helps organizations access customer data and history in various channels to improve their customer satisfaction efforts.
Hootsuite: This tool helps businesses monitor brand conversations, mentions, and even terms that customers use when saying something on social media about the product, service, or overall experience they had with the business.
Building a Successful Voice of the Customer Program
A successful VoC program must be customer-centric, aligned with the organization’s goals, and able to adapt to the changes that the business goes through. In order for these to happen, you may follow these steps and some tips for building and maintaining a VoC program that works.
Depending on the desired outcomes of your organization within a certain period of time, the kind of goals you need to define may vary. These goals should be able to help you to clearly set the foundation for the next steps you should take in setting up a targeted and purposeful VoC program.
For example, if you’re focusing on increased customer retention, you should look for and set up the relevant listening tools that can help you better accomplish your action plans toward that goal. In this case, you’re ensuring that the specific initiatives you’re implementing are leading to more defined objectives you can set and relay to your teams and employees toward better CX and customer service.
To better guide you, here are some questions you can ask during this step:
What business objective are we trying to achieve using the VoC program? Is it for benchmarking or for continuous improvement?
What do we intend to capture? Are we looking at trends, discovering customer demographics, or analyzing website visitor behavior and response?
With our business objective and the data we must capture, what kind of tool or platform do we need to use?
In this step, it’s crucial to understand first what your organization already knows about your customers. Using existing customer data, you can create customer or buyer profiles that you can utilize in effectively mapping out the customer journey. Even more, your marketing and product development strategies can also benefit from the presence of such profiles for further personalization.
Going back to the sample scenario wherein your organization aims to focus on increasing customer retention, your focus must be on your existing customers instead of new or potential ones.
Depending on the objectives you’ve set for your VoC program, the kind of listening tools and strategies you may implement could be unique and may vary. t’s also crucial to consider what triggers you’ll use to encourage or prompt customers to share their experience with your business.
Efforts to proactively “listen” to customer feedback can be integrated into certain points within the customer journey. For example, conducting software demonstrations and organizing customer events can be effective ways to gather customer pain points, expectations, and other insights.
Once you have a significant amount of VoC data ready for analysis, it’s imperative to ensure that the whole organization is committed to establishing goals and action plans to achieve a successful VoC program.
Commonly, the employees and leaders in the customer support and customer service teams are the ones who must be more involved in building the VoC program. Also, the leaders and teams in charge of approving and making changes to the current CX processes must be on board with the program.
Lastly, knowing what to measure also contributes to creating a program that seamlessly integrates your VoC data into what your efforts aim to achieve. Using standard metrics like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) gives you a quantitative way of measuring customer interactions and if these are improving based on the VoC program you created.
As you continuously strive to be a customer-driven business, tapping into the voice of your customers can boost your efforts to achieve a viable VoC initiative. In this endeavor, having powerful tools like Mitti (by SafetyCulture) integrated into your key processes is a powerful way to be consistent with your CX operations.
Using Mitti (by SafetyCulture), a workplace operations platform, CX professionals and product teams can improve and contribute to building a sustainable VoC program by maximizing the platform’s features:
Utilize checklists and templates for ensuring customer centricity in key departments and across the organization. These audits and quality inspections can be in the form of performance evaluations of customer success and support teams and quality management and assurance in departments’ levels of integrating CX in their respective roles.
Flag CX, product, and service issues and assign actions to resolve them accordingly.
Spot patterns and trends from the gathered VoC insights and data to help in forming business decisions, strategies, and continuous improvement initiatives.
Export Voice of the Customer data reports into various formats including weblink, PDF, Word, or CSV.
Conduct training on CX and best practices using a microlearning solution to make workplace training more engaging.
Use Heads Up when communicating across the organization, especially when sharing CX highlights, customer feedback, and other VoC-related insights.
Maximize Mitti (by SafetyCulture)’s integration capabilities to help you easily access all relevant data in one place.
You can also download, use, and customize these free Voice of the Customer templates and checklists from the Public Library to collect and document customer insights and feedback:
