Five voice of the customer best practices for business success

There are many technical solutions available in the market to capture customer needs, expectations, and experiences with the business, while they help businesses to get insights about their customer they are only one tool to create actionable VOC insight.
 

Robust VOC insight isn’t found in a software algorithm or dashboard report rather it needs well thought and properly defined Voice of customer strategy to squeeze the best juice out of any Voice of the customer program. Let's discuss the five most important voices of the customer best practices to achieve VOC success and improve CX.  For better results, it is highly recommended that each of these best practices should align with the others across the entire organization, not in just one department or business entity.

1 Real-time listening across touchpoint

To extract some useful and actionable insights it is important to listen and evaluate the entire customer journey on all channels for example Digital and mobile sources of customer data (websites, social media, smartphones) have not only become important sources of voice of the customer, but also critical channels for enabling the actions and insights learned from the voice of the customer analytics.

2 Data integration across touchpoints and enterprise systems

Traditionally every business has separate departments for each function with its objectives and KPI. These departments normally work in silo and customer insights captured by these departments stay local and rarely shared across the different departments. These silo barriers become the cause of many lost opportunities. To avoid that and for better results from the Voice of the customer program, it is recommended that all the data collected at different channels and different points of the journey should be integrated and easily accessible to all the departments.

#3 Efficient signal extraction from structured and unstructured data

Once you have captured customer data at different touchpoints/channels and integrated these insights with the enterprise system, the next important step is to extract signals from this data to predict customer behavior. At a broader level, there are two data sources structured and unstructured and businesses should have sufficient resources to extract positive or negative sentiments of the customer from both the structured and unstructured data.

#4 Disseminate and share signals with relevant stakeholders and give them actionable recommendations

After capturing customer data, integrating it with the enterprise system, and extracting signals from this data, the next step is to share information with relevant stakeholders so that required actions can be performed swiftly and promptly.

#5 Integrate with frontline systems like CRM, contact centers, etc.

VOC data should be integrated with CRM, and contact centers so that the frontline staff will be loaded with all customer-related information and their sentiments about businesses. This insight eventually helps with personalized customer interactions.

Wrap up

A centralized cross-functional team championed by the CEO is usually the best place to start to develop and take action on a VOC strategy. Also, as we add additional channels to the VOC programs like digital and mobile to serve as both voice of the customer input and enablers of actions, it will become imperative to Integrate the information collected from these channels with information collected from traditional channels, analyze disparate sources of information in real-time and extract signals and translate those insights into actions and determine the best channel to leverage.

 
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