Voice of customer

Poor customer experiences result in a loss by businesses because of defections and abandoned purchases, and people are twice as likely to talk about a negative experience than they are a positive one. To avoid a negative customer experience to your customer it becomes critical to understand the pulse of the customer however when collecting customer feedback, most organizations fail to gain helpful information due to improper timing, inappropriate questions, and slow or no reactions. Deploying a Voice of customer program provides the solution and creates the basis for a customer experience management implementation.

What is the Voice of a customer? 

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a term that describes your customer’s feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. It focuses on customer needs, expectations, and understandings and is proven to help organizations retain customers, build better products, deliver better services, and systematically understand the customer experience to drive change.

Gartner's research recently discovered that collecting customer feedback can increase upselling and cross-selling success rates by 15% to 20%. The same report found that customer feedback can also help decrease the cost of retaining those buyers – as companies that actively engage in a voice of customer programs, spend 25% less on customer retention than those that don’t.

Another study, by The Aberdeen Group, called "The Business Value of Building a Best-in-Class VoC Program" discovered that companies that invest in customer feedback programs experience much higher client retention, and employee engagement and spend less on customer service.

Why it is important?

From the above stats, it is a proven fact that organizations that understand their customer journey are much more likely to improve their products to fit their customers’ evolving requirements and therefore to foster their loyalty and eventually more business revenue. Voice of the Customer programs has a direct impact on the organization's bottom line. 

Businesses can Identify at-risk customers by going through surveys response or customer chat conversations, social media posts, and any other interactions with the brand. This helps to

• Prevent customer churning
• Minimize negative word of mouth
• Decrease the cost to serve

With a well-designed VOC maturity models, program businesses can also amplify the voice of their loyal customers, they can identify happy customers and encourage them to share their experience with their network by incentivizing them for the same. This will help to 

• Encourage positive word of mouth
• Increase share of wallet
• Identify opportunities for references / positive reviews for marketing purposes

When you know your customer's needs, sentiments, and expectations directly or indirectly from them it provides you a good opportunity to keep your products and services stay ahead of the curve by 

• Transforming complaints, you receive into sources of focused improvements
• Encouraging your key customers to participate in co-creation opportunities
• Bring in the Voice of the Customer to fuel innovation throughout the organization

Philadelphia Insurance Companies runs a customer experience program that offers a 360-degree view of the policy lifecycle and gathers feedback at critical touchpoints along the customer journey. This insight enables PHLY to reward a job well done, identify areas for process and service improvements, build a relationship with customers, and provide statistics to drive change. 

The program also offers impact across department lines and opportunities to enhance processes collaboratively among departments. PHLY’s program has directly driven a range of business improvements, including the provision of in-depth training for the Account Management team, giving them more authority and autonomy to handle policy endorsement transactions. 

This has substantially improved the speed of service and enhanced the ease of doing business for customers. Philadelphia Insurance has driven a range of business improvements, including a 43% improvement in speed of service around endorsement processing time. Now we know the what is Voice of customer program and understands its importance for business, the next question is how we can capture customer feedback using the platform. The Voice of a customer can be captured directly and indirectly.

Direct feedback is Feedback received directly from clients, commonly through surveys. Some examples include NPS scores, lifecycle Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, transactional CSAT scores, community posts, etc.

Indirect feedback is Feedback generated by the ways clients are engaging with your product. For example, usage data, support data, and other behavioral metrics.

Wrap up

VOC programs have gained traction over the years and are fast-growing segments of a core business strategy for organizations. They work exceptionally well for brands as customers demand more direct engagement with a firm and because capturing and acting on customer feedback is critical to understanding a prospect’s complex decision-making process.

Reference:

https://www.confirmit.com/What-We-Do/Voice-of-the-Customer/ 

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/voice-of-the-customer-methodologies 

https://customerthink.com/what-exactly-is-voice-of-the-customer/ 

https://www.gainsight.com/guides/essential-guide-voice-customer/ 

Customer feedback loop: A.C.A.F (https://survicate.com/customer-feedback/feedback-management/) 

https://delighted.com/blog/7-customer-experience-survey-types 

https://martechseries.com/sales-marketing/b2b-commerce/new-report-breaks-voice-customer-market-three-functional-segments/ 

https://mopinion.com/30-best-customer-feedback-tools-an-overview/ 

https://www.g2.com/categories/enterprise-feedback-management?tab=highest_rated 

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