Your customers are your best resource for expanding your business. Business growth is not just about attracting new customers and boosting sales, but you can retain existing clients. Customer loyalty is a huge asset and cannot be ignored no matter what industry you operate within. Consumer insights are vital for success, and creating a Voice of Customer or VOC strategy is an effective option.
What is a Voice Of Customer (VOC) strategy?
A VOC strategy is a way of capturing, analyzing, and reporting on customer feedback. It takes into account the expectations, likes, and concerns that customers associate with your business. Customer experience is becoming increasingly important to consumers, and a VOC strategy is the heartbeat behind that. Voice of Customer strategies can reveal real-time insights into how consumers view your business and their experiences with your brand. You can use this to identify opportunities and highlight trends which can enhance the customer journey and improve customer relationships.
How to develop a Voice Of Customer (VOC) strategy?
Your unique Voice of Customer strategy will vary depending on your business goals, but developing the plan requires some standard processes. To begin with, you must set your business up for success by having leaders in place who understand the importance of this new strategy. A VOC strategy is only as successful as the people behind it, and having a team that is aligned with your goals is critical.
Next, you need to know what your customer journey looks like. Remember that each customer will be following their unique journey, and to understand this, you need to know your customers well. Be aware of where they might come across friction on their journey and develop ways to ask them about these areas. It is possible to create a VOC strategy without customer journey mapping, but it will be much more successful if you have one in place.
Once you understand your customer journey and have the right people in place, you will consider how you will gather your customer feedback. Every VOC strategy will be slightly different, as it depends on your unique customers and business model. The most important part is asking consumers for their opinions on an ongoing basis. When it comes to collecting data for your Voice of Customer strategy, remember these key factors:
● Combine various viewpoints: Your customers are complex, and a simple feedback survey might not be enough to understand them fully. Using a combination of customer satisfaction scores and unstructured feedback, such as from social media, can create a robust voice for your consumers
● Consistent measuring: As with anything, consistency is essential for a VOC strategy. You should set yourself a baseline for the data points you are measuring and use this to compare your performance along the way
● Tell your customer story: Gathering all these consumer insights is excellent, but the essential part of your VOC strategy is hearing your customer’s authentic voice. The entire point of this strategy is to understand your customer’s story. Use call center recordings, accurate quotes from customers, and other first-hand data to build a natural voice for your consumers. No amount of data in the world can tell your customer story like their own voice can so do not shy away from direct anecdotes.
Gathering all this information in one place can make your VOC strategy easy to manage, understand and share within your business. Setting up a VOC dashboard is a simple way of keeping on top of your strategy and tracking the changes in real-time. Once in place, your VOC strategy can help you make business decisions with your consumers in mind.