Consumers today are willing to pay more in return for excellent experiences where they can effortlessly achieve what they want with brands.

This is the reason most of us no longer hesitate to share feedback. In fact, 83% of customers agree that they feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints.

Voice of Customer feedback has become integral for business success considering the competitive and ever-evolving markets. But how to go about collecting VoC feedback? 

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Ways to Collect Voice of Customer Feedback

When it comes to collecting feedback from customers, you will have to use direct feedback channels to ask customers the right questions at the right time.

Here are different Voice of Customer methodologies to collect VoC data: 

Voice of Customer Surveys

Voice of Customer surveys are the most reliable way to collect actionable customer feedback at all important touchpoints. Customer surveys can be designed to measure the overall satisfaction of customers with the brand and even the most specific feedback pertaining to certain events. For example, you can send out VoC surveys after purchases to collect post-transaction feedback. Similarly, website or mobile app feedback through surveys can help brands know what features customers like and what more they would like to see.

You can collect VoC feedback by letting customers rate their purchase or customer service experiences. Based on the feedback, you can gauge customers’ overall satisfaction and loyalty to the brand. You can also create detailed questionnaires to allow customers to share contextual feedback through comments. This can be extremely useful in measuring customer sentiment and also highlighting success drivers as well as pain points. 

Customer Interviews

Customer interviews are ideal when you’re looking to collect on-site feedback and a preferred way of gathering Voice of Customer feedback since they allow having conversations with follow-up questions to get a window into consumers’ minds. The great thing about customer interviews is that you can understand your customers better by assessing their body language, facial expressions, and willingness to share feedback. Based on what customers share, you can ask relevant questions and make the entire feedback-sharing process feel like a smooth-flowing conversation. And the best part is that you try to resolve problems reported on the spot. The feedback can then be saved to improve similar experiences. 

Customer Ticket Feedback

Tickets created in customer servicing tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk are nothing but opportunities to get to know your customers better. There are two ways you can retrieve useful VoC data from customer tickets:

• Analyze tickets to identify highly reported issues or pain point keywords
• Collect customer feedback after ticket resolution using surveys where customers can share whether they were satisfied with the resolution provided or what could be improved

Customers share a huge deal of information about your brand when trying to get issues resolved. By collecting VoC feedback with all customer service interactions, you can uncover longstanding issues and rectify them. 

Social Media and Online Reviews

Nearly half of all internet posts reviews online every month. People who are genuinely looking for good experiences are voicing their opinions all the time; you just have to listen. Social media and online reviews are unsolicited feedback, coming from both happy and dissatisfied customers. You can analyze customers’ comments and reviews to identify key business challenges.

You can use techniques like natural language processing and sentiment analysis to make sense of online reviews. Insights then can help refine and even build the product or business roadmap. 

Other Voice of Customer Feedback Methodologies

Though the most reliable form of VoC data is direct customer feedback, you can always use other feedback methodologies to get insight into customer behavior. You can track customer activity throughout the customer journey and gather insightful data at certain touchpoints or events. 
Here are some techniques to capture VoC data:

• Website analytics like cart abandonment rate, page visits, etc., to learn about lost sales and conversion opportunities
• Repeat customer data to identify loyal customers as well as high-selling products
• Customer churn data to learn about products that customers don’t buy again

What to Do with Voice of Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback is useless if you do not utilize it to improve business functions and customer experiences. Therefore, it is important to act on it and use it for decision-making across different verticals. Here are the three main steps you can follow to make the most of Voice of Customer feedback:

1. Draw Insights

Analyze Voice of Customer feedback and draw insights, for example, you can use Voice of Customer survey tools to identify data points like most reported issues, location-specific success drivers, overall customer satisfaction, gaps in customer service, etc. 

Data points that explain what makes customers happy or unhappy will help you understand what you can do to increase satisfaction. 

2. Assign Ownership

Once you know what needs to be worked on within the organization, you can accurately figure out the right people who can take ownership and get results. Make sure to collaborate with subject matter experts in each process where customer feedback can help.  

3. Take Action

SMEs with the help of their teams can then implement changes and take measures to align the brand with customers. Each team or process can use VoC feedback relevant to them and use it to enhance their strategies. For example, if customers report of poor on-call customer support, the agents can be trained in order to help them better and resolve issues more efficiently. 

Conclusion

A successful Voice of Customer program doesn’t run in isolation. It involves multiple stakeholders and various business functions. And to achieve comprehensive results, it’s important to create a comprehensive strategy.

Make sure that your focus is on multichannel Voice of Customer feedback. Whether its on-site feedback, customer survey feedback, or online discussion groups, utilize every channel that may help in capturing the customers’ voice.