Why and How to Create a Voice of Customer Program?

Find out what makes a Voice of Customer program so important & how you can create one for your business. Learn the VoC process broken down in simple steps.

While some companies thrive with their Voice of Customer programs, some struggle to sift the noise from the useful customer voice. What distinguishes a successful Voice of Customer approach from others is a proper strategy that prepares businesses for every stage of the VoC program.

According to a popular report, 20% of the respondents that use VoC customer data to make their decisions experience 10 times higher year-on-year revenue growth compared to other companies. But what about the rest, 80%?

There are still a significant number of businesses that are unable to witness the impact that VoC programs are capable of making. 

Capture Voice of Customer & User Insight

With VoC Surveys, understand what users need and learn ways to delight your customers.

The key to creating a successful Voice of Customer program is to put things in perspective right from the beginning and set up a process. What benefits can you reap from an effective VoC program? How to go about creating a powerful VoC solution?

Let’s read all about it in this detailed article. 

Table of Content

• What is a Voice of Customer Program?
  
  • Why is a VoC Program Important?
• How to Build a Voice of Customer Program? 
  
  • Step-By-Step Instructions to Build a VoC Program
• Zonka Feedback– A Trusted VoC Tool

What is a Voice of Customer Program?

A VoC or Voice of Customer program is designed to collect customer feedback and data to make calculated business decisions and create a more customer-centric brand. The program is typically designed to put together measurable and actionable data, analyze it, and take action to improve customer satisfaction. 

A VoC program can be designed to capture customers’ voices through different Voice of Customer methodologies, including customer surveys, website analytics, social media listening, online tracking, and others. The data is then used to make informed business decisions that would improve customer experience dramatically. 

A good example of a Voice of Customer program can be identifying unhappy customers through online reviews or uncovering the reason for low satisfaction levels using customer feedback surveys.

Why is a VoC Program Important?

A Voice of Customer (VoC) program is a vital tool for businesses as it allows for the collection and analysis of customer data. This enables businesses to gain valuable insights and make informed decisions that can benefit them in various ways.

By implementing a VoC survey program, businesses can identify areas of improvement in both their products and services. This knowledge allows them to optimize their time, resources, and money, leading to increased efficiency and effectiveness. Additionally, a VoC program helps businesses stay relevant by meeting customer demands and expectations, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Here are some:

• Highlights the areas of improvement in terms of both product and service
• Optimizes time, resources, and money
• Enables businesses to meet customer demands and stay relevant
• Helps in resolving customer complaints faster, thus improving the customer experience
• Improves brand reputation
• Empowers the customer service teams
• Helps to stay competitive
• Helps in the innovation of products or services as per customer expectations
• Helps in optimizing marketing efforts

There are many Voice of Customer examples of businesses that used VoC data to understand how customers perceived them. With the most accurate insights into customers’ activity and expectations, you can create products and services that are guaranteed to sell. With accurate customer data, you can go beyond guesswork to create targeted marketing campaigns, build in-demand products, improve complaint resolution rates, and gain a competitive edge in the market. 

How to Build a Voice of Customer Program? 

A VoC program isn’t a one-time activity. Instead, it is a strategic cycle of activities that consistently takes your business closer to success. Here are the four main phases of a VoC program:

Listen: Deploy tools, i.e., use VoC methods to collect customer feedback and inputs across various survey collection and communication channels; for example, customer surveys, customer support analysis, website analytics, online review tracking, and social media listening.

Interpret: Analyze customer data and voice of customer feedback and use it across various business departments to be able to bring significant internal improvements.

Act: Use Voice of Customer to increase customer retention by addressing problems or customer pain points and creating a customer-centric brand.

Monitor: Track your progress continually by measuring how VoC data translates to better customer experiences and improves business performance.

Step-By-Step Instructions to Build a VoC Program

Creating a successful Voice of Customer (VoC) program involves a step-by-step process that can be easily implemented by businesses. By breaking down the process into simple steps, businesses can effectively gather valuable insights from their customers and make informed decisions.

By following these simple steps, businesses can create a successful VoC program that enables them to gain valuable insights, make informed decisions, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Let’s read each in detail. 

1. Create a Goal/Vision

The first step to building a VoC program is to start with an end in mind. Businesses use VoC programs for various goals based on the challenges they are experiencing. You must know what your goal is and create a VoC strategy around that. Here are a few examples of common VoC goals:

• Improve customer service experience
• Reduce customer loss or churn
• Enhance product strategy
• Increase productivity of employees
• Improve marketing efforts
• Increase free trial conversion
• Increase average order value, etc.

Usually, companies creating a Voice of Customer program start with a single CX metric in mind. The initial thought is with Net Promoter Score or NPS Survey or simply measuring Customer Satisfaction with CSAT surveys. 

Based on your goal, you will be able to decide where the customer data would be used and how. 

2. Create Customer Journey Maps and Identify Important Touchpoints

As a customer-centric business, you must make sure that every interaction is seamless and adds value. However, not every touchpoint is equally important in aspects of collecting VoC data. You will need to prioritize the points at which you will collect customer feedback. That’s the reason we need customer journey maps.

A customer journey map encompasses various customer touchpoints and is used to track the sequential interactions of customers with the brand.  It helps in identifying the touchpoints that drive value, such as:

High-Value Moments of Truth: Sending a search query on the website may not be a valuable touchpoint, but adding a product to the cart is a critical touchpoint that sheds light on customers’ preferences. Finding high-value moments of truth means highlighting interactions that give your brand an insight into customers’ expectations and inclinations.

High-Value Customer Segments: Some customers may be frequent buyers, and some may shop with you only once in a while. What’s important is to identify high-value customer segments that allow collecting only high-quality, reliable data across touchpoints, such as:

• Store entry and exit
• Billing
• Customer care support
• Website interactions
• Phone calls
• Web check-in and checkout

3. Build an Omnichannel Strategy

In most businesses today, customers choose to interact with brands through different channels. For example, some customers may only prefer the in-store experience, while several others find the online experience more convenient and time-saving. And some customers may visit the store and use the discount offer available online while making the payment. Therefore, it’s important to consider all points of customer interaction and identify channels that reliable customer data can be collected through.

For example, to collect direct customer feedback on the website, mobile app, or remotely, you can use Voice of Customer surveys. For customer activity tracking on the website, you can use website analytics. For online listening, you can track online reviews and comments. This enables capturing the 360-degree voice of customer data.  

4. Select VoC Tools

With the help of customer journey maps, you can make out what kind of customer data you are looking for. And based on what your feedback or insight goals are, you can use one or more of the Voice of Customer tools.

For example, if the customer footfall in a store is not leading to the expected number of conversions, you might need to install a survey kiosk to collect customer satisfaction data. Similarly, what customers talk about your brand online can be tracked through online and social listening.

This would help you uncover the hurdles in achieving the maximum conversion rates and highlight the areas of improvement.

VoC tools are divided into three segments:

Direct Feedback

• Customer Feedback Surveys
• Focus Groups
• Customer Interview
• Customer Service Calls
• Live Chat

Indirect Feedback

• Online Reviews
• Customer Service Calls
• Social Media Trend Observation

Inferred Feedback

• Click Stream Data
• Purchase History
• Social Networking Activities
• Contact Centre Data

5. Create a Process

Executing a Voice of Customer program is not a one-person job since your VoC data can be used in different capacities. You will need to involve all the stakeholders and delegate jobs for each phase. For example, customer data collected through support calls can be filtered by the customer service team and can be used by the product development team to enhance your business offering. So, define use cases of all forms of data and delegate responsibilities accordingly.

Here are a few examples of the questions you will need to answer at this stage:

• Who will collect customer data via social media?
• Who will select the VoC survey questions or create the questionnaires?
• Who will send or schedule surveys at various touchpoints?
• Who will be responsible for report generation and analysis?
• Who will be involved in the decision-making process?
• How will the output of a previous stage be used as input in the next stage?

6. Collect VoC Data

After you assign the important contributors in your VoC program, you can finally start collecting data. Make sure you have defined accountabilities so the team can effectively act and collaborate to use Voice of Customer data for customer retention and business success.

7. Track Your KPIs

The customer data that you collect in the first phase of your VoC program will serve as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your business. You can use these to understand the drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Also, this information will help you prioritize the effective changes that you will need to make in order to deliver remarkable experiences. However, make sure that your KPI dataset is consistently updated.

8. Close the Feedback Loop

VoC data is useless if you do not act on customer feedback, especially if it is negative. So, make sure that you have a team in place that tracks if issues are being resolved and if customers are being responded to. Keeping customers in the loop and informing them about all the progress is critical since it communicates to them how important their business is to your brand. And in most cases, customers would prefer to stay with you despite a negative experience if they know that they are being heard and their experience is your priority.

Zonka Feedback– A Trusted VoC Tool

Zonka Feedback is a VoC Survey Tool that is designed specifically to help customer-centric businesses collect valuable customer data through interactive surveys at various touchpoints. Not only does the Zonka Feedback survey tool help you in collecting online, offline, and real-time feedback, but it also generates actionable insights to help you make the right business decisions.

Why Do You Need Zonka  Feedback?

• Multi-channel feedback, which means that you can collect customer feedback via email, mobile app, SaaS product, tablet, kiosk, website, SMS, QR code surveys, and live chat.
• Different types of customer surveys, including NPS, CSAT, and CES
• 500+ survey templates on our easy-to-use survey builder without the need for coding and other technical skills
• Automated surveys with workflow and CX automation 
• Response-based action and triggers
• Real-time notifications and alerts
• Personalized and customizable surveys
• Insightful survey reports, sentiment analysis, and trend tracking
• Integration with business tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Slack, Google Sheets, Integrately, Zapier, and many more.