The plethora of reviews across different sites and the increasing adoption of Voice of Customer (VoC) have helped many organizations leverage the VoC program in establishing a solid CX function.
In recent times, VoC programs have been employed as one of the most radical instruments to develop an incredible customer journey for businesses. Organizations investing in VoC programs see higher client retention, improved employee engagement, better brand visibility, and reduced customer retention cost.
VoC is comprehensive qualitative research undertaken by companies to understand customer behavior, expectations, requirements, and perception of your product or business. However, designing, planning, implementing, and communicating an effective VoC strategy isn't always an easy task. As a result, most brands fail to extract value because they fail to identify small yet critical flaws while drafting a proper VoC framework.
Key Benefits of Knowing Your Company’s VoC
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Brands use a voice of the customer platform to estimate the trends across distinct client profiles. Later, they leverage the discovered insights of feedback evaluation to address service quality issues and revise business strategies. Through continuous improvements driven by a data-backed voice of customer framework, companies enhance consumer experiences.
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VoC reports reveal novel opportunities to hyper-personalize companies’ offerings for each client. Besides, managers learn about customer interests and how to market the products or services most appealingly by utilizing relevant behavioral insights. So, the sales conversion rate increases, facilitating the ease of new customer acquisition.
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When enterprises listen to customer feedback, it builds a bond of mutual respect and trust. And since customers use your offerings, they are in an ideal position to help you solve the issues concerning product ergonomics and feature upgrades. Moreover, customers love it when a brand pays attention to their ideas and are likelier to become brand loyalists.
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More resilient customer relations assist business leaders in sustaining their organization’s financial performance during economic downturns and controversial media coverage. Satisfied consumers also support their favorite brands through the word of mouth marketing.
Read Also: Things to Consider Before Buying a “Voice of Customer” Solution
5 Most Common Mistakes that Voice of Customer Practitioners Make
Every company seeks qualified professionals to operate its voice of customer platform. However, expertise drastically varies among customer analytics providers. This situation arises due to avoidable skill deficiencies and business acumen issues. Here is a list of the five most common mistakes VOC practitioners make and how to avoid them.
Here is a list of the five most common mistakes VOC practitioners make and how to avoid them.
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Not Asking the Right Questions to the Right Audience
Before drafting any question, it is vital to understand your target audience. A VoC program provides insight into customers’ expectations, preferences, and desires. Customers with the same demographic and psychographic profile may have different needs and perceptions of the same product. ↵
Collecting contextual data about the customers’ pain points/touch points and personas will help brands provide superior customer experience orchestration and optimization. Therefore, enterprises must embrace qualitative customer analytics supporting context detection and unstructured data processing technologies.
Another imperative thing to keep in mind is the timing of feedback that affects the quality of the voice of the customer framework. Feedback gathering must happen at the right time and place, from the right person, and through the proper channels. Asking for customer feedback in a setting where people feel uncomfortable sharing their thoughts may result in people not speaking openly.
Similarly, asking customers about some aspects of the experience sets an expectation among the audience that the management will do something about it. However, it is best to refrain from asking questions that promise a resolution you cannot see through.
Related: How Analytics is Changing the Landscape of “Voice of Customer”
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Poor Survey Design
Survey design is one of the most crucial components of a strong and successful VoC program. Asking directly for data, endlessly long and boring surveys, navigation and UI issues, and poor grammar will do nothing except frustrate and annoy your audience and will lead to friction in relationships.
Before starting any program, initiative, or journey, always try to outline your goals, objectives, outcomes, and metrics. Poor survey design can lead to low response rates, poor quality responses, and low re-engagement from the audience. The size of survey questions, word choice, intuitiveness, and flow can directly affect how your customers perceive your business and their willingness to complete your survey.
Survey design is massively impacted by the channel you choose to survey your customers. A strong VoC program may have different touch points for different channels. While the live chat option on your website is excellent for collecting real-time customer feedback, social media platforms let you tap into relevant ongoing conversations, connect with participants, and/or listen quietly. Many companies rely on one or two channels to measure and optimize their interactions, limiting the coverage and depth of insights assimilated.
Brands should ideally collect customer feedback from everywhere possible to create a more seamless customer experience. Nevertheless, financial or technological constraints can reduce the social listening scope in the voice of the customer framework. So, data processing and customer analytics needs vary from company to company. .
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Failing to act on feedback
Most organizations mistake VoC for a market research study. One of the most certain ways to annoy the respondents is to ask them questions and not put them into action. Customers will most certainly stop giving feedback in the future if they notice their feedback is not taken seriously.
VoC is not just about asking; you must listen, plan and implement the right course of action. The difference between ‘ask’ and ‘listen’ is of paramount importance when it comes to VoC. Be sure to keep an eye on social media, online reviews, and customer advisory boards.
Most organizations fail to share feedback with their respective departments to learn and act upon it. Your VoC program helps you make changes to operations, marketing, and strategy to improve the customer experience (CX). Completing a VoC and not using its insights will not help your organization and, more importantly, your customers.
Fear of negative feedback can also slow down the VoC data collection process. It is important to note that you may risk losing out to competitors who listen and act swiftly on negative feedback.
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Focusing on the metrics, not the factors
Most of the companies' surveys rely too much on the metrics and not enough on factors that may influence that outcome. CX metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) are all insightful, but each score measures a unique and different aspect of customer's behavior. No doubt, VoC is best understood with text, predictive, and sentiment analysis technology, but focusing too much just on metrics will result in yielding wrong customer psychology or behavior.
While measuring the results of the VoC program, it is prudent to understand why customers gave these ratings. This will help analyze and identify customers' pain points behind the negative rating or touchpoints for positive rating. The proper amalgamation of pain points and positive attributes would help the organization access the qualitative data needed to formulate proactive CX initiatives.
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Viewing it as a one-time process
Most brands conduct VOC programs annually or quarterly to be viewed solely by senior team members. This siloed approach to act on VOC data would result in missed opportunities and ideas. The strategic intent of any VoC program should be a continuous improvement to identify sudden casualties. It is very important to revisit your customer listening efforts to ensure that they meet today's respondent preferences, new features and product enhancements, competitors' offerings, and the industry's rapidly changing landscape.
The customers' needs are continuously evolving, and so are technological advancements. Therefore, what delights a customer today may turn out to be an expected or indifferent product feature tomorrow.
Your VoC must be updated frequently to ensure that you are working on improving based on the feedback previously heard. Creating a process-based VoC will assist in listening to the customers' evolving needs and acting accordingly to provide maximum satisfaction.
Read Also: Trends 2023: Top Customer Experience (CX) Trends You Don’t Want to Miss
Creating and Implementing VoC Strategies
The following principles guide businesses on how to create a voice of customer strategy.
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Customer-centricity prioritizes what the customers want. It also encompasses keeping the survey design intuitive and eliminating ambiguity from the questionnaire. Your VoC initiative must adapt to respondents’ requirements. For instance, offering flexibility in selecting survey duration and submitting descriptive responses is an excellent approach to embracing this requirement.
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Data quality management (DQM) eliminates redundant, duplicated, and factually incorrect records for acquired datasets. It helps prevent skewed insights from undermining customer analytics and VoC reports’ reliability.
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Business relevance and actionability restrict the data gathering and processing scope, aligning all computing and surveying tasks with the company’s mission statement. Consider the macroeconomic forces outside the leadership’s control that can result in price hikes. While such events increase negative customer feedback, brands cannot do much to avoid them from a financial performance perspective.
You want to examine each voice of the customer platform before selecting one to conduct the customer insights research following the above principles. After all, the chosen system will influence reporting practices, data quality, and employees’ ease of learning.
Finally, brands must monitor whether the VoC initiatives provide practical insights. If the surveys and customer analytics reports need revisions, consult experienced professionals and optimize them.
Conclusion
We have highlighted the most common mistakes companies make while drafting a voice of the customer framework and using a VoC platform. How many of them are you guilty of? A good VoC program requires immense commitment. So, it would help if you always kept an eye on pitfalls. Frequently audit your program to note if you need to re-align to the proper trajectory. A powerful VoC program is always a resource and time-consuming investment, but it would reap infinite returns.
You need to set it in such a way as to get the correct feedback essential to designing and delivering a solid customer experience.
Do you still need to figure out how to renew your VoC program? Let one of our team members help you. Get in touch with the iNava team.
Visit us at: iNava.io
About SG Analytics
SG Analytics, recognized by the Financial Times as one of APAC's fastest-growing firms, is a prominent insights and analytics company specializing in data-centric research and contextual analytics. Operating globally across the US, UK, Poland, Switzerland, and India, we expertly guide data from inception to transform it into invaluable insights using our knowledge-driven ecosystem, results-focused solutions, and advanced technology platform. Our distinguished clientele, including Fortune 500 giants, attests to our mastery of harnessing data with purpose, merging content and context to overcome business challenges. With our Brand Promise of "Life's Possible," we consistently deliver enduring value, ensuring the utmost client delight.
