The Power of Voice of the Customer (VoC) in Transforming CX

Who knows your business better than you do? Your staff, for one. And even though no single individual is likely to have a complete view of the whole, if you take feedback from them all, you can build a good picture.

The other group of people who know precisely how your organisation works are your customers, who deal with it every day.

This is why most companies that focus on Customer Experience (CX) have been using Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes for several years now.

The idea is to uncover what customers feel and experience when they interact with your business, then transform that data into actionable insights that you can use to understand more clearly how your business operates, what it’s like to do business with you, and where you can improve.

According to Forrester, 70% of CX leaders believe their VoC programme is critical to their CX’s success. Conversely, only 47% of the same leaders believe they have a fully mature VoC programme, which means most companies still have some way to go.

So, how does it work?

Collecting VoC Data

Before uncovering actionable insights, you first need to collect customer feedback. In some cases, it might be more accurate to say uncover it, as you already have the data—in recordings and transcripts of your customer interactions—you just need to unlock it. Here are some of the main VoC collection techniques.

Surveys

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys have been a mainstay of Customer Experience (CX) programmes for many years. These range from asking customers to rank an interaction from 1 to 5 as soon as it’s finished to online surveys that ask deeper questions.

Online surveys are a straightforward and efficient way to collect anecdotal and qualitative customer feedback. With the right incentives, response rates can be pretty impressive. You can ask customers specific questions about their experiences, preferences, and satisfaction levels. This data can then be analysed to identify trends and pinpoint areas that require improvement.

Interviews and Focus Groups

If you want to dig deeper, you can use interviews and focus groups. Whether you do this face-to-face in the real world, over the phone, or online these really allow you to dig deep and ask quite specific questions. A skilled interview can often uncover the nuances of customer experiences and sentiments that straightforward surveys might miss. These methods can help you understand the ‘why’ behind customer opinions and behaviours.

Social Media Monitoring

Customers today are not exactly reticent about coming forward to share their experiences with brands online. Social media monitoring allows you to discover and listen to these unstructured conversations on platforms like X, Facebook, and Instagram. By analysing these interactions you can gauge customer sentiment, identify emerging trends, and spot potential issues before they escalate. Social media monitoring tools generally let you track mentions, hashtags, and keywords related to your brand, so you can build a real-time picture of customer opinions.

Reviews

While social media mentions are spontaneous and candid, reviews are a more formal way for customers to share feedback about their experience with your brand. Not only are reviews on sites such as Trustpilot, Amazon, and Google highly influential in persuading new customers whether to do business with you or not, they can be a great source of insight into what you’re doing right or wrong. Of course, if your brand is quite popular you might have tens of thousands of reviews to trawl through, so you will probably want to deploy some sort of monitoring tool to find and summarise your online reviews.

Conversational Analytics

So far, we have looked at data collection methods that focus on what customers tell you, and others after they have had an interaction with your brand. There is, however, a much more immediate method of understanding your customers, and that is by listening to the call recordings or reading the transcripts of the interactions they have with your brand.

Conversational Analytics allows you to unlock the rich insights into your customers that can be found in the mountains of unstructured data you already hold in your phone call recordings, live chat logs, and emails. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, Conversational Analytics can detect emotions, identify customer intents, and extract valuable insights from these interactions. Sentiment Analysis is another tool used to analyse large amounts of audio or text and categorise customers’ feelings in each interaction as positive, negative, or neutral.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of organisations with VoC programmes will enhance traditional customer surveys by analysing voice and text interactions to better understand customer context, emotion, and experiences through natural language processing.

Customer Feedback Platform (CFM)

Collecting customer feedback is only the first step. It then has to be analysed so you can understand what customers are trying to tell you, turned into actionable insights, and then communicated to the appropriate business units.

This is where a Customer Feedback Platform (CFM) comes into play. These are designed to collect, analyse, and manage customer feedback across multiple channels. They have a crucial role to play at all stages of the VoC process:

1. Feedback Collection:

• Multi-channel Integration: CFM platforms gather feedback from various channels, including surveys, social media, emails, live chat, phone calls, and in-app feedback.
• Survey Distribution: Tools to design, distribute, and manage surveys that can be sent via email, SMS, or embedded in websites and apps.

2. Data Analysis:

• Sentiment Analysis: Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning analyse recordings and transcripts to determine the sentiment behind customer comments, identifying whether they are positive, negative, or neutral.
• Text Analytics: Analyses unstructured data from customer feedback to extract meaningful insights, identify trends, and highlight common themes.
• Real-Time Reporting: Provides dashboards and reports that display real-time feedback, allowing you to monitor and respond to issues promptly.

3. Actionable Insights:

• Predictive Analytics: Forecasts future trends and customer behaviours based on historical data, helping businesses to be proactive in their CX strategies.
• Customisable Alerts: Sets up alerts for specific feedback that requires immediate attention, ensuring critical issues are addressed quickly.
• Feedback Loop Closure: Facilitates responding to customer feedback, ensuring that customers feel heard and valued.

4. Integration with Other Systems:

• CRM Integration: Connects with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to enrich customer profiles with feedback data.
• Workflow Automation: Automates workflows based on feedback, such as triggering follow-up actions or routing issues to the appropriate departments.

Once you have data that you have turned into actionable insights, the real key is to communicate those to the wider business and ensure they are acted upon. Metrigy found that only 61.5% of companies act based on the customer feedback they have gathered. Those that do saw remarkable benefits, including 18% higher revenues, 7% lower operational costs, a 17% boost to customer satisfaction, and an increase of 24% in agent productivity.

Benefits of Implementing VoC Programmes

VoC is crucial for several reasons:

1. It enables you to develop customer-centric strategies by incorporating customer feedback into your decision-making processes, with an eye on enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
2. Understanding customer needs and pain points allows you to refine your products and services, ensuring they meet or exceed customer expectations.
3. VoC programmes provide insights that help you create more personalised and engaging customer experiences as well as fix issues with existing customer journeys and internal processes.

Specifically, understanding what your customers really think of your business and their interactions with you can help you improve in any number of areas.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

By addressing customer concerns and preferences proactively, you can boost customer satisfaction and loyalty. As we have seen, those companies that act on customer feedback boost satisfaction by 17% according to Metrigy. When customers feel heard and valued, their overall perception of your company and bran improves, leading to stronger relationships and increased brand advocacy.

Operational Efficiency

VoC insights can identify inefficiencies in customer interactions, enabling you to streamline processes and reduce costs. For instance, if feedback indicates that customers frequently encounter issues with a particular service touchpoint, you can address this problem, resulting in smoother operations and better resource allocation.

Revenue Growth

Metrigy says that companies which act on VoC insights have 18% higher revenues through improved customer retention and higher sales from better-targeted marketing efforts. When you understand what it is that your customers truly want, you can tailor your offerings and communications to match those desires, leading to higher conversion rates and increased customer lifetime value.

Metrics Improved Through VoC

VoC insights can also be leveraged to improve several key CX metrics, including:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend the company. You can use VoC to find out what would lead customers to have a stronger, more positive relationship with your brand.

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): A high CSAT is a reflection of a positive experience which met the customer’s needs or desires. VoC can help you understand exactly what each customer expects from you when they interact with your brand or use your products.

• Customer Effort Score (CES): Lower effort scores indicate customers find it easy to engage with your business and achieve the outcome they want. Use insights from customer feedback to find and eliminate customer service roadblocks.

• First Contact Resolution (FCR): A higher FCR suggests that customer issues are handled effectively and efficiently, reducing the need for repeat interactions. Improve FCR by analysing interactions to find out how to make your processes more efficient.

• Churn Rate: A lower churn rate indicates higher customer retention and loyalty. VoC insights can tell you what makes customers keep coming back to you, so ensure you give them more of those things.

• Average Handling Time (AHT): Reducing AHT without compromising service quality can improve customer satisfaction. This can be done by making your processes more efficient and also by leveraging VoC data to give advisors greater insights into how best to solve different customer issues.

Implementing a VoC programme that delivers results requires commitment, the right tools, and a strategic approach. In the end, it’s all about listening to your customers. They have a lot to say, and if you’re willing to listen, the insights you gain can be transformative. So, start capturing that valuable feedback, analyse it thoroughly, and act on it decisively. Your customers – and your bottom line – will thank you.

Find our more about what Ventrica do for our customers using our Customised CSAT and Customer Listening Tools.