How Voice of the Customer Tools Can Help Your Business

Type: Blog
Topic: Customer Insights

As a business owner, your most important responsibility is to provide a product or service that customers need, like, and want. If you are not living up to your customer’s expectations, they won’t return to spend money with your business. To survive, you need customers who are thrilled with what you offer and are excited to both return and share their experience with your company with their friends and family.

As important as it is, customer satisfaction can be hard for business owners to measure. Then, even if you find ways to collect customer feedback, you need the ability to use the information to inform your future products and services. Collecting, analyzing, and using this customer data takes time and resources most business owners do not have available.

Your business can’t thrive without understanding how your customers define their expectations for trust, value, digital, and virtual engagement, and the detailed actions needed to improve their customer experience.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a marketing term that encompasses all of the client’s feelings, satisfaction, purchase habits and behaviors, and needs. VoC tools collect the information from your clients, sort it into useful data, and then provide you with helpful insights into your business’s best future direction and strategies.

Not all Voice of the Customer companies provide equal services. You must choose an experienced service provider that genuinely cares about your company and understands your unique goals. PossibleNOW is a leader in understanding your buyer’s emotions, needs, and habits. We employ a blend of innovative technology, strategies, and best practices to understand your consumers and boost your business to the next level.

In this article, we will take a deep dive into what we mean when we talk about the Voice of the Customer, the data we collect, and how we use it. Through it all, you will better understand how VoC data will benefit your company and why PossibleNOW is the best choice to help you begin using these tools.

What does Voice of the Customer mean?

The hardest part of understanding your client’s needs is the fact that they do not often speak to you in a manner that offers an opportunity for dialogue. They may leave reviews when they are either thrilled or angry, but you rarely have the chance to follow up with them and learn more about their opinions. Those reviews are one of the only times you hear directly from the customer’s mouth.

Often, customers communicate with businesses non-verbally, through their actions, spending habits, and social media interactions. Referrals and return visits say more than five stars on a website.

Giving the customer an opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions makes them feel heard and listened to. This helps build trust in your company, which is the foundation of good customer relationships. Gathering these customer insights through VoC research positions you and your company to better understand the human needs, expectations, emotions, and specific actions necessary to transform the value your company can provide your customers.

Voice of the Customer describes the process of analyzing their needs, wants, and feelings using all of the ways they communicate with your company, both verbally and non-verbally.

VoC marketing uses all the information gathered from the clients through their habits, reactions, and surveys to direct the future of your business. Instead of crossing your fingers and hoping that your customers will like your new service or product, you will confidently choose a direction that your market loves.

There is more to successfully using these tools than purchasing a Voice of Customer program. If you do not understand the data you collect and fail to use it to inform your business decisions, the expensive software or platform will be a waste of money. A professional services team specializing in Voice of Customer analytics and business techniques is essential for the highest success levels.

When you work with an experienced team, you will develop a comprehensive VoC process. This plan allows you to truly hear your customers and shift your business accordingly. VoC tools will enable you to listen to consumer needs and desires. With that information, you can appropriately design your future offerings to tailor to what your customer base truly wants and create a better customer experience. Your clients will be happier, and your business will thrive.

What are some Voice of the Customer (VoC) examples?

Even with a general idea of what Voice of the Customer is, it can still be hard to picture how you use it in the real world. After all, communication encompasses a vast variety of concepts. We’ve taken the guesswork and questions out of understanding Voice of the Customer through examples.

Consumer actions are the easiest ways to understand customer feedback. Happy clients will return to your business and buy more products or services. Unsatisfied clients will leave items in their cart, not open your emails, or won’t come back to your brick and mortar facility. Effective VoC tools will help your business identify essential feedback information.

At an individual level, customer actions do not provide much valuable data. However, they become powerful when we combine them to identify trends. If every customer who received a service from the same employee or purchased the same product immediately stopped interacting with your business on social media and didn’t make another purchase, that tells you something helpful. As a business owner, you know a change needs to happen.

It is essential to consider the voice of the customers at different points across their buyer’s journey. Maybe a particular email triggered an influx of sales. Perhaps a specific advertisement offended a large group of potential customers. Voice of the Customer analysis provides these insights.

How do you collect “voices” from customers?

As you might expect with a process that covers so much information, there are thousands of Voice of the Customer tools available to you as a business owner. Each customer VoC program uses different information to understand your buyers. As we describe the diverse Voice of Customer tool options, remember that the best VoC process is the one that creates and compiles data and information you can use.

The first important step in tracking the VoC is creating a customer profile. In an ideal situation, the buyer’s first name, last name, email address, social media information, and phone number would be apparent. This way, you can most clearly connect the customer feedback and customer satisfaction to a complete client profile.

Consider the following situation: A customer purchases your new product from your storefront and then leaves a two-star review. If this person is a brand new buyer, that might mean your items aren’t the best fit for them. However, if that review comes from a loyal fan who opens every email you send and returns to your store often, then you might need to redesign that offering.

Once you have the customer’s data profile, you can track their feedback, customer experiences, and customer journey. A high-quality VoC process uses a variety of methods to understand the perspective and voice of the consumer. Remember, the complete picture of a person’s relationship with your company provides the most valuable information.

Conducting surveys is a very popular method employed by many companies because these forms make it easy to gather feedback. However, social media interactions, email open rates, and website visits also provide valuable data in the digital world. In a physical location, VoC tools allow you to track when someone visits your store or how much they spend.

What is a Voice of the Customer Survey?

Customer satisfaction surveys are excellent voice tools to gather direct feedback from your buyers. These VoC tools are arguably the most straightforward solutions a company uses. However, keep in mind that a survey voice tool is only as good as the questions it asks.

The most important survey question you can ask is, “Would you recommend this business or product to someone else?” The answers will tell you if most of your clients are raving fans, people using you because you are the most convenient option, or if buyers are dissatisfied.

The response to this crucial question creates your net promoter score. A net promoter score is considered an essential metric of customer loyalty and satisfaction.

The rest of your other survey questions should help to clarify the customer experience and understand how they view a specific product or service. Quality Voice of Customer strategy will help you design feedback questions.

How does PossibleNOW use Voice of the Customer analytics?

The mission of PossibleNOW is to help brands grow by using technology and services to understand their customers’ needs. We take our years of experience in the field and combine it with top of the line data collection methods to ensure success.

By combining the best VoC business tools available with our advanced analytics, we clarify the right process changes for your business success. Customer VoC insights are only one of the tools we use to advise your company, but this field is one of the most critical pieces of our toolkit.

Without a robust customer VoC system in place, many companies find themselves working hard to avoid angry or negative voices of customers who are unhappy with a product, service, or experience. By focusing so much attention there, they miss out on crucial data from their happy buyers. It is essential to hear what all of the buyers think, not only the loudest or angriest.

That is why Voice of Customer information is key to understanding where your business stands and how it can improve. Using VoC tools, you will not waste resources shifting directions for one-time customers who don’t fit your target demographic.

At PossibleNOW, we handle the Voice of the Customer process for you. With our help, you have all the information necessary to do what you do best. We will use all the VoC tool options in our kit so that you can plan for the future with confidence.

With PossibleNOW, you will find yourself more empowered to design, plan, and implement new product and service offerings alongside a better customer experience. Growing a business becomes a more natural process.

Contact us to begin using Voice of Customer analysis to improve your business today.

We understand that implementing a voice of the customer program can seem overwhelming. This is a multi-layered marketing and management strategy full of complex information and processes. You need an expert on your side.

PossibleNOW understands all the VoC tools and strategies available, and our team knows how to use them. Our years of experience guarantee you will have the right programs, information, and support to improve your business. You will see noticeable growth as you develop a more targeted customer experience.

Let PossibleNOW help you gather and use VoC analytics to your benefit. Now, more than ever before, the loyalty of customers and staff can make or break the future of your organization. Call us today to investigate how to leverage VoC insights to better your business.