The consumers voice can you hear it

CSMs get a clear definition of what success means to each customer and can strategize ways to help them achieve it. Customer Success is a company-wide initiative and VoC fits into the same narrative. It takes an entire company, from sales to marketing to product development, to give customers a satisfactory journey from start to finish.

Voice of customer programs can include a wide range of tasks, from collecting data, to extracting insights, to putting them to work in your customer lifecycles. Following this framework will give you the power to act quickly and drive significant impact from your VoC efforts.

Technological advances have drastically streamlined Voice of Customer processes. Software with VoC capabilities can automate many daunting tasks, such as reaching out to thousands of customers, addressing replies en masse, aggregating data, and much more. When used alongside Customer Success software, VoC data can be a powerful storyteller. It can help to identify trends, create individual customer health scores based on responses, and much more.

This concise approach to Voice of the Customer expands on the three core components to reactively close the loop, proactively improve consistency, and predictably deliver value. Gathering useful, actionable feedback depends on three things: asking the right person the right question at the right time.

Before you go sending out surveys left and right, VoC best practices suggest creating customer personas. Building standard personas help to easily define who is involved with your product and the level of their interaction. This will take the guesswork out of finding the right person to answer your questions. Direct feedback: Feedback received directly from clients, commonly through surveys.

Indirect feedback: Feedback generated by the ways clients are engaging with your product. For example, usage data, support data, and other behavioral metrics. They work together to fill in the blanks that would be left if you only relied on one type of feedback.

For example, someone could send indirect feedback in the form of a negative NPS score, but not give any other feedback explaining why they chose that answer. Taking a look at their indirect feedback, you notice that they have multiple support tickets that concern a particular aspect of your product. Finding the right time to ask.

When you reach out for feedback is just as important as who you reach out to. Your timing can directly affect the answers you receive.

Align your surveys with important milestones along the customer journey. Send out a survey within a few days of the end of their implementation to get their current sentiments about the process and how comfortable they are now that they are on their own.

Another common practice is following every support ticket with a one-question survey to close the loop. This can happen when you send too many surveys in succession or fail to set accurate expectations for the amount of time your survey will take. Fail to follow both of these best practices and your customers may ignore your surveys, leaving you with nothing to show for it. Step number two focuses on providing value for your customers.

When it comes to Voice of Customer, value happens immediately and at a grassroots level. It requires a quick response, strong tactics, and a shared company mindset to truly show customers that you are listening and adapting. An unanswered positive response is just as wasteful as its negative equivalent. In NPS terms , these Promoters are valuable advocates for your product.

The longer you wait to thank them and stoke the fire that is their advocacy, the greater chance they may slip into becoming Passives or worse, Detractors. This blog post by Lincoln Murphy does a great job of explaining the difference between high-touch and low-touch and the benefits of this bilateral approach. High-touch customers, important accounts that require a high level of communication, tend to receive one-on-one attention. Low-touch customers, smaller contracts that may not require as much attention, can be effectively reached through one-to-many 1:Many communications.

Reading about VoC is one thing, carrying it out is another. Motivating team members to do that all day can be equally grueling. This is a highly effective way of standardizing customer outreaches that can grow with your company.

Strengthen your playbooks and outreach strategies by providing team members with as many resources as possible. Customer relationship management CRM software is a valuable tool with myriad capabilities.

Instead of having to rely on their own instincts when mediating situations, pre-populated emails give team members confidence and save them time. Keeping support documents organized and easily accessible enables team members to quickly share them with customers in need.

In order for feedback to become reality, your entire company, from sales to services to product development, needs to view VoC as a priority. Encouragement from management is key for this mindset shift to happen. Departments need to realize the importance of feedback and feel the motivation to act on it.

Once this realization occurs, standards can be set and feedback can flow smoothly. Now that your feedback loop is closed, you should have a good bit of data to work with. Business analytics includes all the metrics you want to track and benchmark against.

Data in this bucket can include NPS trends and follow-up response time. For example, track your NPS score to see how it trends quarter over quarter. Outreach analytics reflect the performance of your customer outreach attempts. You can take these metrics and use them to optimize your outreaches against industry benchmarks.

Combine direct and indirect feedback to create a holistic health score across subjective and objective measures. This health score will give you a high-level view of customer health and enable you to easily identify at-risk customers. If you're not getting the results you're hoping for from your VoC techniques, then you may need to reassess the questions that you're asking your customers.

It removes your company from the conversation and directs the attention to the customer's interests. By asking this type of question first, you give the impression that your interests are more customer-driven. Pay attention to the vocabulary that your customers use when responding to this question.

Even if the responses are similar, the vocabulary that's used can indicate different characteristics of your customers. For example, if there are responses that use a lot of slang or shorthand, then you can deduce that this feedback is coming from a more casual audience. This will help your team when making big operational decisions like changing a product or restructuring your pricing. This question is an excellent way to find out what your customers care about the most.

Whereas the previous question asks about general characteristics, this question helps your team learn what influences the final purchasing decision. Is it quality? Sustainable production? Customer service? Free shipping? Or express shipping regardless of the price?

Even more importantly, it can help you deduce whether your current business practices are getting in the way of the customer experience. This question will get straight to the point and give you a clear, actionable directive. Multiple choice. Consider giving customers the ability to choose up to three answers preferably in order of preference.

This essentially acts like an approval rating that lets you know how customers feel about your business in the present moment. You can monitor responses to see how they change over time to determine whether or not your company is actually addressing the feedback. One area where this is exceptionally helpful is during crisis management. If you're not sure whether a crisis is resolved or not, you can use this survey question to get a general feel for how your business continuity plan is affecting your customers.

If you're still seeing negative comments toward your company, then you know that you need to continue working to resolve the crisis. Admittedly, this question probably won't yield many groundbreaking ideas. No matter how loyal your customers are, they might not understand how your business operates nor might they fathom how hard it is to implement even small changes to the customer experience.

Making changes takes time and costs money — two assets that most businesses will be hesitant to put at risk. So, why do we see this question included in nearly every survey we take? The answer is customer loyalty. Successful companies recognize that their most valuable customers spend nearly three times more than others. So, when they're sorting through responses to this question, they use their CRM to pinpoint feedback that's left by their most valuable customers.

This way companies can be sure these customers are being included in every business decision. This can help you get clear answers on what you should prioritize without having to sift through paragraphs of writing. This question gives you two pieces of information. First, it tells you who your direct competitors are, or at least who your customers believe your competitors are. This difference is important because your customers may be using a competitor that you're currently unaware of.

For example, customers may be supplementing your product or service by using a competitor who's in a completely different marketplace. The next piece of information that this question provides is why customers would switch to a competitor. It could be because of price, functionality, style, etc. Whatever the reason is, knowing why customers may prefer a competitor can help you address any weaknesses that exist in your products or services.

One way to determine customer satisfaction is to see if customers would recommend your company to others. Customers trust other customers and won't advocate for your product or service if they don't like it. That's because if they recommend a bad product or company, they risk ruining a personal or professional relationship in their own lives.

If customers are hesitant to recommend your company, you may need to assess how your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts are affecting the customer's experience. A good addition to add to this question is to ask to whom they would recommend your product or service.

This not only gives you an idea for potential lead opportunities but also helps you gauge how invested customers are in your company. For example, if a customer said they would recommend a product to their boss or potential lead of their own, you know that your product is significantly meaningful to that customer. If they would only recommend it to a peer or acquaintance, then there may be an opportunity to enhance the customer experience for these users.

Both are important pieces of data but offer slightly different insights. This makes it easy for customers to choose from your competitors. Last, include a write-in option. These questions will help you gauge how customers feel about your brand, product, or service, and tell you in what instances they would do business with your competitors. A Voice of the Customer analytics program is the systematic method by which companies examine the data from VoC surveys.

The purpose of a VoC analytics program is to identify and track trends in customer sentiment, resulting in an action plan to improve the customer experience.

Measure the success of your program on the number or percentage of responses. If you sent out surveys and only received 30 responses, it would be worth taking a second look at the methodology that you used. If you target a young audience, for example, they might prefer social media outreach instead of surveys. Identify trends and common themes. Do most of your customers wish you offered a chat service?

Are most customers happy with the responsiveness of your service team? Consider adding your findings into a simple reference document such as a Google Doc. After analyzing the feedback for trends in consumer behavior and preferences, add these new insights into your buyer personas. This helps you gather a more complete picture of your target audience. Visualize these trends and compile them into reports. You can visualize trends using simple tools such as Google Sheets or a more dedicated reporting software such as Lexalytics.

Create an action plan. Depending on the themes and trends you found, your action plan will look different. Extending on the chat example, your next step might be to look into investing in live chat software. Present your report and action plan to your team. By pairing these results with an action plan, you can ensure your team will understand the actions they can take to improve right now.

Still not sure what this can look like for your company? Creating and implementing VOC strategies can be both time- and resource-intensive. Thankfully, there are tools available to help streamline this process. Clarabridge is all about conversational analytics that leverage artificial intelligence AI algorithms to capture multi-touchpoint consumer data, in turn providing both depth and nuance to customer sentiment and experience analysis. VOC from Verint focuses on going beyond surveys to collect unstructured data across all customer touchpoints.

Sentisum looks to minimize consumer friction across channels by providing categorization and analysis for customer support conversations.

Equipped with accurate, granular, and real-time data, companies are better positioned to identify and resolve key customer concerns. Get a Demo. To make the most of VOC efforts, you need a reliable template that generates predictable results. Make your questions clear and get to them ASAP. Depending on the venue, online customer reviews can include everything from a basic 5-star rating to ratings breakouts for individual aspects of your product and company to lengthy open-ended reviews.

These are a rich vein of customer feedback. Reviews are one of the most effective ways to tap into both positive and negative feedback. Plus, reviews on third-party websites are the most direct way to find unsolicited customer opinions — meaning you can find out how customers really talk about your brand out in the wild.

Third-party review sites vary from industry to industry, but here are a few options to get you started:. Net Promoter Score is a common metric for gauging customer loyalty that simply consists of asking customers how likely they are to recommend your business or product to someone.

It looks something like this:. Focus groups, similar to customer interviews, are often done in person. The primary difference is that focus groups involve a small group of customers, instead of being conducted one-on-one. The group of customers is gathered together along with a moderator. From there, the moderator presides over a often free-flowing discussion about the brand, product, or industry. As a source of Voice of the Customer data, focus groups are one of the best ways to conduct more exploratory research — in their discussions, groups may often touch on things your company may never have thought to ask about.

Plus, the back and forth between customers can help to draw out consensus and deeper details that other research techniques may gloss over. Focus groups can also be useful when the feedback required is more specific: seeing how customers perceive a particular new product, for example, or gauging their reactions to a rebrand or advertisement.

This is separate from your Customer Support operation, and it can be an invaluable way to keep a pulse on how customers feel about your brand and product. Often hosted right on your website, a feedback form allows customers to share their thoughts whenever they arise.

Team members who talk with customers regularly are often your best window into the customer mind. That includes, most notably, your Support team, who spend the majority of their time with customers. When problems arise like a software glitch or a product deficiency , your Support team will often be the first to know and the first to identify widespread problems from isolated issues.

They can offer invaluable details on customer pain points, objections, and why deals may be lost to competitors. Start in minutes with a free trial. Here, you want to understand how customers behave versus what they say or perceive. By using tools designed for website analytics e. You can also measure how changes to your website or product affect customer behavior. For example, if you see that customers fall out of the ideal customer journey at the same touchpoint, you can identify points of friction and test to find the best solution.

Business leaders focus on creating products that solve customer problems, streamlining the customer journey, and improving the overall customer experience.