What's Voice of Customer?

Capturing the voice of the customer is a very important part of improving the customer experience. Your customer success team’s very first step to creating better experiences for customers should almost always be to listen to the customer’s voice. Voice of customer (VoC) is a fairly easy term to understand. As you can probably guess, the voice of the customer is the feedback your business receives directly from customers. 

Listening to customer feedback has always been an important part of ensuring customer success. The voice of customers is one of the most powerful tools a business has for creating better customer experiences. Just because a business listens to customer feedback doesn’t necessarily mean it has adopted a true voice of the customer methodology. Gathering aggregate feedback from customers and incorporating that data into your customer success initiatives is simply good practice for customer success teams — it would be very difficult to make improvements to the customer experience with no data at all on the current customer experience.

While the vast majority of customer success initiatives utilize feedback from customers, a strategy based on the voice of the customer takes feedback a step further. The difference between collecting customer feedback in the traditional way and prioritizing the voice of the customer is that traditional feedback takes a broader view of customers’ opinions and sentiment, whereas listening to voice of customer trends toward narrowing in on specific insights about individual customers.

One of the key elements of a voice of the customer strategy is digging deeper into customer feedback to understand it better. The deeper analysis that goes into the process is one of the factors that separate a voice of the customer approach from a standard customer feedback process. When businesses analyze customer feedback on an individual level, they can draw valuable insights from it that can be used to make specific, meaningful changes to the customer experience.

Voice Of The Customer Questions

Successful voice of customer survey examples are all about asking customers the right questions. The best questions to ask depend on a variety of elements like the industry your company is in and your goals for your voice of the customer survey. The answers customers provide are your customer service team’s best indication of where to focus efforts to improve customer experience.

There are two main types of customer feedback: direct feedback and indirect feedback. It’s important to collect both kinds of feedback from your customers in order to develop a holistic view of your customers’ opinions about your brand and products. Direct feedback is the type of feedback you receive straight from customers via channels like surveys, social media, or community message boards. In contrast, indirect feedback comprises the insights you infer from customer actions such as product usage or feature adoption.

One of the most basic examples of voice of customer interview questions is simple net promoter score questions. These types of questions ask customers to rate how likely they are to recommend your business on a scale of 1 to 10. Another example of the kinds of voice of the customer questions many customer success teams use is a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score survey.

Voice Of Customer Program

Building an effective voice of the customer program requires a strategic approach. The best voice of customer program examples prioritize a few key elements:

Objectives

One of the very first steps should be to define clear goals. These goals should form a vision for your voice of the customer program that all your efforts can center around. Everyone on every team that’s involved with the voice of the customer program should clearly understand these objectives.

Leadership

In order for your voice of the customer program to get off the ground, you’ll need to get some buy-in from company leadership. It’s essential to get all the key players at your organization on board with your program.

Listening

Of course, one of the most essential aspects of your voice of the customer program should be how you listen to customers. The channels you use to gather feedback make a significant difference. It’s usually best to collect feedback using the channels that are most convenient for your target demographic.

Alignment

Your customer success teams’ actions should always be contributing toward your overall objective for your voice of the customer program. It’s important to keep everyone working together toward a shared vision.

Follow-through

A voice of the customer program does not produce immediate results. Don’t be discouraged if you notice little impact in the short term. It’s essential to continue following through with your program until you’ve had enough time to reap the rewards. A successful voice of the customer program leads to gradual change in customer culture and improvement to customer experience. 

Voice Of Customer Analysis

Once you’ve collected feedback from your customers, you’re only halfway to compiling a finished voice of customer report example. Next, you need to analyze the data you’ve collected and use the insights you uncover to drive action. Here are a few tips for effectively analyzing your program’s voice of the customer data:

Don’t lose sight of the question

Your efforts should ultimately revolve around revealing customers’ answers to your questions. You’re likely asking customers questions about which aspects of your product or service they like, which aspects they don’t like, and why. Now it’s time to dig deeper into the connections between their answers and your business’s customer experience.

Perform sentiment analysis

You can use sentiment analysis to determine whether feedback is positive, negative or neutral. Of course, this is easy to do when you’re reading customer comments yourself, but for many large businesses, it’s impossible for customer success teams to personally read every bit of feedback. Sentiment analysis AI can help by analyzing customer feedback and detecting its meaning automatically.

Find correlations in the data

In order to act effectively on the data you gather with your voice of the customer program, you need to find correlations that tell you what kinds of changes will impact customer satisfaction. Then you can turn your feedback into action.

Voice Of Customer Examples

Voice of customer examples encompass many different kinds of customer feedback. Here are a few of the various ways you can capture the voice of the customer:

Surveys

Giving customers a survey is one of the most straightforward ways to collect their feedback. Simple surveys like customer satisfaction score surveys or net promoter score surveys can be great methods of measuring factors like customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Focus groups

Focus groups are another example of a channel through which you can listen to customers’ voices. You can use focus groups to collect more in-depth feedback from customers. Surveys are usually more effective when you keep them brief, but in a focus group, you can ask customers multiple questions and encourage them to elaborate on their answers.

Engagement

You can also analyze customer behavior as a form of indirect feedback. Tracking your customers’ behavior on your website can help you untangle insights about their usage patterns — which your customer service team can use to improve their experiences.

These are just a few methods of capturing the voice of the customer. There are other voice of the customer examples that can work just as effectively.

Voice Of Customer Tools

Creating an effective voice of the customer program is easier with the right tools. There are many kinds of software you can use as voice of customer tools. For example, any kind of software you use to collect customer feedback more efficiently could be considered a voice of the customer tool.

Northpass is a learning management system that enables you to seamlessly deliver customer education opportunities to your customers. Northpass combines this capability with analytics tools that make it easy to track customer success throughout the education journey. You can use Northpass to analyze the data you track and connect it to customer success team objectives. A learning management system like Northpass that includes analytics features can be used in this capacity like a voice of the customer analysis tool.

Voice Of The Customer Best Practices

Here are a few additional voice of the customer best practices to help you build an effective strategy:

Combine feedback from different channels

It’s usually best to source feedback from multiple channels. However, you can’t analyze the data in isolation. Combining insights from across all your different modes of feedback can help you paint a complete picture of customer behavior.

Listen to employees too

While your customers’ feedback can help you understand what you need to change about the customer experience, your employees may be the ones who are able to tell you how to actually accomplish those changes. Collecting feedback from employees as well as customers can help you understand what internal actions need to be taken to improve customer experience. For example, a customer success team member might be able to alert you to an inefficiency in the customer support ticket process that is reducing the quality of the customer service experience. 

Tie everything back to business outcomes

Once again, all your voice of the customer initiatives should be aligned toward business objectives like increasing product adoption or lowering customer churn. Focusing on the right questions can help you collect feedback that will show you how to impact the metrics that matter most to your business.

Following voice of customer best practices like these can help your customer success team maintain a more effective voice of the customer program.