Voice of the customer tools (VoC tools) are the means to accomplish a successful VoC strategy. Most often, companies implement a Voice of the Customer software offering a variety of these VoC tools. Learn which VoC tools will work best for your business to enhance the customer experience.
Reminder: What is a voice of the customer program?
Voice of the customer (VoC) is a major component of customer experience management.
How your customers experience your brand directly impacts their loyalty as 56% of consumers stick with brands that “get them” (1).
And what better way to know what their experience is like than by collecting their words and sentiments used when describing their interaction with your company?
A VoC program enables your company to capture and analyse customer feedback to learn what customers’ needs and expectations are. Then you can innovate to match and exceed them.
What are voice of the customer tools?
It’s important to remember that your business doesn’t need every tool ever created. But you do need to understand which ones will bring the best results for your company.
VoC tools can help you do one (or more!) of the following:
- Gather customer feedback
- Identify your specific customers
- Get customer insights
- Report on your customer experience initiatives
Here are the most common VoC tools:
NPS Surveys
A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric developed to assess the loyalty of a company’s customers by collecting feedback from customers on a scale from 0-10.
The most common question (and you’re likely familiar with this one):
“How likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or coworker?”
NPS is an easy voice of the customer tool that can help to decrease churn rate and help you scout out which customers would be happy to be your brand ambassadors. To learn more about NPS, check out Net Promoter Score—A Concept of Success.
Questionnaires
Many companies offer excellent voice of the customer software, which automate sending out questionnaires over regular intervals or for example, after every purchase or onsite shop visit.
Tailor a survey to fit your company. An ecommerce enterprise’s questionnaire should differ from that of a retail store’s.
Curious to know which questions you should be asking your customers? Check out our Voice of the Customer Guide.
When selecting a voice of the customer software, make sure they offer automated and customisable questionnaires so that you can build a survey that matches your brand needs and personality.
With the right VoC tool, you can easily customise questionnaires, automate when they get sent out, and analyse the feedback they collect.
This voice of the customer tool is often underestimated in terms of its functionality as there are multiple ways a company can use questionnaires. See 5 ways to use the new questionnaire that you haven’t thought of yet!
For example, take a look at this hotel utilising a questionnaire to get feedback before a guest leaves their room.
Interviews
While one of the more time-consuming VoC techniques, you can gather lots of customer insights by having a selective one-on-one conversation with a customer.
Conversion Rate Experts conducted interviews with Moz clients to optimise their homepage and the payoff? A 52% lift in sales!
You can conduct an interview over email, phone, or onsite.
Although the interview questions should be structured, the customer will find the freedom to express themselves in their own words about your products, service, or overall brand experience.
Focus Group
Another voice of the customer technique to consider is the focus group. Gather a small group of people, ideally 5-8 to discuss a specific product feature or topic.
Instead of an individual interview, the focus group provides a place for the interviewees to interact and affect each other’s opinions, which can provide a good look into the customers’ knowledge and perception of your company.
Focus groups will help you learn:
- Which features to focus on when developing your product
- Who should be your target customers
- How to position your company in the market
Online Reviews
Authentic online reviews are a rich source from which you can better shape your voice of the customer and do a better job for the review management.
As customers are free to write in their own words about their experience with your company, it’s truly an optimal way to see their actual customer experience and perception of your brand.
Beyond understanding your customers, online reviews are critical to your company’s online presence.
Depending on the need, companies will opt for voice of the customer softwares which:
- Help them generate more customer online reviews
- Manage efficiently many reviews across multiple websites
- Distribute reviews throughout trusted review platforms
- Display these reviews on the company website to build trust
Heatmaps & User Recording
Okay, okay. So while the information regarding where your customers click the most on your website isn’t technically their “voice” or words, it’s still pretty enlightening to their (albeit unspoken) needs, no?
Some feedback tools will allow you to experience your website the way your users do.
Companies such as Hotjar offers VoC tools like heatmaps, scroll maps, and session recordings to clue you into how intuitive your layout is, what’s the first thing most visitors click on the homepage, how far down the page do customers typically scroll, etc.
Being able to take in the customer’s actual experience of your website and innovating your website based on their behavior is directly linked to improving your brand’s customer experience.
Social Media
Social media shouldn’t be ignored with around 51% of the earth’s population using one or more platforms (2).
Note that often, customers will take to social media after they’ve felt ignored or not well-served by customer service.
The goal of voice of the customer solutions is to reach these customers before they feel the need to complain and leave your company a negative review on social media.
Yet social media is still a great way to be transparent as a brand and appropriately respond to both good and bad feedback.
Text analytics and semantics
Context is everything when it comes to knowing the voice of your customer! Understand how your customers feel about your products and services and why they feel that way.
Rather than categorising by keywords, text analytics software classifies by meaning (customer sentiment) and looks at patterns within the analytics to identify trends and customer behaviour.
Text analytics can take large volumes of unstructured customer feedback and produce common themes in a word cloud. Typically, red themes indicate negative comments, green are positive, and yellow are neutral.
Voice of the customer programs with text analytics such as Customer Alliance allow you to select which topics you’d like to analyse in your reviews.
Reporting
How can you share data collected with executives or other departments such as marketing, product, or sales?
Ensure you have a voice of the customer reporting system that not only allows you to monitor feedback, customer trends, compare your stats to those of your competitors, and track goals, but also provides you with intuitive charts and graphs for visualisation and alignment among teams and upper management.
Being united in your voice of the customer program is key to its success!
We recommend you select a dynamic 360 voice of the customer software like Customer Alliance that has flexible and intelligent voice of the customer tools which can be utilised by different departments as well as on the operational and management levels for a more comprehensive and effective VoC program.
Sources:
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- Fundera: “Keep Your Customers Coming Back: 13 Brand Loyalty Statistics You Need to Know”
- The Next Web: More than half of humanity now uses social media—here’s what that means
Related Content:
Hotel VoC: The key to guest satisfaction is voice of the customer
VoC Restaurant 101: Develop a Voice of the Customer Strategy
