Guide to Voice Of The Customer (VoC)

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“Voice of the Customer” (VoC) seems to be one of those terms that vendors and professionals in the field love to toss around – but what is it?

Our goal with this guide is to remove the hype surrounding Voice of the Customer. We aim to define the process, strategy, and concept clearly.

Once you understand the components of VoC, it becomes much less complicated. It is not as intimidating as many experts and vendors like to make it seem.

What Is “Voice Of The Customer”?

The best meaningful definition we have found for VoC is a system or process for collecting customer feedback. This feedback comes from multiple touchpoints. The goal is to put that feedback in the hands of decision-makers to drive continuous improvements to your product or service.

Ironically, most small businesses do this naturally. The business owner constantly listens to the customer and makes small improvements based on feedback over time.

However, once your organization reaches a certain size, customer feedback tends to become siloed. This separation makes it harder to make key decisions based on well-rounded customer feedback.

The solution for larger organizations is to develop a system for collecting, analyzing, and communicating customer-driven insights. This system should coordinate these insights to decision-makers throughout the organization.

This is a Voice of the Customer program – minus all those pesky details that make it work successfully.  So, let’s take a look at those!

What Are The Benefits Of Voice Of The Customer?

One of the most common questions that a pragmatic-minded implementer of VoC has is about the benefits of this type of process. They often wonder what specific advantages they can gain from implementing a Voice of the Customer initiative.

Voice of the Customer processes can be custom-built to support various business goals, depending on your organization’s strategy and needs.

Here are some of the advantages and goals you can use to align a VoC system:

1) Service Improvement: You can improve customer satisfaction by using real customer opinions. By listening to their feedback, you can enhance your services and refine your communication strategies to better align with their expectations.

2) Brand Management: Understanding how your customers perceive your brand is crucial. This insight allows you to address problems and brand awareness issues effectively. By doing so, you can increase revenue, gain market share, and foster greater customer loyalty.

 3) Product Development and Innovation: Actively listening to customer feedback allows you to tailor your products to better meet their needs. Pay attention to the actual language they use and their specific suggestions. This approach will help you create offerings that resonate with your target market. You can use customer feedback to understand new trends and develop innovative products.

 4) Marketing Efficiency: Customers insights from VoC can help you create content for your marketing programs that resonate with each buyer persona. Also, combined with #1, word-of-mouth marketing of your products will grow as satisfied customers will spread their good experience.

 5) Market Fit: Listening to customers will help you understand how effective your go-to-market strategies are. VoC will also provide you with deep insights into adopter-stage and the psychographics of your market.

Who Is A “Voice Of The Customer” Strategy For?

Voice of the Customer is mostly for mid-size to enterprise organizations that need the competitive advantage that customer insights provide.

Small Businesses Usually “Get It” Naturally

As we mentioned in the section above, small businesses, consultants and entrepreneurs naturally gather customer insights and feedback. They don’t need a system for it until key stakeholders become removed from regular customer interactions and feedback.

Large Businesses and Enterprise Business

As teams, departments, offices, and divisions form within an organization, natural silos of customer information and needs will also form. Typically, each team gathers the information necessary for its specific functions. However, they rarely share this data across the organization in a structured and continuous manner.

Large and enterprise organizations stand to gain the most from a well-constructed Voice of the Customer (VoC) process. However, they also face more obstacles when it comes to successfully implementing such a system. Please refer to the section titled “problems” below for more details.

Getting Ahead of the Curve: Medium Business

A wise organization should begin laying the foundation for a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program when it reaches 75 to 150 employees. At this stage, there will typically be several layers of management and a clear separation of duties. Establishing a VoC framework during this period can enhance customer feedback integration and decision-making processes.

Implementing a Voice of the Customer (VoC) process at this stage is ideal. Doing so can prevent the lack of continuous customer input and research from becoming an internal problem for the organization. It also helps avoid falling into a competitive disadvantage.

Venture Backed Startups

The last group that will find a Voice of the Customer system useful, oddly, are fast-growing venture backed startups and tech companies.

As an organization grows rapidly, the importance of building a Voice of the Customer (VoC) system into its strategy increases significantly. Some organizations may even double in size every few months. In such cases, implementing a VoC system becomes crucial to ensure that customer feedback is effectively integrated into the organization’s processes and decision-making.

Otherwise, the business risks loosing focus on providing customer-centric value and its likelihood of failure increases.

How To Design A Voice Of The Customer Strategy

If your organization is considering implementing a structured Voice of the Customer program, then this section will help you plan your approach.

We recommend the following steps and suggestions for any new VoC initiative.

1. Get Buy-In From Your CEO

For the initiative to be successful, leaders at the top of the organization must support it.

This is important for several reasons. Arguably the most important reason is to communicate the importance of the VoC program to the entire organization (and to customers). Enthusiasm from top executives in the organization will make the entire adoption process easier.

It also helps make sure the goal of the Voice of the Customer Program stays on track. Your CEO will want to make sure that you are building a VoC process that supports a key business goal.

Lastly, while an effective VoC program does not need to be expensive, it will require a budget and financing to implement. Getting executive buy-in early will help streamline this process.

2. Set Goals For Your VoC Program

Right from the beginning you should define your expectations, the benefits, and expected timeline.

Above this section of this guide we mentioned some key benefits of VoC. Our suggestion is to pick one or two to focus on at first, then rollout more over time.

Prioritizing integrations and determining which systems to link first becomes easier when you focus on a specific business objective.

Over time, you can enhance the program by adding new goals and objectives. This approach will help increase the return on your initial investment. Additionally, it allows you to do so without overloading your teams and leaders.

3. Audit Your Exiting Customer Feedback Sources

More than likely your organization has several adhoc voice of the customer programs already running. Marketing, support services, and product development teams have likely siloed these programs.

Do an audit of your organization and create a map of your existing customer insight and feedback collection systems. These will be the low hanging fruit to your Voice of the Customer rollout.

The largest hazard is collecting the data but ignoring any examination of innate bias that might exist in the information.

For example, your customer service team might collect feedback from unhappy customers, but ignore satisfied customer feedback. The sales team might have the opposite bias. Before you can integrate this information source with your overall project you’ll want to start collecting unbiased data.

Don’t forget unusual information sources in your organization! Here are some you might not expect:

 a) Product information requests

b) Feedback provided to your front desk or concierge

c) Employees receive verbal feedback (it just needs to be recorded!).

d) Webinar & event feedback

e) Feedback from your onsite training teams

f) External review sites

4. Identify Missing Points In Your Customer Experience

Once you have mapped out your existing customer data, compare it to your customers’ experiences. Consider all the touchpoints they have with your product, your team, and your organization. This analysis will help you identify gaps and areas for improvement.

Do you have any opportunity (and need) to collect additional customer feedback?

A good Voice of the Customer program should balance both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data includes surveys, support frequency, sentiment analysis, and analytics. In contrast, qualitative data encompasses focus groups, online community research, social media insights, and interviews. This combination provides a comprehensive understanding of customer feedback and experiences.

Ask yourself, does the data you already have represent a good balance of these types of data? Do you feel that the information you are collecting gives you well-rounded, timely customer insights and feedback?

More than likely you might have to implement a few additional channels of information gathering as part of your Voice of your customer project.

It might be regular surveys (We’d love that at Alchemer, lol) or setting up an online research community of customers. This last option worked well for Dominos several years ago.

5. Agree On Action Expectations For Your VoC Program

Agreeing on the types of actions and decisions your organization is willing to make based on Voice of the Customer insights is key.

If you can’t get key stakeholders like your executives and top management to agree to act on data from customer feedback then going any further is unnecessary.

Discuss and develop an understanding of what types of decisions functional managers can make off insight data and how they will do it before you start implementing.

If your organization has not defined good guidelines about their mission, core business, and competitive advantages then you might want to stop and do that first. It’s overwhelmingly likely that you’ll get some customer feedback suggesting your products and organization go in a different direction.

Your core mission and the vision set by your executives will guide your decision-making process. These elements will help you determine which feedback is actionable and relevant to your product plan. Conversely, you will also identify information that is interesting but not essential for your strategic goals. Don’t make the mistake of acting too early on feedback or trying to act on all feedback.

Build a holistic view from customer feedback and choose the innovations and insights that fit your organization’s vision.

6. Connect Your Voice of the Customer Data Sources

Once you have buy-in, a communication plan and strategy for the information you’ll collect it’ll be time to connect the pieces.

Often this is an IT project but overseen by the project leader for the VoC program. It’s important to break your project into phases and implement one step at a time.

One of the first decisions you’ll need to make is selecting a “Hub.” This Hub will serve as the central repository for the data you collect. It will also be responsible for presenting regular reports and insights throughout your organization.

These hubs are often advanced survey platforms like Alchemer. However, no survey platform will perfectly fit every VoC program. This includes enterprise feedback management platforms as well. Regardless of what their sales teams claim, each organization has unique needs that may not align with any single solution.

It’s important to look at your existing infrastructure and picking a vendor that has pre-integrations with your core products such as:

a) Your CRM: Salesforce.com, Zoho, SugarCRM?

b) Your Analytics Package: Google Analyics? Omniture?

c) Your Marketing Platform: Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot?

e) Your Service Platforms: Zendesk, Olark, SnapEngage

Many of the survey platforms now provide packages and services for Voice of the Customer projects. These include reporting, dashboards and workflow management for communications.

Pick a vendor that works well with your existing platforms, or has a killer API and developer platform, but also one that works with your budget.

A good choice will save you time and money – both important factors for the overall return on investment for your Voice of the Customer project!

Common Problems Rolling Out A VoC Program

Every great plan has problems when you start to implement it (or after implantation).  Here are some of the most common pitfalls that Voice of the Customer programs face:

 1) Bias In Customer Groups.

In the steps above we mention “customer journey maps” and “listening to customers”. Sometimes, businesses lack a clear definition of their customers or customer segmentation.

In some cases the customers you have now, may not be representative of the market you are just entering.

This can result in surveying the wrong group or an incomplete set of customers.

Our recommendation is to work with your marketing team, or a good consultant to help separate and identify your customer groups.

Correct identification will help you understand your data better and make better decisions!

2) Not Communicating (Or Defining) Goals.

“Voice of the Customer (VOC)” sounds professional and authoritative. However, avoid getting carried away. Don’t implement a process for acting on your customers’ voice without a solid plan.

The first hallmark of a good plan should be a goal and objective list.

Organizations that rush to implement a VoC program based on a vendor’s sales team wish and sweet talk are setting themselves up for failure. Such an approach often leads to a wasteful implementation. It may also result in an unsuccessful program overall.

3) Failure To Manage The VoC Project After Launch.

Like most worthwhile systems, a VoC program is going to require more than just the implementation team.

You need to manage and curate the project even after launch to address the realities of an ever-changing business and the information you are collecting.

Make sure your budget and timeline include post-launch management.

4) Too Much (And Often Contradictory) Information.

Finally, and most frustratingly, we can almost guarantee you are going to get contradictory information from customers and customer groups.

Poorly understood customer segments often get grouped together. If you notice patterns of feedback that contradict each other, this may indicate a customer subgroup or category that you have not previously identified.

Take the time to research it, if the customer group is valuable and fits with your product/market vision then adapt your tracking and reporting.

A Last Note: Be Patient & Stick To The Program

It will take time for you to implement your Voice of the Customer project and to create a culture that uses it as an integral part of decision making.

The best advice we can offer is: stick to it. Implement your program in phases and celebrate early successes. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate results in either the data or your organization’s adoption.

It takes a real champion to drive a successful Voice of the Customer program.

Good Luck!

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