As the way organizations do business continues to evolve, one thing will always remain critically important: the Voice of the Customer. This is the key factor to understanding what your customers need now and what they’ll need in the future. If the answers to these questions are keeping you up at night, it might be time to take a step back and reassess your Voice of Customer program.
Thankfully as the business landscape changes, so do the tools at your disposal, especially in the realm of AI text-based analytics. More on that later, but we’d be remiss to mention how tech advancements are currently fueling a new evolution of Voice of the Customer programs. These advancements enable brands to uncover new customer insights and transform those insights into business impact faster than ever.
But first, let’s take a few steps back. What is the Voice of the Customer, and why are VoC programs so important?
What is the Voice of the Customer?
To put it simply, the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is everything your customers think and feel about your customer experience and brand. It’s become a standard business term used to describe the process of collecting data about customer expectations, preferences, and dislikes. Once organizations collect VoC data, they gain valuable insights that can significantly impact various aspects of their business. You can use these insights to refine customer experience strategies, shape product development, and optimize business operations. Additionally, they inform marketing campaigns and guide the product roadmap, among other areas.
The Voice of the Customer includes answers to questions like:
- What do your customers like?
- What do your customers not like?
- What do your customers want?
- How do your customers feel about the customer experience?
- Why do unhappy customers feel the way they do?
- How do specific cohorts of customers feel in comparison to each other? (i.e. loyalty program members versus non-loyalty members)
- Why do certain customers churn?
Why is VoC so important?
A deep understanding of the Voice of the Customer helps companies increase revenue by preventing churn, driving increased loyalty, and creating better products and experiences.
Let’s dive into each of those:
Prevent Churn
When you start listening to VoC feedback, you can better identify at-risk customers before they churn. Keeping a pulse on the Voice of the Customer allows you to better predict behaviors before they happen, and therefore intervene before it’s too late.
With the right tools in place to track changes in sentiment, you can see which happy customers have suddenly become unhappy or why unhappy customers continue to feel that way. This allows you to then target at-risk customers and take the appropriate action to win them back before they’re gone forever.
Increase Customer Loyalty
We all know loyal customers are incredibly valuable. They can help with customer acquisition by sharing positive reviews and acting as brand advocates. But do you know why certain customers are more loyal than others? Do you know why some people join your loyalty program and some don’t? If you can answer these questions, that’s great – you have the data to inform CX, product, and marketing strategies. But if you can’t answer these questions, you need to start rethinking how and what VoC data you collect.
Create Better Products and Experiences
VoC feedback helps product and CX leaders understand what areas of the product or experience are broken or need work. When you collect this data in real-time, you’re able to catch friction or bugs before they become a larger problem. It also helps you understand what areas of your roadmap to prioritize and where to allocate resources.
When customers see that their feedback is not only heard but also acted upon promptly, it fosters a sense of trust and loyalty.
How to create a better VoC program
Many brands use traditional methods like NPS and CSAT to understand the Voice of the Customer. But the hard truth is that brands that cling to these traditional VoC initiatives without expanding have become stuck. And those who embrace and act on the change have pulled ahead—quickly widening the gap. When it comes to gauging customer attitude, NPS is fine. However, NPS isn’t always great at understanding actual customer behavior. These traditional scales only tell a small, one-dimensional part of the story.
One recent change in enterprise VoC feedback is the addition of “emotion data” to help brands go beyond traditional customer sentiment channels. These traditional metrics tell you the “what.” Emotion data tells you the “why.”
Creating a better VoC program all comes down to capturing emotion and analyzing sentiment. An effective VoC program allows you and your team to:
- Enrich behavioral churn prediction models with shifts in sentiment
- Prioritize and validate your product roadmaps and experiential investments
- Utilize emotion for customization and personalization
- Drive adoption and revenue growth from “repeat fans”
- Act on the specifics of when and why your customers are at risk
The Importance of AI Text Based Analytics on VoC Programs
As mentioned earlier, any blog post on Voice of the Customer feedback needs to mention how AI-driven feedback analysis has completely revolutionized the scalability, accuracy, speed, and impact of VoC programs.
Advancements in AI technology now allow customer-obsessed teams to analyze high volumes of VoC data faster and with a higher degree of accuracy. These new tools help brands identify patterns, extract key information such as sentiments or themes, and transform textual content into structured data that businesses can use to derive insights, make decisions, and improve processes.
No matter your department, if you are collecting VoC feedback, there is a use case for using AI tools to analyze the open text feedback gathered.
Collecting feedback is one thing, but using that feedback to better understand how your customers really feel and turning those sentiments into tangible actions is another. And at Alchemer, we argue there has never been a better time to get started.
If you are interested in learning more about incorporating AI-driven text analysis into your voice of the customer program, check out Alchemer Pulse! Alchemer Pulse is our AI solution for text analysis that is built for customer-obsessed teams that want to turn customer insight into business impact.
