What is Voice of the Customer?

How Do You Build a Voice of the Customer Program?

We recommend you follow the 5 stages below to ensure your VoC program delivers the insight you need to build strong customer experiences, create competitive advantage and generate ROI.

1. Define: Make sure your VoC program is aligned to your overall business issues, to create clear, phased objectives and success criteria and to map your customer journey and your key Moments of Truth
2. Design: Design your program to deliver both tactical and strategic benefits, mapped to your key business objectives. Select a robust, powerful and scalable program architecture which includes key components such as sampling, feedback channel requirements based on your customer journey map, survey design and reporting, and closed-loop alerting
3. Listen: Put in place multi-channel data collection to ensure your customers can provide feedback in the way that suits them, driving high response rates and greater insight. Select a secure and scalable platform to gather customer feedback, automate alerts and escalate issues that require attention
4. Analyze: Perform advanced analysis of the feedback, including structured and unstructured data, so you can improve business results and create a clear view of issues you need to address. Design tailored reporting to provide actionable insight at every level of the business, from customer service managers to the CEO
5. Act: With the actionable insight you collected, work quickly to resolve individual customer issues, through an automated closed-loop system. At a strategic level, identify the processes that cause repeated problems and take action to resolve them and improve the customer experience

Learn More 

How Does Voice of the Customer Help Your Business?

Voice of the Customer programs have a direct impact on your bottom line, through a number of ways:

Identify at-risk customers so you can:

• Prevent them churning
• Minimize negative word of mouth
• Decrease cost to serve

Amplify the voice of your loyal customers

• Encourage positive word of mouth
• Increase share of wallet
• Identify opportunities for references / positive reviews for marketing purposes

Ensure your products and services stay ahead of the curve

• Transform complaints you receive into sources of focused improvements
• Encourage your key customers to participate in co-creation opportunities
• Bring in the Voice of the Customer to fuel innovation throughout the organization

Learn More 

What Voices Are There Besides the Voice of the Customer?

Customers are, and should be, at the center of everything you do. But this doesn’t mean they’re the only source of valuable information. Confirmit’s customer engagement model, Confirmit Voices®, recommends you stay on top of all key sources of knowledge and feedback within your organization:

1. Voice of the Customer
2. Voice of the Employee
3. Voice of the Market
4. Voice of the Business

Learn More 

What Channel Should You Use to Collect the Voice of the Customer?

In order to collect the right feedback at the right time from your customers, you need to make sure you do so in the channel your customers want to engage in. This will not only boost response rates, but show your customers you care about their preferences too.

A combination of the main channels below is ideal (all integrated within one solution):

• Web
• Email
• Mobile (SMS, App)
• Telephone
• Social Media
• Paper (still… in some cases)

No channel is better than another – it’s all about selecting the right way to engage with your customers so that they want to share their feedback with you and know it will be actioned.

Learn More 

When to Collect the Voice of the Customer?

A good starting point to answering this question is a Customer Journey Map. This exercise enables organizations to identify key touchpoints in the customer journey where they need to gather and understand feedback in order to improve their internal process, and customer experience as a whole.

Throughout the buying cycle (before, during and after purchase), customers interact with different people at different times, so understanding their level of satisfaction in detail at various key interaction – or touchpoint - helps you understand what you should fix and what the impact of that action will mean for the customer and for your business.

In addition to understanding these touchpoints, analyzing the state of the overall relationship with your customers can also be immensely effective. This is usually done at precise intervals (e.g. 3 months after purchase or before renewal). What you’re looking for here is a continuous stream of feedback that will help you trend the health of your customer relationships over time, helping fuel every business decision you make.

Learn More