Voice of the Customer (VoC) may be a term used by businesses and contact centers, but it’s also a straightforward technique: collecting customer feedback – their “voice” – to figure out what their expectations are and whether or not you’re giving them the experience they want.
A VoC program has four parts to it:
- Listening by collecting data
- Understanding and gleaning insight from the data you’ve collected
- Distributing those insights to your team
- Taking action
Here are four ways to knock your VoC program out of the park.
- Create the plan backwards.
It’s difficult to create an effective VoC program if you don’t know the end goal. Figure that out first, taking into account your customer personas, and then start creating the roadmap that will get you there. From there, add the metrics you’ll need to collect and strategies for collecting them.
- Ask new questions.
If you’re going to use surveys as part of your VoC strategy, limit the number of questions you ask the customer. To do this, remove any questions you already know the answer to. The idea here is to uncover the most valuable information, which is the info you don’t yet have – this isn’t the place to get confirmation on the answers you already know.
- Think outside-the-box when listening.
In the past, rankings, scores and structured surveys were the main ways of collecting VoC data. Those techniques alone don’t work anymore, though, especially with so much unstructured data out there. Today’s data needs to include things like chat logs, social comments, social reviews and voice recordings.
- Just get started.
Start collecting data ASAP while you work on the rest of your VoC program. It’s easy to fall into the trap of waiting for everything to be perfect before you start gathering VoC information, but the truth is that your VoC program is going to continually evolve and change, and you’re going to be refining your strategy for as long as you have customers.
Don’t be afraid to jump in by choosing one touchpoint and one metric and just starting – refer to your customer journey map to choose an important one. To measure, isolate the treatment group so you can split-test your strategy.
By tuning into the voices of your customers, you have a better chance of improving customer engagement and the customer experience as a whole.
CRMxchange 