A Voice-of-Customer Program (or VoC program for short) is a way for organizations to capture, analyze, and implement customer feedback to better their products and services.
Customer feedback helps small, and large businesses understand their customers on a deeper level. With a VoC program, companies gather data that tells them about customer expectations, preferences, dislikes, and pain points. Additionally, by pooling a multitude of customers, organizations can see trends in responses that lead to company-wide changes. Data gives businesses the chance to realign with customers to boost their overall market share with better products or services.
The first step in any VoC program is to find the right voice-of-customer tools; these are the tools used to capture feedback. There are several ways businesses can capture customer feedback, with the most popular method being online surveys. When it comes to collecting quantitative data, surveys are unmatched in their effectiveness. No matter which feedback collection method a business uses, there are several impressive benefits to investing in a VoC program, which we’ll dive into below.
Boost Sales
With the right voice-of-customer tools, businesses can gather data and implement improvements quickly for a stellar customer experience. An improved customer experience means that customers are more likely to purchase from you, keep buying from you, and tell their friends/colleagues about you, which directly translates to sales. Many large corporations have built their entire brand around customer experience, like high-end retailer Nordstrom. Nordstrom has a loyal following primarily due to its focus on customer care.
Drive Down Costs
By focusing on customer satisfaction with the proper VoC tools, companies can decrease the cost to serve each customer. The information gathered through surveys, in-home-usage tests, or focus groups allows businesses to improve their products and services for increased customer retention and loyalty. It is much more cost-effective to retain customers than to go out and find new ones. In fact, it is anywhere from 5 – 25x more expensive to search for new customers versus holding onto the current ones.
Become A Customer-Centric Organization
Lastly, the feedback gathered with VoC tools can lead to cross-functional organizational change across the board. From changes to chatbots, customer service operators, packaging, marketing, and company culture itself, VoC programs can lead to powerful outcomes. When VoC is prioritized at the leadership level, every department from sales to product development becomes customer-centric. Though a customer-centric mindset doesn’t happen overnight and may take work for established companies, it is a necessary shift. Once the importance of feedback is understood, departments can begin taking charge of improvements to products or services.
Understanding the Customer Journey
Voice-of-Customer Programs are proven to help organizations boost sales, drive down costs, and become customer-centric, which is essential for any organization to maintain and grow their market share. With the right voice-of-customer tools, businesses can capture customer feedback seamlessly.
Systematically understanding the customer journey empowers brands to drive change within their organization to improve the customer experience, foster loyalty, and become a customer-centric organization.
If you’re interested in starting a VoC program for the purposes of customer journey mapping, be sure to check out the ebook, How to Bring Your Customer Journey to Life.
