Voice of Customer Best Practices and Tools

Voice of the Customer (VoC): Definition​​

Voice of the customer (VoC) is a term used in business and marketing that refers to the collective feedback and opinions of your customers.

It also refers to a research method for collecting customer feedback and analyzing positive and negative feedback.

VoC data includes e.g. customer feedback, customer satisfaction levels, reviews, testimonials, customer sentiment, customer expectations, and virtually any data that offers insight about what your customers think.

It can also mean relevant insights about customer behaviors, such as clicks on your website.

Voice of the customer is often managed with different voice of customer programs and collected with various tools.

Importance of VoC

What does all this mean for your business?

Well, it means a great deal. Whether you listen to your customers or not can make or break your whole business.

When used effectively, VoC data can help you improve your product or service, better understand your customers’ needs and wants, and make more informed marketing and business decisions. 

This in turn helps you to:

• increase customer loyalty 
• Increase customer satisfaction
• improve customer experience
• better the customer journey
• generate higher customer lifetime value
• aid customer retention
• improve customer engagement.

Simply put: your customers are happier and stay with you longer, and you get more sales.

Build a Voice of Customer Program

Let’s look at some of the VoC best practices for planning a VoC program.

Easiest first step is to create a voice of customer survey.

1. Define your goals and objectives

Before you start collecting VoC data, it’s important to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. 

Do you want to improve your customer satisfaction scores? Perhaps you want to increase sales of a particular product? 

Defining your goals will help you determine the best way and the right moment to gather feedback.

2. Collect customer data from multiple sources

Don’t put all eggs in one basket… Don’t rely on just one source of VoC data. 

Collect data from multiple sources, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social media to get a well-rounded view of your customers’ opinions. 

3. Use a mix of quantitative and qualitative data

Both quantitative and qualitative data have their place in VoC analysis. 

Quantitative data, such as survey results (NPS, CSAT), can give you a broad overview of customer opinions. 

Qualitative data, such as open customer feedback questions, interviews and focus group discussions, can provide more in-depth insights. 

4. Analyze the data regularly

Don’t wait until you have a problem to analyze your VoC data. Review the data on a regular basis, such as monthly or quarterly, to identify any trends or issues. 

Here’s a few tips on collecting NPS regularly.

5. Take action and improve customer satisfaction

Once you’ve analyzed the data, it’s time to take action. 

Use the insights from your VoC data to improve your product or service, make changes to your marketing strategy, or address any other areas of your business. 

6. Share the results with your team

Make sure your team is aware of the changes you’re making based on VoC data. This will help ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals. 

Actually, don’t even stop at your team: share the results with everyone in the company! Sometimes it might even be a good idea to share the information externally as well.

Here’s our best tips for implementing NPS and why it is important to share the information with everybody.

7. Do it again

The VoC process is never really finished. As your business grows and changes, your customers’ needs and wants will also change. 

Regularly collecting and analyzing VoC data will help you stay ahead of the curve and keep your finger on the pulse of your customers.

8. Don’t sweat it

If you think it is too tiring to send surveys to your customers, are you still doing it manually?

Time to get back to this century.

You can minimize the manual work by sending surveys with automations from your existing CRM system, like Pipedrive or HubSpot.

Six Sigma: Voice of the Customer Program

Let’s introduce one more way to plan and execute a successful voice of customer program. 

Six Sigma is a frequently used methodology for improving business processes. It employs quantitative data to define the routine of improvement for your organization.

It can also be applied to a Voice of Customer program.

Here’s a simple summary of how you can implement Six Sigma methodologies on your VoC program:

Stage	What it means
Define	Find out what your customers need and want. Use surveys and other tools.
Measure	What are the metrics that indicate the success of your VoC program? How do you measure it? (Pro tip: NPS is one of the most used metrics)
Analyze	Look into the current situation and find your pain points.
Improve	Now that you know the current situation, you need to figure out how to improve it and fix the pain points.
Control	Follow your success and monitor results.

Voice of Customer Tools and Methods

There are many ways to collect VoC data. 

Let’s go through some of the best VoC tools and methods.

Online Customer Surveys

Surveys are an easy way to collect customer feedback.

Surveys can include both quantitative (score, rating, likert-scale, close-ended survey questions, multiple choice) and qualitative questions (open-ended questions, open feedback).

You can include surveys in emails, send SMS surveys, or embed a survey to your website where all visitors can access it.

We have compiled the ultimate guide to surveys that tells you all about surveys and how to analyze survey data.

However, let’s take a closer look at a couple of our favorite survey types.

NPS

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most used customer feedback tools out there.

NPS measures customer loyalty and the willingness to recommend your business to friends and family.

The customer is presented with the question: “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to friends and family?”

The answer is presented on a scale from 0 to 10. Based on the answer, customers are divided into three groups: Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8) and Detractors (0-6).

Your overall Net Promoter Score is a number between -100 and 100. 

The more detractors you have, the closer you are to -100. The more promoters, the better: aim as close to +100 as you can!

When you include an additional open question to your NPS survey, you can collect more feedback from the unhappy customers, and possibly get positive feedback that you can turn to stellar customer testimonials!

That is quantitative data together with qualitative data: even better!

Measuring NPS regularly with an NPS tool is the key to continuous improvement and real-time data.

CSAT

CSAT survey tells you how satisfied your customers are with your brand overall.

The survey is simple, but can still offer you valuable insights into the customer experience.

Present the customers with the question “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the service you received?”

The customer gets to choose a number between 1 (very unsatisfied) and 5 (very satisfied).

Reviews

Another way to find out how your customers feel is to ask for reviews.

A review can be used to measure virtually any service, product, or touch-point experience, but it is mostly used to review products or individual services.

One of the most used types of reviews is a star review.

The customer is presented with a question: “How would you rate our service/this product?”

They can choose up to 5 stars and leave a comment.

You can either conduct your own review surveys or look for existing reviews from external websites, such as Google or Yelp.

The best thing is that you can use the good reviews as social proof and get new customers!

The best tool for collecting reviews and conducting surveys is Trustmary. Book a meeting with us and let’s start tracking Voice of Customer together!

Chat

From customer support live chat to chatbots: conversational manner to collecting customer insights can work wonders.

Unlike surveys and feedback forms, chat offers a hint of personalization and humanity.

This can truly aid the customer experience, as personalization is one of the most important aspects for contemporary customers!

Interviews

It sounds official, but it doesn’t have to be.

You could conduct an “interview” also within a follow-up meeting with your client. Make customer satisfaction one of the topics of the meeting.

Of course, if you want to and you have the resources to conduct formal customer interviews, you can.

You could even hire an external interviewer, or maybe a student who is making a thesis. This way you can get elaborate and impartial analysis.

Sentiment Analysis

Sometimes people don’t necessarily say anything to your face, even if they are unhappy with your service.

But they probably tell other people. While you cannot know what people say behind closed doors, you can observe internet discussions. 

Google your brand and see what your customers say about you online.

You could conduct sentiment analysis on social media comments, where you employ linguistic tools to analyze customer sentiment: aka how your customers feel.

Voice of Customer Examples 

Still not quite sure how to collect Voice of the Customer data?

Here are some well-known examples of VoC campaigns and VoC programs.

1. Talk to Wendy’s

The fast food chain Wendy’s has an ongoing online customer satisfaction survey.

Those who answer the survey are eligible to receive a reward that can be redeemed upon the next visit to a Wendy’s restaurant.

Wendy’s makes sure that not just anyone can answer the survey and collect rewards without being a customer: they add a survey code to a receipt.

This way only the actual customers can take part in the survey. Additionally, they get to know which feedback is directed at which restaurant.

2. Home Depot Voice of the Customer

The home improvement retail store Home Depot also has an extensive customer survey. 

The survey has many questions regarding the customer experience, starting from the tidiness of the store to the friendliness of the staff.

With this survey, Home Depot is able to form almost a complete picture of the customer’s experience.

Of course, a long survey like this is tiring to fill in, and customers need some motivation.

When customers participate in the survey, they have a chance to win a $5.000 prize.

If you cannot offer a tempting reward like that, a long survey is not the best choice. Rather, focus on short and concise feedback surveys to maximize the response rate.

3. Amazon Voice of the Customer

Amazon offers a VoC program for the U.S. sellers.

With their CX Health program, sellers can monitor how their product is doing compared to others. The analysis is based on data like customer behavior, reviews and customer feedback.

The CX Health dashboard helps sellers to identify the problems and react to bad health scores by giving notifications.

Conclusions and Next Steps

Voice of Customer is an essential part of your business processes. You should implement systematic VoC efforts to your daily tasks.

One of the easiest ways to do so is to send regular surveys to your customers.

Trustmary lets you create many different surveys with the easy to use survey tools and templates.

Whether you are looking for NPS, CSAT or star reviews, we got you covered.

On top of collecting feedback, we help you utilize your positive feedback as testimonials and video testimonials that boost conversions and get you new customers.

Book a meeting with us and let’s discuss how we can help you!

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