Launch a Meaningful Voice of a Customer Program

Why is it crucial to not only listen but also act on feedback?

14/08/2024; 7 min to read

A Voice of Customer (VoC) program is a systematic approach to gather, analyse, and act on customer feedback to improve products, services, and overall customer experience. The main goal of a VoC program is to understand customers' needs, preferences, and expectations to drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

By listening to the voice of the customer, you can align your company offerings with customer expectations and enhance your competitive advantage in the market.

Voice of Customer program

The structure of a Voice of Customer (VoC) program typically includes the following components:

1. Customer Feedback Collection: Implementing various methods to collect feedback from customers. The goal is to understand your customers’ needs, identify opportunities for improvement, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction.

As a minimum VoC program target to gather feedback on clients' satisfaction (CSAT) and easiness (CES) of purchase or usage of your products and/or services and recommendation (NPS) of the company usually based on rating (see here example question and rating scale). Gathering a motivation on rate is highly recommended as it gives clarity about reasoning of the customer with the words of the customer (verbatim).

2. Data Analysis: Analysing the feedback data to identify trends, patterns, and key regarding customer preferences, satisfaction levels, and areas for improvement.

3. Customer Segmentation: Segmenting customers based on their feedback, preferences, behaviours, and needs to tailor products and services to different customer segments effectively.

4. Actionable Insights: Transforming the feedback data into actionable insights that can drive decision-making and strategic initiatives within the organisation.

5. Cross-functional Collaboration: Engaging cross-functional teams across the organisation to share customer feedback insights, collaborate on improvement initiatives, and ensure alignment with customer-centric goals.

6. Feedback Loop Closure: Closing the feedback loop by communicating with customers about how their feedback has been used to make improvements and addressing any concerns or issues raised by customers.

7. Performance Metrics: Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success and impact of the VoC program in enhancing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

8. Continuous Improvement: Continuously refining and evolving the VoC program based on feedback data, market trends, and changing customer expectations to ensure ongoing relevance and effectiveness in meeting customer needs.

Importance to act

Act upon customer feedback is crutial part of any VoC program. Actually the action, based on the analysed feedback outcome, is the ultimate goal to such program. Gathering feedback as stand alone action is meaningless.

It is essential to implement changes, improvements, or solutions based on customer feedback. Utilising methods for extract actionable insights and tools such as prioritisation matrices, roadmaps, action plans, feedback loops, and follow-ups can help effectively respond to customer feedback.

Understanding and acting are key in the Feedback loop pillar of any good NPS System. Simply said, it refers to Inner and Outer loop management.

Extract insight and actionable insights

Step 1: Categorise the feedback: 

The first step to successfully making feedback insights actionable is categorizing the collection of the feedback data. 

Concerning this issue, there are three main options available for you to explore.

1. Coding - Transforming qualitative data into quantitative data.

This is done by:

>>> categorising the piece of feedback (is it related to price, quality, delivery, service, etc.?);

>>> determining if a piece of feedback is positive, negative or neutral;

>>> assigning a value (i.e. 1-5) of how negative or positive that piece of text is.

2. Rules-Based AI – A rule-based approach involved human-crafted and curated rule sets.

Defining whether a sentence is generally positive or negative relies on interpreting positive and negative words across a significant sample size, even though language's ambiguity shifts with culture and context.

3. Sentiment Analysis – These programs are able to recognize certain key phrases and go through your customer feedback data, tagging and categorizing them automatically, turning them into quantitative data points.

However, instead of analysing the topic or intent of a piece of text, the AI analyses the emotion or sentiment behind the words.

Overall, the goal here is to find out what your customers are talking about, how they feel about it, and what they want from you, quickly and at scale.

Step 2: Analyse the feedback 

The following step is to analyze all the feedback data that you’ve efficiently collected and categorized to make it actionable. 

After gathering all the data in a spreadsheet, you can discover insights on the following:

• Different demographic trends, such as product preferences based on age or location

• Unexpectedly high- or low-quality ratings on certain products or touchpoints

• High amounts of customer service complaints in a specific subject or via a specific channel

Doing so allows you to objectively look at what customers are feeling when they say what they’re saying and what customers feel about which aspect of the product or service. That type of information is invaluable.

In order to conduct a thorough CX analysis, it is essential you to create a complete overview of the customer journey by identifying the factors that contribute to positive customer experience as well as those that hinder it.

Step 3: Dig into the root causes 

The third step to actionable customer feedback analysis is identifying the root cause behind customer issues and answer the question of why the problem occurred in the first place.

In that step I often use the "5 Why Technique". You simply ask "why" something is happening until you get to the source of the issue.

It is highly advisable and beneficial in this stage to work together with other teams. By collaborating with relevant individuals from different teams, you can acquire a wide range of experiences and expertise. They may provide unique viewpoints that can assist in identifying the multiple factors contributing to the issue.

Acting on customer feedback

Once the cause and scale of a repetitive problem is discovered it is time to plan and implement improvements.

Depending on the scale of the problem, resolution might be through a change in existing process, small development to core business supporting system or full development of entirely new solution which solve the issue.

Make good prioritisation and integrate planned improvements and / or solutions in: improvement roadmaps or overall project planning or product owners' backlogs and also look for other relevant projects to integrate CX improvements so to optimise and utilise already planned resources.

Keep in mind that the overall objective of collecting customer feedback is to make changes that build better customer experiences.

• Clearly communicate the value and benefits of the VoC program to all levels of the organisation, emphasising how it can drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth.

• Secure support from senior leadership to showcase commitment to the VoC program and obtain vital resources for its implementation.

• Offer training sessions and educational materials to familiarise employees with the VoC program, its objectives, and how they can contribute to its success.

• Establish cross-functional teams across departments to collaborate on VoC initiatives, share insights, and drive customer-centric decision-making.

• Align Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with VoC metrics to track the impact of customer feedback on business performance and incentivise participation in the VoC program.

• Encourage employees at all levels to actively participate in collecting, analysing, and acting on customer feedback, fostering a customer-centric culture within the organisation.

• Recognise and reward employees who contribute to the success of the VoC program, whether through innovative ideas, exceptional customer service, or driving improvements based on feedback.
  

• Share success stories and case studies that demonstrate the positive outcomes of the VoC program, showcasing how customer feedback has led to tangible improvements and business growth.
  

• Continually seek feedback on the VoC program itself  from employees, encouraging suggestions for improvement and ensuring ongoing engagement and relevance.

• Celebrate milestones and achievements related to the VoC program, acknowledging the collective effort of employees in driving customer-centric initiatives and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Good luck!