Voice of the Customer (VoC), taking into account feedback as a whole

Organizations are aware that, in order to reliably deliver superior customer experience in the future, they need to understand the customer experience they provide today. This is fundamental in developing loyalty and retention. In this context, customers feedback plays a very important role when it comes to dependably improving and enhancing customer experience.

What is VoC anyway?

Voice of the customer (VoC) is the process of listening to customer feedback about their experience using a product or service, sharing results within the organization, and interpreting feedback to improve customer experience and retention.

Reference: Hubspot

The evolution of VoC

VoC began off as a method to develop products which creates an itemized set of customers wants and needs. As a result, it depicted the way toward capturing customers’ necessities composed in various levels of hierarchy, with the end goal that the product team could address them accordingly.

Today, VoC has extended to conceptualize the same approach to marketing that accomplishes an in-depth understanding of the wants and needs of your customers and prospects which can be utilized to plan and implement powerful marketing strategies and to build meaningful relations with these customers.

Sources of VoC

As VoC data developed to provide the foundation for designing a superior customer experience, it is imperative to consider what kind of information you can accumulate while executing a VoC program, there are three types of VoC data:

1. Direct feedback: This is the feedback that your customers expect to provide directly to you. Direct VoC data alludes to any touchpoints along the client journey whereby the customer anticipates that the business is listening to them. They usually include reviews, statistical surveying, complaints and mentions from social media. 
2. Indirect feedback: This is the feedback that customers or media choose not to share directly with the company although is talking about it. It comprises comments from social media, customer reviews sites and forums comments.
3. Inferred feedback: This is input received from value-based, conduct and operational information related to the customer journey across different touchpoints. It is collected from verifiable VoC data and is extremely difficult to acquire. An example of inferred data would be chat sessions, emails and customer purchase history.

Sources of VoC

Surveying your customers

Surveying is one the main sources of VoC, specially Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. This is a simple method to help you understand and store data on how loyal your customers are. NPS is, in its essence, a customer satisfaction metric that measures, on a scale of 0–10, the degree to which people would recommend your company to friends and family. Other sources of VoC can help you to better understand your NPS.

The Advantage of NPS

Referral marketing

NPS enables organizations to conduct referral marketing and bridle customer excitement in order to draw more customers in with advocacy. Customers who are loyal and advocate the brand with word-of-mouth publicity usually promote the brand through social media promotions and online recommendations, generating additional leads for the company.

Customer loyalty

It’s anything but difficult to center around how to obtain new clients, however you also need to continually assess how to retain existing customers and keep them delighted as well. Organizations need to ensure that they measure NPS scores over time to evaluate churn risks and other potential potholes. A growing number of promoters and a diminishing number of detractors is normal, yet you ought to quantify how the breakdown changes over time. A greater number of depreciators is a red flag, but you need to focus on your inactive reactions as well.

Go beyond VoC

VoC involves the processing of copious information, both structured and unstructured. Capgemini’s Online Marketing Solutions can help you implement specific tools to identify all your company’s sources of voice, extract them, analyze them, and channel high-value insights to requisite departments. Additionally, we can help you to prepare action plans, such as distortion problems, elimination of pain points or generation of wow effect, based on VoC conclusions.

Scheme of action plan measures due to VoC