What is voice of the customer?
In this article we will provide you the information about Voice of the customer tools and How to analyze the data.
The voice of the customer is a term used in business and marketing to describe the process of capturing a customer’s expectations, preferences, and dislikes in a deep and analytical way.
This process consists of collecting and analyzing customer data about their relationship with a brand, in order to improve the company’s processes, its products and services , as well as successfully achieve customer satisfaction .
Knowing the voice of the customer helps you understand the behavior, difficulties, preferences and needs of your customers at a deeper level, allowing you to better serve and communicate with them.
Collecting the voice of the customer is one of the best strategies for decision-making, since it allows us to know what they really think about a brand, its products or services, and how they can improve to satisfy their needs. For this reason, in this article we will introduce you to what this process consists of and how you can do it in your company.
Tools to collect the voice of the customer
Some strategies that you can implement to collect the voice of the customer are:
1. Customer survey
Customer Surveys are one of the most flexible and effective methods for collecting Voice of the Customer data , allowing you to easily integrate quantitative assessments along with open-ended qualitative questions.
Once the questionnaire is built, you can use it to survey as many customers as you can get, so they can serve as a useful filter to identify the customers you want to get more details and feedback from through another, more in-depth VoC program , such as interviews and focus groups .
2. Interviews
Customer interviews are one of the techniques you can use to gather deeper insights from the customer voice, and can be conducted as part of ad hoc research , selecting a representative sample of customers, or targeting a specific segment.
Contacting the client and conducting an in-depth interview opens the door to truly personalized and detailed research. Although interviews are time consuming, they often allow you to get some of the most valuable opinions .
3. Social networks
Social media can be a very valuable means of communication for listening to customers , as they often allow for a more informal, two-way, and real-time conversation than email or phone calls allow.
Interactions on social networks are a valuable source of customer voice data, it is important to note that the most powerful source comes from social listening .
4. Customer reviews
Reviews are one of the most effective ways to take advantage of both positive and negative comments. Therefore, monitoring the reputation of your brand on various internet sites is a good option for researching the voice of the customer.
Online customer reviews can include all kinds of information, from a basic 5-star rating to rating breakdowns for individual aspects of your product and company, or even lengthy open reviews. It is a rich source of customer feedback.
Additionally, reviews on third-party websites are the most direct way to find unsolicited customer reviews, which means you can find out how customers are really talking about your brand spontaneously and naturally.
5. Customer experience software
If you need to compare complex trends over time, a basic analysis tool won’t be able to give you enough information. To achieve this, you can integrate customer experience software with specialized features such as Net Promoter Score questions , sentiment analysis, and customer feedback loops to get a comprehensive picture of the voice of your customers.
How to analyze the data of the voice of the customer?
Analyzing the data from the voice of the customer consists of understanding the customer experience that has been collected from an analytical perspective. It is about understanding how customers behave in the face of what they say or perceive, since what customers say they want and how they behave do not always coincide.
Using tools designed for website analytics, product analytics and the customer experience map , you can get an idea of how customers move both in relation to your product and your website. You can also measure how the changes made affect customer behavior.
Steps to analyze the voice of customers
To use the customer’s voice data, you can carry out these steps:
1. Develop the questions
An effective voice of the customer analysis program focuses on answering questions. Before analyzing anything, you must clearly identify the question (or questions) you want to answer.
The questions you ask will define the data that can be collected, the tools and types of analysis needed to answer them.
2. Choose the right tools
To perform the analysis of the voice of the customer you can use spreadsheets, such as Excel and Google Sheets, with built-in analysis for quantitative data (mean, maximum, minimum, percentages, etc.) or an online survey application with useful tools to know the opinions of the clients and that they generate reports in real time.
However, as we mentioned earlier, if you require a more complex analysis, it will be advisable to have CX software that allows you to obtain exactly the information you need.
3. Collect and prepare the data
Once you have the questions and the tools, it is time to start the data collection stage of the voice of the customer, either through your physical points of sale, surveys on your websites, etc.
The data you collect must be appropriate to answer the questions posed, and it must be able to be translated into reports that help to obtain clear results for decision-making.
4. Analyze your data
The voice of the customer data analysis reports should focus on answering the initial questions. If you’ve chosen the right tool for your voice customer analysis program, it should be reasonably easy to identify the correct reports to run.
5. Get conclusions
Sometimes the best course of action will be clear. Other times, the conclusions will be more complicated, so you may need to drill down to specific data points or run more analysis.
6. Act to improve the customer experience
Now is the time to put your results into practice. When you put the right voice of the customer program in place, you’ll understand every step of the customer journey and see the results in broad strokes and in super-minute detail.
