Know the pulse of your customers by Voice of a Customer program

Poor customer experiences result in a loss by businesses because of defections and abandoned purchases, and people are twice as likely to talk about a negative experience than they are a positive one.

To avoid a negative customer experience to your customer it becomes critical to understand the pulse of your customer however when collecting customer feedback, most organizations fail to gain helpful information due to improper timing, inappropriate questions, and slow or no reactions. Deploying a Voice of customer program provides the solution and creates the basis for a customer experience management implementation.

What is the Voice of a customer?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a term that describes your customer’s feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. It focuses on customer needs, expectations, understandings and proven to help organizations retain customers, build better products, deliver better services, and systematically understand the customer experience to drive change

Gartner’s research recently discovered that collecting customer feedback can increase upselling and cross-selling success rates by 15% to 20%.

The same report found that customer feedback can also help decrease the cost of retaining those buyers — as companies that actively engage in a voice of customer programs, spend 25% less on customer retention than those that don’t.

Another study, by The Aberdeen Group, called “The Business Value of Building a Best-in-Class VoC Program” discovered that companies that invest in customer feedback programs experience much higher client retention, employee engagement and spend less on customer service.

Why it is important?

From the above stats, it is a proven fact that the organizations that understand their customer journey are much more likely to improve their products to fit their customers’ evolving requirements and therefore to foster their loyalty and eventually more business more revenue.

Businesses can Identify at-risk customers by going through surveys response or customer chat conversations, social media posts, and any other interactions with the brand to prevent customer churn, minimize negative word of mouth and decrease the cost to serve.

With a well-designed VOC, program businesses can also amplify the voice of their loyal customers, they can identify a happy customer and encourage them to share their experience with their network by incentivizing them for the same. This encourages positive word of mouth, Increase share of wallet, and Identify opportunities for references /positive reviews for marketing purposes.

When a business understands customer needs, sentiments, and expectation directly or indirectly it provides them a good opportunity to keep their products and services stay ahead of the curve by transforming complaints into sources of focused improvements, encouraging their key customers to participate in co-creation opportunities and bring in the Voice of the Customer to fuel innovation throughout the organization.

Below is an example of how an Insurance company leveraged VOC to enhance their customer experience.

Philadelphia Insurance Companies runs a customer experience program that offers a 360-degree view of the policy lifecycle and gathers feedback at critical touchpoints along the customer journey.

This insight enables PHLY to reward a job well done, identify areas for process and service improvements, build a relationship with customers, and provide statistics to drive change.

The program also offers impact across department lines and opportunities to enhance processes collaboratively among departments.

PHLY’s program has directly driven a range of business improvements, including the provision of in-depth training for the Account Management team, giving them more authority and autonomy to handle policy endorsement transactions.

This has substantially improved the speed of service and enhanced ease of doing business for customers.

Philadelphia Insurance has driven a range of business improvements, including a 43% improvement in speed of service around endorsement processing time.

Now we know the what is Voice of customer program and understands its importance for business, the next question is how we can capture customer feedback using the platform.

The Voice of a customer can be captured directly and indirectly where

Direct feedback is Feedback received directly from clients, commonly through surveys. Some examples include NPS scores, lifecycle Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, transactional CSAT scores, community posts, etc.

Indirect feedback is Feedback generated by the ways clients are engaging with your product. For example, usage data, support data, and other behavioral metrics.

Wrap up

VOC programs have gained traction over the years and are fast-growing segments of a core business strategy for organizations. They work exceptionally well for brands as customers demand more direct engagement with a firm and because capturing and acting on customer feedback is critical to understanding a prospect’s complex decision-making process.