Voice of Customer

Want to know everything about Voice of Customer?

Then you’ve come to the right place! Below you will find all information about what Voice of Customer entails and why it is important to focus on this.

• What is the Voice of Customer? A definition
• Why is the Voice of Customer important?
• How do you measure the Voice of Customer?
• How do you implement a Voice of Customer (VOC) program in the organization?
• How do you implement a Voice of Customer (VOC) program in the organization?
• 9 Tips for implementing a Voice of Customer program
• Voice of Customer Software
• Essential features of Voice of Customer Software

What is the Voice of Customer? A definition

The Voice of Customer is literally translated the voice of the customer. By examining the Customer Experience in terms of expectations, preferences and aversions, you learn to understand who your customers really are. With this you really get to know the customer and you find out what the customer values, what the customer lacks and what the customer wants.

Why is the Voice of Customer important?

For years, things like price, product and quality were of greater value than the customer himself. But now the Voice of the Customer is more important than ever. Customers make the choice for your brand or organization based on customer experience. How they experience your brand, your service, your products and logistics, etc. The impact of a customer experience is increasing, everyone is watching online with the customer and the organization. As a result, the risk of failure for organizations has become much greater. There are few people who do not first consult all kinds of reviews from other consumers before booking a holiday or buying a certain product.

Make these experiences and customer experience transparent to optimize processes. If, for example, the results of customer feedback structurally show that there is dissatisfaction with the telephone complaint handling process, then it is a lost opportunity not to respond to this. By hearing negative and positive feedback, you can improve but also immediately see where you score well. And that is what you as an organization would like to know!

Gaining insight into your company’s Voice of the Customer contributes to:

• a customer-oriented organization
• an improvement in customer satisfaction
• higher customer loyalty
• a great recommendation score (NPS)
• lower failure costs due to fewer complaints

The needs of your customers and their behavior can be a true source of inspiration for your organization. Ultimately, the use of the Voice of Customer will certainly contribute to a more customer-oriented organization.

Also listen to the Voice of Employee and Voice of Business!

Today, if you really want to improve and differentiate, you will not only have to focus on the Voice of Customer, but also on your internal organization and the employees. After all, happy employees also mean happy customers. And to make and keep your employees and customers happy, the foundation of your organization must be in perfect order (delivering the best quality and service, healthy business operations, etc.).

With only listening to the Voice of Customer you can no longer stand head and shoulders above it. ‘Experience Management’ (and no longer ‘Customer Experience Management’), on the other hand, looks at customer orientation and what this yields from 3 pillars as a holistic whole:

• Voice of Customer (VoC)
• Voice of Employee (VoE)
• Voice of Business (VoB)

In the e-book ‘ The power of Experience Management‘ you will find all background information and all developments that influence this holistic view of customer experience are described.

How do you measure the Voice of Customer?

There are countless ways to measure the Voice of the Customer. Three commonly used KPIs are NPS, CES and CSAT.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS measures your customer’s loyalty through the recommendation question: ‘How likely is it that you would recommend product/service/company X to friends or family?’ The NPS is the most commonly used KPI for measuring Voice of Customer. This gives you quick insight into how loyal your customers are to your brand or company.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES gives you insight into how your customers have experienced the service through the following question: ‘How much effort did you have to put in to get your question fully answered?’ With CES you can measure various contact moments. For every step in which the customer has contact with your company, you know what he/she thought of it. CES shows how you perform in this and on the basis of this you can improve contact moments.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT measures the satisfaction of your customers with the purchased services or products. The customer is asked via the CSAT to assign a rating to your product or service in the form of a score on a scale from 1 to 10. The CSAT is usually used when asking for a recommendation is not a logical question or is not appropriate, for example with questions about healthcare institutions or questions about the government.

How do you implement a Voice of Customer (VOC) program in the organization?

The opportunity to distinguish itself as a company lies in offering optimal service and customer experience. Insight into customer feedback is necessary. KPIs such as NPS, CES and CSAT make this possible. But then? How do you actually implement the Voice of the Customer in your organization? Using customer feedback in your organization is not easy. If you’ve already started collecting the Voice of Customer and analyzing the feedback, you’re well on your way. How you actually make an impact with customer feedback in practice can be distinguished on three levels:

• One-on-one follow-up
• Operational level
• Strategic level

9 Tips for implementing a Voice of Customer program

Below you will find practical tips for effective use of the Voice of Customer to improve the customer experience:

1. Determine the right KPI
2. Use short questionnaires
3. Make use of your internal customer data
4. See where the priorities lie
5. Respond to positive and negative feedback (Closed Feedback Loop)
6. Don’t focus too much on the score
7. Get input from your open answers
8. Involve the individual employee
9. Measure continuously

Voice of Customer Software

On the basis of the chosen KPI (NPS, CSAT or e.g. CES), you request customer feedback to measure the Voice of Customer. This can be done manually, but that is often error-prone, which leads to discussions about its correctness. Furthermore, it is a time-consuming job, which means that reports are often sent too late to be able to respond to them. And the information often remains with certain departments. It is then difficult to gain insight into the data and to make analyzes and make connections based on it. You solve this by linking and automating all data flows.

In order not to burden your customers unnecessarily with information that you already have in your systems, it is advisable to include existing customer data when requesting and analyzing customer feedback. Think of background information of your customers such as: age, gender and other process and product information such as what your customer has ordered, complaint handling or logistics processes and which employee has helped your customer.

With smart Voice of Customer Software you can automatically enrich customer feedback with data from internal systems such as CRM, SAP, Customer Service Software and logistics systems. In addition, the condition of a Voice of Customer tool is that you automatically have insights with which you can analyze and filter endlessly via user-friendly (personalized) dashboards and prepare and send reports. Only then can you provide insight into points for improvement and let your employees act on them.

Essential features of Voice of Customer Software

• Ask as few questions as possible
  Make your automated questionnaire short and sweet, that has a proven response increase. Just ask a few questions that will let you know if the customer is satisfied, but make sure you can find out why they give a certain score.
• Simply label open answers
  By asking customers to categorize their answer (root cause analysis) you find out exactly why they gave that answer and what exactly it means.
• Focus on customer stories
  A story says so much more than just a number. Understand what moves your customers by supporting the scores with real stories and emotions via an open answer field. This way you know exactly which buttons to push to improve the customer experience.
• Turn a complaint into an opportunity
  Create a case via your system based on predefined conditions in the questionnaire and automatically assign the case to the right employee. Identify and resolve a complaint in the customer process in such a timely manner. This is an opportunity to ‘make things right’ that you would never have had otherwise.
• Share positivity!
  Motivate employees by forwarding compliments from customers directly and automatically via the software to the right employees.
• Share insights into your organization
  Automatically link the feedback to internal data such as organizational structure, process and product information. Know exactly in which department, location or even down to employee level improvements are needed and share relevant insights with the right people at the right time.