What is Voice of Customer?

Simply put, Voice of Customer (VoC) is the process of collecting customer feedback about a business, its products and services. Many companies believe that collecting customer feedback through surveys is the meaning of a VoC program. In reality, that just isn’t the case. NPS® surveys are popular, for example, but they do not amount to a VoC program (though they are generally an input into a VoC program). A true VoC program involves much more customer experience management than simply sending out surveys.

Voice of Customer is an important tool that helps you gauge customer sentiments and the overall experience customers have with your brand. When done right, it can help you evaluate whether your business is succeeding or failing in customer experience strategy and CX efforts.

Benefits of a Voice of Customer Program

• 360-degree view of your customers’ experiences in real-time:
  • Track and identify key issues in each customer journey
  • Get real-time insights about customer experience management quality via a single platform

• Understand the drivers of customer experience:
  • With the AI feature of customer experience software, be faster and smarter about what your customers are trying to tell you
  • Learn which factors have a higher impact on key metrics in your customer experience strategy

• Systematic actions for experience improvement:
  • Turn real-time consideration into immediate actions through customer experience management
  • Continuously improve product and service quality using this customer experience software.

The basic mechanism of a Voice of Customer program:

There is essentially a 3-step process for implementing the VoC program in your actual customer experience management system:

1. Collect customer feedback – As a customer experience strategy, use methods like surveys, etc. to gather information
2. Analysis – Implement machine learning to analyze responses that reveal the root cause of dissatisfaction and impact on KPI’s
3. Implementation – Within customer experience strategy, act on new insights to improve areas of the business that will drive the biggest change.

Some ideas for a successful VoC program set-up:  How to make it really work

These are some expert tips for a successful VoC program integrated with a customer experience management system that helps you turn insight into action:

• Start with a clear objective. To run any successful program within your customer experience management system, you have to be able to answer “WHY.” Before you ask anything of your customers, begin by asking yourself: “Why do we want to capture customer opinions and feedback?” Understand where you want to go with your customer experience strategy before you start.
• Map your journeys to make sure that all critical channels/touchpoints are included. Through journey mapping and VoC measurement, companies can pile all the information together for their customer experience management, interpret what interactions are taking place at each moment of truth, and understand the pain points of specific customers. A “living map” allows you to understand changes in customer behaviors as well assess different groups of customers holding disparate expectations.
• Use advanced technology to improve analytic capabilities. The greater the amount of feedback you collect, the more difficult it gets for your CX team to process. This calls for the deployment of AI within customer experience software. Text analytics, churn prediction, and speech analytics are some areas where machine learning algorithms may be implemented in your customer experience software VoC program.
• Focus on the improvement trend rather than the score itself, then close the loop. The most clicked item in your VOC dashboard might be NPS or CSAT score. These metrics are the main outputs of the customer experience software program; however, we believe that focusing on the improvement trend rather than the metric itself is a healthier approach to managing your program. Designing improvement loops is necessary for continuous customer experience improvement.
• Break down silos and build cross-functional teams. Customer experience is everyone’s job in the organization.  From frontline to top management, every employee should access customer experience software and dashboards transparently.

To learn more about Alterna CX’s Voice of the Customer tool, please click