Has there been a brand to this day that has survived without listening to customers? I say no! You have the business but its end goal is to sell the product to a customer after all. So it matters you listen to their needs and expectations from the product, identify how well your product meets those needs, and what do your customers think of your product? And to be intact with the customer’s evolution and needs going ahead. So question yourself, do you know them better? If not, now it’s time to hear the voice of the customer!
If you are wondering, you knew them better, hold that thought! It‘s not all to it. You might be assuming or predicting but either way, hear it from them and that’s how you are acknowledging the voice of customers and leveraging it!
Let’s see the ways how you can stand out in the competition.
Voice of customer: What is it?
The processes are set up to better comprehend the customers in the business through the collection of information from customer feedback that depicts the significance of learning from the data and taking necessary actions to meet their needs.
Voice of the customer as the word says refers to listening to a customer’s voice that speaks about their needs, priorities, feedback, and expectations.
It becomes necessary that you hear the voice of the customers and it needs you to follow the best practices to listen to them appropriately as a brand.
8 Best practices to Execute the voice of customer program!
# Practice 1: Take insights from various channels
Insights are necessary to gather, only when the data is collected. More the data, the better the insights from it. So, don’t miss out on data from various channels. Track all the places your customers intend to connect with you.
The data collection need not be just to the point of answering a question but rather the data can be interpreted indirectly as well. Product usage is one of the metrics that speak of how engaged are your customers with your product.
Social media messaging can be another way of knowing what they think about your product? And what are they talking about?
So such things contribute to collecting data. It need not only come from feedback but, it can be an indirect collection of data as well! Figure out where you can collect data from all the touchpoints!
- Live Chat: You’d know what customers are looking for particularly in real-time.
- Customer interviews – It aids in understanding the point of view of the customers towards your product.
- Online customer surveys – The point from where you understand your customers better and their issues firsthand.
- Social media applications such as Linkedin or Twitter lets you know what customers are talking about your product and are the way for direct conversation.
- Live recorded conversations – Know how your customers perceive your brand and what they expect of you.
- Online reviews – let you know the details of what customers think before reaching out to them.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys help in knowing the loyalty of your customers.
- Focus groups – acknowledges opinions, perceptions, and beliefs.
# Practice 2: Gather data from each and every customer
Not all customers are the same and to connect to their expectations, you need to have enough data on each and every customer at all the touchpoints they interact with your brand.
It is their feedback that has to be reflected to give a personalized experience as they expected and trust me it makes them loyal to your brand if they like the experience you laid out. So, you need data of each and every customer and say NO to assuming all the customers think similarly.
# Practice 3: Share the feedback you receive with your teams in the organizations
There got to be one platform that puts across all the necessary data from customer-facing teams in the organization. It indeed helps the individual teams to perform best in their duties by leveraging the information.
So it’s like the data gathered by the sales team can help in analyzing the behavior of the customers to approach them for upsells and cross-sells. Similarly, the other teams can work together to make use of collaborative data.
In this context, approaching the customers with relevance gets things moving faster rather than having to ask customers about themselves over and again. And such sure shot data gives a higher authority to make an interaction.
This gives them a sense of you knowing them better and being heard well!
# Practice 4: Dissect the feedback received!
Now it’s time to make sense of the data you have collected. There is a voice behind it that says something. So this is how you’ll go about it,
- Get to know where the feedback is coming from.
- Segregate all the comments based on positive, neutral, and negative.
- Go through the entire data, and take out the relevance of the information.
- Set the priority order to the information collected.
Suggested Read: 7 Steps to a Solid Customer Feedback Loop
# Practice 5: Respond to the feedback you’ve got!
Remember no one has plenty of time to write feedback? But if the customers are taking time to write it, it’s their interest in reaching out to you to explain their experience, whether good or bad.
Give them a sense of being heard. So now on, hop on to respond to them as quickly as possible. So the thing is, acknowledge and explain how are you making the best use of the information.
Practically it is all about nurturing the exchange of viewpoints.
# Practice 6: Capture feedback with text and speech analytics
Are you not getting enough response from your customers from the traditional ways? Then change it to collect it from text or speech. Text and speech analytics can give quality insights.
# Practice 7: Go by the ‘right’ time, not the ‘frequency’!
Most of us assume collecting feedback frequently allows the business to keep improving but at the same time, they don’t consider that it has to go at the right time and not randomly.
So mind interrupting at these times, after finishing the onboarding process, in cases when the customer behavior has changed. To follow up on how they found the new feature that was released and after accomplishing the goals set!
# Practice 8: A customer success tool
How empty has your business been by just gathering data but failing in taking insightful information?
Your business needs a tool that can integrate data from the scattered database and give out insights from a leading indicator. The tool gives insights as well as alerts at the same time.
Having just direct feedback with NPS and CSAT is not enough as they are the lagging indicators and do not give insights to be proactive. So, you as well need more than that to understand customers better.
To get those insights, a customer health score is a good alert that is calculated over the customer journey from the start to the end.
You’d want to track where the customers are in the onboarding process and if they have reached early value or not. Later, the product adoption in the journey is when they know what your product does that helps them achieve success by adopting your product effectively. And to the point, where they are happy using your product and are achieving customer success.
In the process of which there is a need for tracking, triggering for them to take action, automation to make things easier, imparting alerts to the risks, sending out surveys to collect data, letting AI take insights, clear unnecessary data, and predict. And ultimately tracking the KPIs to monitor the efforts implemented.
That’s how the tool is most effective in understanding the voice of the customer!
Leap at every opportunity with the help of the software!
Winding up!
So the voice of the customer isn’t a system but a tool to better comprehend your valuable customers and if I’m not wrong the relationship gets stronger as and when you deliver the solutions that they are looking for.
At any point in time, it doesn’t change the fact that customers are a valuable asset of your business and to keep them loyal to you, they need to be heard and should be delivered with the things that they care for.
To get one step ahead in the process of listening to your customers, you’d as well need insightful customer success software to create the best experience for them.
