The Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a critical element in how a business conducts itself – there are few things more important than what your consumers, current and potential, think about your brand.
The Voice of the Customer can come in the form of a consumer’s literal voice through phone calls, but it refers to anything your customer is saying about your business – things that might help or hurt your operations. Written reviews, comments and suggestions, and even off-handed notes could prove helpful in optimizing your process.
In short, VOC is any kind of input from your customer that you should be paying attention to. Here are three ways to make the most of it:
Accommodation
The best way to ensure you’re getting the feedback you need to produce the best customer experience (CX) possible is to ensure that your consumers want to give it in the first place. Over time, it’s become clear that unsolicited calls, advertisements with no personalization, and endless surveys can grow tiresome, even frustrating, for many customers – that’s not how you want them to feel about interacting with your brand. Instead, hop on board with the growing trend in 2022 by developing more indirect feedback collection methods. That leads us to…
Analysis
There are several ways to unintrusively collect data, many of which you might already be set up for! Get creative and start using avenues that you know your consumers will be accessing anyway, even if those avenues weren’t initially designed for feedback collection. For example, customer support calls are full of opportunities to learn more about what parts of your system do and don’t work for the customer, no matter what the central point of the call is.
- Adaptation
Changing the way you do things isn’t easy. Still, you’re not alone – businesses worldwide are adjusting more indirect and analytics-based methods, which means there’s demand for supporting technology. To stay ahead of the pack, explore your options when it comes to intelligent analysis of calls, social media, and shopping history, and you’ll be able to hear the VOC loud and clear.
While it can be a challenge to encourage customers to speak up, the right strategy and technology can go a long way toward helping companies listen to the Voice of the Customer.
