What Is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

• What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?
• Methods & techniques for capturing the Voice of the Customer
• How to build a Voice of the Customer programme
• Set up your business for Voice of the Customer success

You can use various methods to collect VoC feedback to better understand customer needs. Let’s look at some effective ways:

• Customer Service Interactions & Sentiment Analysis: Your contact centre captures an abundance of insights from customer touchpoints - phone, chat, email and more - and centralises it in your customer relationship management (CRM) system (ideally). With 24/7 sentiment analysis across these critical interactions, you can thoroughly understand what conversational trends and topics are creating a positive or negative customer experience.
• Surveys: Following the above, feedback surveys should be deployed across your customer touchpoints and journey milestones, such as support cases and contract renewals. With structured and timely questionnaires, you can collect targeted feedback on specific aspects of the customer experience. This is an effective way to gather both quantitative and qualitative data at scale through rating and open questions. CSAT and NPS surveys can provide actionable feedback into customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Interviews: Interviews let you gather in-depth, qualitative feedback through open questions. These can be done in many ways, including one-on-one, open-ended discussions and focus groups. No matter the type of interview, customer interviews provide a better understanding of customer pain points, expectations and more.
• Social Media Listening: Social media is a great way to gather Voice of the Customer data in real time. People express unsolicited and unfiltered opinions, complaints and sometimes even compliments 24 hours a day, all year round. This feedback can provide you with valuable insights into what’s happening now and reveal trends. Social media moves fast, so make sure that you monitor mentions of your brand, as well as your competitors.
• Website and App Feedback: Tracking customer behaviour and feedback on your website can help you better understand how they interact with your digital channels — chatbot, live chat, email and more — and identify areas for improvement. On-site feedback forms, click tracking and heatmaps help to capture customer preferences and usability issues.
• Online Reviews: Third-party platforms or websites provide unsolicited feedback on products and services for free. This data can identify areas that need improvement and even where your business excels. Check out Service Cloud’s review on G2.

Follow these steps to building a successful Voice of the Customer programme:

1. Define Objectives: Clearly outline the goals of your VoC programme. For example, do you want to improve customer satisfaction? Reduce churn? Enhance product features?
2. Identify Touchpoints: Determine how you will gather customer feedback, such as post-purchase surveys, customer service interactions and social media.
3. Select Tools and Technologies: Choose the right tools and technologies to capture and analyse customer feedback, such as Customer Experience Intelligence.
4. Design Feedback Methods: Create engaging surveys, timely interview questions and other feedback collection methods that are fast and easy for customers and provide valuable insights for your business. With Salesforce Feedback Management, you can leverage AI to save significant time building and translating surveys for your diverse audiences.
5. Collect Feedback: Implement and launch your feedback tools to start collecting valuable Voice of the Customer data.
6. Analyse Feedback: Use analytics tools to analyse the collected data and identify trends, patterns and areas for improvement.
7. Act on Insights: Develop action plans based on the insights gained from customer feedback and implement changes to improve customer experiences.
8. Monitor and Iterate: Continuously monitor the effectiveness of your VoC programme and make adjustments as needed to ensure ongoing success.

Effective analysis of customer feedback is crucial for deriving actionable insights. Here are some best practices:

1. Segmentation: Segment feedback by customer demographics, product lines or other relevant criteria to identify specific trends and patterns.
2. Sentiment Analysis: Use natural language processing (NLP) to analyse the sentiment of customer feedback, helping you to understand the overall tone and emotions expressed.
3. Text Analytics: Apply text analytics to identify common themes, keywords and topics in customer feedback, providing a deeper understanding of customer needs.
4. Benchmarking: Compare your VoC data with industry and your own benchmarks to understand how your performance stacks up against competitors and your history.
5. Visualisation: Use data visualisation tools, such as a dashboard, to present feedback data in an easy-to-understand format.

Salesforce Feedback Management empowers teams with a single platform to effectively analyse VoC data and take action directly within your CRM.

Implementing Voice of the Customer insights to drive change involves several steps:

1. Prioritise Insights: Identify the most critical insights and prioritise them based on their potential impact on customer satisfaction and your business goals.
2. Develop Action Plans: Create detailed action plans outlining the steps needed to address the identified issues and opportunities.
3. Assign Responsibilities: Assign specific responsibilities to team members or departments to ensure accountability for implementing changes.
4. Communicate Changes: Clearly communicate the changes being made to customers and internal stakeholders to build trust and alignment. Effective change management increases the likelihood of a successful VoC programme.
5. Measure Impact: Track the impact of the changes using customer service metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) and qualitative customer feedback to assess their effectiveness.
6. Iterate and Improve: Continuously monitor customer feedback and make iterative improvements to ensure ongoing success.

Bonus: Ensure your Voice of the Customer data is integrated with your CRM to drive immediate follow-up actions across your teams.

Improving your VoC programme involves several strategies:

1. Personalise Feedback Requests: Tailor feedback requests to individual customers based on their interactions and preferences to increase response rates.
2. Close the Loop: Implement a closed-loop feedback system where customers receive follow-up communication addressing their concerns and updates on actions taken.
3. Train Employees: Provide training to employees on the importance of VoC and how to effectively gather and act on customer feedback. Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, is a great resource for your employees to learn valuable skills on Voice of the Customer.
4. Use Technology: Take advantage of technologies, such as AI and machine learning, to automate feedback collection and analysis, improving efficiency and accuracy.
5. Encourage Feedback: Create a culture that encourages customers to provide feedback by making it easy and rewarding for them to do so with convenient channels and incentives.
6. Continuous Improvement: Regularly review and update your VoC programme to ensure that it remains effective and aligned with business goals.

The right tools can help to set up you for success with your VoC programme. These include:

1. Surveys

Surveys are a great way to collect structured feedback from customers on satisfaction, experiences and loyalty. Look for a tool that offers customised survey creation, multichannel distribution (web, SMS, email, voice and more) and real-time feedback collection.

2. Customer Feedback Management (CFM)

A customer feedback management tool aggregates and organises feedback from multiple channels to provide a comprehensive view of customer experiences and sentiments. Your CFM should be able to analyse the feedback to provide actionable insights to improve customer experiences.

3. Sentiment and Text Analysis

A lot of customer feedback is unstructured: open-ended survey responses, social media comments and reviews. Sentiment and text analysis tools can help you make sense of large volumes of feedback with keyword extraction, pattern recognition and AI-driven insights.

4. CRM

CRM systems integrate customer feedback with customer profiles and histories into one platform, providing a holistic view of customer interactions. This helps you to segment customers, track customer interactions and manage follow-ups, which is essential for closing the feedback loop.

5. Analytics

Once feedback is collected, analytics tools are essential for visualising data, tracking trends and measuring the impact of customer insights on business performance. Act on AI-powered insights.

These tools work together to help you to gather, interpret and act on customer feedback, making them crucial to any successful VoC programme.

VoC programmes can have a significant impact on businesses across various industries. Let’s look at what’s possible in a few real-world examples:

• Retail: A large retail chain uses a VoC programme to collect customer feedback through in-store and online surveys. The data reveals long checkout times as a major pain point. By integrating VoC insights with their CRM, the chain implements a mobile checkout option, reducing wait times and increasing customer satisfaction scores by 25%.
• Consumer Goods: An electronics manufacturer gathers feedback from customer support interactions and surveys. Text analysis reveals recurring complaints about the complexity of a key feature. Based on this insight, the company redesigns the feature with a user-friendly interface, leading to a 15% reduction in churn and improved NPS scores.
• Communications: A telecom company uses real-time VoC feedback from customer service calls and social media listening to identify common complaints about service outages. By implementing a proactive communication strategy and improving response times, the company reduces customer complaints by 30% and increases overall satisfaction.

Here are some common challenges in VoC programmes, along with potential solutions:

1. Low Response Rates: Low response rates can limit the effectiveness of VoC programmes. To encourage feedback, personalise feedback requests, offer incentives such as a discount or a free hoodie and make it quick, easy and convenient for your customers to do. They’re busy, after all!
2. Data Overload: Managing large volumes of customer feedback can be overwhelming. Use advanced analytics tools to automate data processing and identify key insights.
3. Silos: Silos within organisations can hinder the sharing of customer feedback and insights. Centralise your data in a CRM so everyone has the same information. Use tools like Slack to collaborate in real time.
4. Lack of Action: Do something with the data that you gather. Collecting feedback without taking action can lead to customer frustration. Develop clear action plans and assign responsibilities to ensure that feedback is acted upon. Keep your customers looped in and let them know when to expect change.
5. Bias: Bias in feedback collection and analysis can skew results. Use a variety of channels to reach a broad range of customers. Apply different analytical methods, such as random sampling and cross-validation, to minimise bias. Train your team to recognise and mitigate unconscious bias during data collection and analysis.

The Voice of the Customer can transform your business by providing valuable insights into customer needs and preferences. By implementing a robust VoC programme, you can improve customer satisfaction, enhance loyalty and drive business success.

Salesforce offers comprehensive tools and technologies to help manage VoC programmes effectively, from capturing and analysing feedback to implementing insights and driving change. By overcoming common challenges and continuously improving your VoC programme, you can unlock the full potential of customer feedback and achieve lasting business success.

Source: “ State of the Connected Customer, Fourth Edition,” Salesforce Research, 2020.