Voice of the Customer: A Strategy You Need
By: Jared Orr
Tags: Feedback, Customer Experience, Customer Success, Voice Of The Customer

The customer may not always be ‘right’ but they are always the most important.

It’s easy to say that the customer is important to your organization. There are many companies that say that but, let’s be honest, we all know a few that could use a little help with that statement.

One of the most important ways a company can demonstrate their desire to put their customers first is to implement a customer-feedback program.

Otherwise known as Voice of the Customer (VoC).

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a strategy that, if implemented, can be the ultimate customer feedback program for your company. It can generate real-time insight into your customer’s experiences.

“Companies use VoC to visualize the gap between customer expectations and their actual experience with the business.” Hubspot

Implementing this can help any organization do the following:

Identify risk of churn early

Increase customer retention

Help identify ways to improve brand image

Know what product customizations need to be a priority

Improve the overall customer journey

The Aberdeen Group conducted a study entitled The Business Value of Building a Best-in-Class VoC Program. In this study, they came to the conclusion that top performers using VoC best practices retain up to 87% of their client base and, as a result, enjoy nearly a 10-times greater year-over-year increase in annual company revenue.

See the full study here: http://meritdirectlistmanager.com/creative/aberdeen/10449-RR-VoC-business-value.pdf

A quality VoC program can take many different forms.

I might be a bit biased here but I currently work for a company that has this whole Customer Feedback thing figured out. Currently, we have three different methods our customers can reach us:

A dedicated Customer Success Manager. Since we are a global company, we have 1 or 2 CSM’s for almost every region in order to give every customer a main point of contact. A 24/7 support line. This not only is great for our customers but also great for me. If I need some help answering a technical question, our support team is always on call and very quick to respond to employee and customer inquiries. A chat feature on our website. This is also a quick method our customers can use at anytime to get in contact with a company representative. Our product is virtual data rooms and we recently implemented this chat feature in each data room to make it easier for data room users to receive answers to their inquiries.

Every time a customer interacts with our support team via chat, we ask if they could rate their experience with the representative. Seen here.

We send the customer a similar inquiry for email conversations as well. This feedback is used to determine how well we are communicating with our customers and how they feel about the experience they are having with us. We also gather feedback data through exit interviews and NPS surveys that I, as their dedicated CSM, conduct.

To see how other companies are revolutionizing the way modern organizations are implementing VoC, check out this article: https://www.myfeelback.com/en/blog/top-brands-collect-customer-feedback

So whether you’re a start-up or seasoned organization looking to make some positive changes to your customers’ overall experience, I highly recommend implementing a quality VoC program.

As I like to say, Voice of the Customer isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a highly effective strategy.

For more content, check out my website www.cswhisperer.org