Voice of the Customer

Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs enable you to understand the experience that you deliver to your customers.

What is Voice of the Customer?

Voice of the Customer is the process by which your customer’s preferences and experiences are collected and then shared inside your organization.

The aim?

• Uncover the reasons behind feedback scores
• Understand customer needs, wants and pain points
• Prioritize them
• Understand how your customers view and value your products and services
• Understand where you are delivering on your promise to your customers, and where you are not
• Utilize all this information to inform the way in which your offering is developed and refined

Why does Voice of the Customer matter?

Peter Drucker famously said: “the purpose of business is to create a customer”. Well, the purpose of VoC is two-fold:

• Retain the customers you have already created, and
• Improve your products and services in a way that attracts new ones.

By listening to your customers and acting on their feedback, Voice of the Customer enables you to build better products and deliver better services than you otherwise would have been able to.

Traditionally, businesses would use customers “voting with their wallets” to get feedback. What people are buying is a ready and important way of understanding what is working, and what isn’t, inside a business. But it’s also very blunt feedback: it doesn’t tell you for example, where you could be doing a better job; or whether people are grudgingly giving you their business, only hoping for a competitor to emerge. Bringing the customers’ voice into your organization, and understand what their experience was like, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, gives substantially more.

The other reason it’s so valuable is that there is no other way to truly understand the journey that your customers undertake. They will each interact through different touch points, with different members of staff, buy different products and services, and have different experiences post-purchase. Rather than focus from just one of these angles, VoC takes a unified view — cutting across the entire customer journey, regardless of which channel a customer takes or which product or service they buy.

The only way you can get that? By listening to the voice of the customer.

How does Voice of the Customer work?

The voice of the customer can be heard through a variety of different mechanisms: interviews, focus groups, ethnographic studies are but some of the examples.

However, the latest generation of VoC can be conducted on a much larger scale than ever before — because it leverages the power of the internet. No longer do you need a random sample of your customers — you’re able to begin a conversation with each and every one of them.

To do this, you can use both solicited feedback — email, web intercept, SMS — and unsolicited feedback — social in particular — to listen to the voice of the customer. This enables you to build up a complete picture of the experience you’re delivering to every customer that you have. Once you have this complete picture, you can take this information and feed it back into your organization.