Social, mobile, and digital media are helping buyers become more knowledgeable, elevating customer expectations and raising the stakes for businesses. This rising Voice of the Customer (VOC) has become ever more important. Are you leveraging it correctly?
The customer is the key to your success
The key to becoming an industry leader in the modern day is actively and regularly listening to your customers.
The main driver for business success is how your customers perceive the quality of your products and services. If your customers are telling you that your offerings aren't up to standard, then surely it is time to take action.
Voice of the Customer (VOC) is how those insights are uncovered.
Related content: 6 steps to unlock financial value from your customer experience program
Leverage the Voice of your Customer
VOC is used to describe your customer's feedback about their experiences with your products or services (and their expectations).
Through this method, you gain knowledge not only into how you’re performing but also what you need to improve or do more/less of.
Knowing where to make these crucial tweaks is a key factor in driving profitable business growth.
With VOC tools you can:
- Customise your products and services to meet customer demand
- Boost your bottom line and overall profit
- Understand the wants and needs of your audience
- Focus your efforts
- Prioritise any issues
- Evaluate new ideas for improvement
Related content: The common pitfalls of customer experience management
Do more with less
The way to leverage VOC insights is to analyse the metrics that directly impact your bottom line.
Consider the following questions:
- What metrics do you use at the moment to measure created value?
- How can you change those metrics to make your customer experience better?
The answers to these queries will guide your next steps down your voice of the customer journey.
The most important thing to do
When it comes to gathering customer feedback, the key is to actually act on the feedback you’re getting.
While this may seem obvious, many companies keep running surveys and don’t take the time to act on the insights that appear.
Related content: 5 ways of leveraging the voice of the customer
How to best utilise VOC tools
The voices of your customers shouldn't be heard as a single shout followed by silence; they should be part of a conversation. The key to being effective in this area is to gather and use information regularly to help you improve.
- Gather: The easiest way to do this is to use online surveys to identify customer feedback.
- Evaluate: Go through your feedback daily to understand key insights.
- Action: Now that you’ve understood the key insights, it’s time to do something about it. Highlighting your problem areas allows you to take action to improve.
- Monitor: You need to have a daily pulse on your customers to uncover patterns and see where you are making improvements and where you still need to work.
For more in-depth tips on leadership strategies to drive growth, get the free ebook Powerful CX Strategies for Business Growth here:
