Alright, if you've been keeping up with our earlier discussions on VoC in the context of product development. In that case, you already know how it can shape your product development roadmap, help you prioritize your backlog, and ease your sprint planning. But here's the thing – VoC isn't just for the tech or product folks.
But a VoC program doesn't stop there; these insights can be applied to various fields within an organization. Your marketing team can utilize it to create customized messages that will connect with your target audience. This will encourage them to engage with your brand and even promote your business further. The sales team can collect customer feedback through their sales phase by interacting with potential clients, leads, or prospects. They can send those customer inputs to their marketing team, who'll analyze the customer insights using sentiment and text analysis, identifying trends and other customer behavior, and give back those findings to their Sales team so that can use them in their sales calls to label and address their potential customer's emotions that will definitely impact the chance to close a deal.
At first, it might be scary for a lot of companies to enhance their workflow and procedures, but new approaches come with new opportunities, and it's really worth investing time in them if we'd like to grow as a brand, company, or small business.
Voice of Customer (VoC) in Marketing
At its core, the various "Voice of X" methodologies, especially Voice of Customer (VoC), in marketing are not merely about "hearing" the perspectives of different stakeholders. Instead, the focus lies on engaging with our customers, actively listening to them, and genuinely understanding their sentiments towards our brand, services, or products.
By harnessing the power of VoC, Voice of Employee (VoE), and other relevant VoX approaches, we're doing more than just collecting customer feedback. We're gleaning profound insights that have the potential to shape our marketing strategy. This leads to tuning our buyer personas, crafting messages that deeply resonate with our customers, and ultimately improving our customer engagement and conversion metrics.
At its foundation, Customer Experience (CX) in the marketing context is more than just a term. It has an impact on the nature of our brand and plays a crucial role in establishing our company's position and reputation within a specific industry or sector.
Benefits of Voc and CX usage for your Business and Brand
Diving into the world of Voice of Customer (VoC) and Customer Experience (CX), we'll discover tremendous opportunities that will ease our daily work, and it will give us the advantage to keep pace with the market and demand.
The latest PWC report called "Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right" shows us the need for businesses to amplify their Customer Experience strategies becomes more important than ever. We'll break down the benefits peppered with those key statistics offered by PWC:
- Enhanced Brand Loyalty: Trust cultivates brand loyalty. Over time, loyal customers champion your brand, extending its reach, but time can be your enemy too. A reputation of a brand is no longer backed up by its long-time presence in a specific market. Customers will shift to other brands if their experience poor or bad CX with your brand. After just one poor experience, 32% of all customers might stop doing business with a loved brand. It's even higher in Latin America, where 49% could walk away after one unfortunate incident.
- Informed Decision Making: VoC offers rich insights, guiding decisions rooted in customer-centricity. But there's a surprising disconnect. While a significant 48% of U.S. consumers highlight friendly, welcoming service as a success metric, only 10% of companies in 2017 saw improving customer experiences as a digital priority — a dip from 25% in 2016.
- Elevated Product/Service Quality: Pain points and preferences, when understood, refine offerings. Interestingly, while price and quality are top purchasing choices, positive interactions are especially important in industries like healthcare (78%), banking (75%), restaurants (74%), and hotels (74%).
- Personalized Marketing Strategies: Driven by genuine understanding, personalization can drastically improve engagement. It's worth noting that 65% of U.S. customers believe a positive brand experience influences them more than flashy advertising.
- Operational Efficiency: Streamlining your process increase customer satisfaction, and 73% consider customer experience overall to be critical in purchasing decisions. Yet, only 49% believe companies today provide a good customer experience.
- Reduced Customer Churn: Prioritizing CX reduces customer loss risks. In the U.S., while 59% may abandon a brand after multiple bad experiences, 17% might leave after just a single one.
- Increased Revenue: Satisfied customers make repeat purchases and refer others. Moreover, 43% of consumers are willing to pay more for convenience and 42% for a friendly experience. This value placed on experience is echoed globally, with over 40% of global respondents willing to pay extra for same-day delivery, prioritizing speed.
- Reputation Management: In an era where negative reviews spread like wildfire, VoC and CX strategies help control and uplift online reputation.
- Future-Proofing Your Brand: A brand rooted in VoC and CX remains relevant, especially when most consumers prioritize speed and convenience in their experiences.
- Building Emotional Connections: Emotional connections transcend mere product features. This is crucial when even a single negative encounter could result in losing up to a third of your customer base.
Strategies to Harness, Examine, and Utilize VoC Data
Customer feedback can provide insights into your brand, products, and the feelings of your customers. But without a systematic approach to collecting, analyzing, and applying this data, its potential might remain untapped. Below, we will guide you through a comprehensive strategy to extract the most from your VoC data.
1. Define Your Objectives Clearly
The first step is to pinpoint your objectives. While VoC data can shower you with a lot of insights, not every piece of data will align with your goals. Are you aiming to bolster sales and revenue? Do you aspire to design a more captivating loyalty program? Perhaps you're looking to diversify your product line or understand prevailing industry trends?
Answering such questions will determine your data-gathering strategy. For instance, depending on your goals, you might lean more towards social listening or combine insights from reviews and surveys. Knowing your purpose ensures that the subsequent discussions and decisions emanating from your VoC analysis remain focused and to the point.
2. Gather VoC Data from Targeted Sources
The VoC data spectrum is vast. But by determining your goals, you can channel your efforts into obtaining data from the most relevant sources. Here's a detailed look at some potential data sources:
Social Media or Social Listening
Social media platforms offer a wealth of customer opinions. You can find tools that enable you to track and analyze conversations and trends associated with your brand or industry. Such social listening not only helps gauge brand sentiment but also comprehends customer needs and competitor moves. By aggregating key topics, you can get a panoramic view of public perception and direct mentions about your brand.
Surveys
Surveys are a direct window into customers minds, albeit with a caveat. Surveys are effective when the questions are precise, and participants are responsive. When done properly, surveys can provide information about customer preferences helping to improve loyalty programs or revive a business. Tools like ClientZen, which use natural language processing, can extract insights from responses. You might have a look at how to build your survey to extract the most of your customer feedback data.
Online Customer Reviews
Platforms like Yelp, G2, Capterra, or Google My Business are replete with authentic customer feedback and online reviews. By actively seeking and analyzing these reviews, you can discern both strengths and areas of improvement for your products or services. And if you're using a customer feedback platform like ClientZen, you don't need to go through the boring manual data processing tasks since you can analyze your online reviews with just one click.
Live Chat and Chatbots
These real-time communication tools capture immediate customer data. By evaluating common queries or customer feedback, brands can determine potential areas of enhancement. You can construct chatbots for frequently asked questions, alert human agents when specialized intervention is required, and so on.
Web Behavior and Purchase Patterns
Analyzing web data provides insights into customer behavior, including their preferences, content engagement, website navigation, and purchase history. These insights can guide user-oriented web design development, effective content strategies, and targeted marketing campaigns.
Sales and Support Interactions
Conversations during sales pitches or support calls can be enlightening. By regularly reviewing such interactions, brands can understand customer expectations, recurrent issues, and areas where they outshine or lag behind competitors.
Email Insights
Emails, especially those directed at customer service, are often filled with detailed customer feedback. By examining these communication channels, businesses can identify opportunities for enhancing operations addressing hurdles, or even discovering moments of customer satisfaction.
To further enhance your data collection process, make a note of hashtags, keywords, or phrases that are associated with your brand. This will ensure that your findings cover all the aspects and are in line with the objectives of your brand.
The real value of VoC data lies not just in collecting it but in its actionable application. By defining clear objectives and sourcing relevant data systematically, you are paving the way for insights that can reshape your brand strategy and foster deeper customer relationships.
3. Extracting Meaningful Insights from VoC Data
Delving into VoC data necessitates an understanding of various metrics that offer valuable insights into customer perspectives. In the following section, we will discuss some of these measurements. If you would like an analysis and explanation, please feel free to refer to our comprehensive article.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The NPS serves as a key gauge to measure a customer's propensity to endorse your business to acquaintances. Customers voice their opinion on a scale from 1 to 10 through surveys and interviews. They're subsequently grouped as promoters (9-10), passives (7-8), or detractors (0-6). The NPS is the outcome of the differential between the promoter and detractor percentages.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
This metric offers insights into the simplicity and efficiency experienced by customers when interacting with your business. The evaluation is done on a scale spanning from 'strongly disagree' to 'strongly agree', and the aggregate score typically centers around those leaning towards 'somewhat agree'.
Social Listening and Engagement Indicators
These metrics cover aspects like preferences, dislikes, social media shares, comments, and retweets that indicate the online presence and reputation of your brand. By integrating software and sentiment analysis tools, we can enhance these metrics, thereby increasing the impact of our brand and ensuring levels of customer satisfaction.
Sentiment Analysis
Leveraging AI, sentiment analysis methodically examines the emotional tone behind customer feedback. Platforms like ClientZen offers Features such as Automated Tagging, which employs AI to classify customer responses effectively. Insight Discovery delves deeply into extracting data-driven actions from this feedback, while the Sentiment Analysis feature interprets the emotions and intentions underlying each response.
4. Actioning the VoC Feedback
VoC insights pave the way for enhanced strategies in several domains:
Crafting and revising Buyer Personas
One area where these insights prove invaluable is in the crafting and refining of Buyer Personas. By utilizing VoC analytics and customer feedback, you can categorize your customer base based on their purchasing behaviors. This allows you to create buyer personas that help you customize content that truly connects with your audience, identify networks and address common challenges. These valuable insights also empower your sales approach leading to enhanced conversion rates.
Spotting and Rectifying Issues
Regular patterns in VoC data might highlight persistent hurdles across various areas, be it in logistics, website UX, or supply chain operations. Addressing these proactively ensures seamless customer experiences.
Setting Product Directions
VoC insights serve as a guiding light in helping you make decisions about your products. They assist in prioritizing choices and adjusting strategies to align closely with customer preferences. Additionally, they play a role in crafting marketing campaigns and refining your brand strategy.
Designing Tailored Marketing Campaigns and Refining Brand Strategy
When you start implementing VoC methodology and customer feedback into your marketing effort, you'll notice that crafting personalized messages or making your audience actively involved to interact with your brand will be effortless since you'll start to communicate with your segment based on emotions and sentiment, and that's what all of us want.
Embedding your marketing campaigns in VoC insights can highly increase their efficiency. Using customer feedback and sentiment, you can design more personalized and resonant messages for paid and organic campaigns. Here's how to make the most of this approach:
- Sentiment-Driven Advertisements: Emotions play a crucial role in influencing our decisions. Tap into the sentiment derived from VoC data to craft your ad messages. For instance, if feedback suggests customers feel relieved by the simplicity of your product, use this emotion in your ad copy to resonate with potential customers.
- A/B Test Emotion in Ads: Run parallel ad campaigns - one capitalizing on the positive emotions of your customers and the other addressing their concerns. For instance, if you have a travel business and customers rave about the joy of hassle-free bookings, one ad could highlight "Effortless Booking!" Contrarily, if some feedback centers around concerns over cancellation policies, another ad might emphasize "Flexible Cancellations!"
- Incorporate VoC in SEO: Use feedback to identify frequently mentioned keywords or pain points. You can then include these ideas into your content strategy, making sure that your content focuses on the problems or questions people have. For instance, if customers often mention "sustainable materials" when discussing a product, consider crafting SEO-optimized content around sustainability in your industry.
- Tailor Content for Different Platforms: Different platforms cater to different demographics and behaviors. Use VoC insights to draft platform-specific content. For instance, if feedback from younger customers on Instagram suggests they value behind-the-scenes content, prioritize such content for that platform.
Leveraging VoC to Enhance Brand Reputation Case Study
Almost every American (99%) checks reviews before buying online, and more than half (57%) do the same for in-store shopping. Interestingly, just one more star in reviews can boost a company's revenue by 5-9%.
So, how can companies get more of these valuable reviews?
One effective way is by smartly automating the VoC (Voice of the Customer) process.
A great example is Canadian Dealer Lease Services Inc. (CDLSI). Like many big companies, they use NPS surveys to determine how happy their customers are and if they'd recommend CDLSI to others.
What's unique about CDLSI is how they use this data. If a customer scores a 9 or 10 on the NPS survey, CDLSI immediately sends them an email asking for a Google Review.
This approach focuses on maximizing the potential of individuals who have an affinity for your brand and providing them with a means to express their positive experiences.
For CDLSI, this approach worked perfectly. Their Google Review ratings shot up by an impressive 80%, making them more noticeable online and likely drawing in new customers.
Main Takeaways: VoC scores like CSAT, NPS, or CES are great for understanding customer feelings. However, their true worth shines through when they result in outcomes. Utilize these scores to identify your customers and create a seamless process for them to share their positive experiences about your brand.
Conclusion:
Customer feedback holds value in shaping business strategies. When brands thoroughly analyze and understand customer insights they gain a roadmap to develop initiatives that truly connect with their target audience. This helps solidify their position in an evolving marketplace.
Key Takeaways for Marketing Specialists:
- Actionable Feedback: Gathering feedback is just the first and one of the most essential steps. The real value lies in translating this feedback into actionable strategies, refining marketing campaigns, adjusting brand narratives, or tailoring loyalty programs.
- Customer-Centric actions: When customers are overwhelmed with options, brands that truly focus on and respond to customer needs and feelings distinguish themselves and cultivate loyalty.
- Informed Strategy Development: Use VoC insights to sharpen your marketing initiatives, from selecting the most resonant platforms for ad distribution to creating content that speaks directly to customer pain points and desires.
- Brand Reputation and Advocacy: Encourage satisfied customers to become brand advocates. Their positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations can significantly boost brand visibility and trust.
- Leverage Modern Tools: With tools like ClientZen, marketing specialists can delve deeper into sentiment analysis, gaining more precise insights into how customers perceive their brand. These insights are invaluable for optimizing campaigns and product offerings.
- Flexibility is Key: The market landscape and customer preferences are always evolving. Regularly revisit and refresh your strategies in light of the latest VoC data to ensure your brand stays ahead of the curve.
- Integration Across Departments: VoC shouldn't be confined just to marketing. It is important to exchange insights between departments, including product development and sales, in order to create a strategy that prioritizes the customer in all business decision-making processes.
Brands that master interpreting and acting upon VoC data set themselves apart in the marketplace. As professionals in the marketing field, utilizing these insights can make a difference when it comes to creating and enhancing strategies that effectively meet and surpass customer expectations. A customer-first approach, informed by genuine feedback and insights, will be the linchpin of enduring brand success as we move forward.
Once you have understood the importance of the Voice of the Customer and you plan to use your customer input to enhance your marketing strategy by prioritizing customer loyalty, improving customer satisfaction, and using your client base for your company's own advantage, the next phase is to find the best tool that fits your goals.
Take a look at our comparison chart to see the pros and cons of one of the top customer feedback software that currently fills the market.
In case you have a specific question and want to have a friendly chat with us, you can always book a call with Ovi; he's ready to offer you the guidance needed to get your VoC program off the ground. You can always start your free trial journey by just clicking here and setting up your account.
Customer feedback made easy
Customer feedback tagged automatically
Real-time customer sentiment scores
Pain-points evolution over time
