VoC Program Must: How to reduce Workload While Boosting Engagement

David Pop

5

min read

Maintaining a stable Voice of the Customer program can be challenging, especially with feedback coming from multiple sources. A significant portion comes from support teams, often not the most positive. Product reviews also play a major role, with the average in the e-commerce industry among US citizens being around 112 reviews, and even higher, between 159-203, for the Millennial and Gen Z demographic.

This data is scattered across various channels like social media and Google, making it tough to collect, analyze, and draw objective conclusions to address major organizational gaps. This article will look into how VoC tools like ClientZen can dramatically lighten your team's workload and boost customer engagement with minimal extra effort.

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VoC Program Basics

Before diving into how voice of customer tools efficiently manage your workload, let's revisit the essentials of a Voice of Customer program. This isn't just a refresher but also a guide for newcomers or those starting their own VoC program. We'll cover the basic steps crucial for designing an effective VoC strategy, ensuring everyone, from seasoned professionals to beginners, has a solid foundation in understanding and implementing these customer-focused programs.

1. Define Objectives and Goals

Start by defining clear objectives for your VoC program. Not all feedback will be relevant to your goals, which could range from boosting sales, enhancing loyalty programs, diversifying products, to understanding market trends. Identifying these goals shapes your data collection strategy, influencing whether to focus on social listening, surveys, reviews, or a combination. A clear purpose ensures that your VoC analysis leads to focused and relevant discussions and decisions.

2. Gather VoC Data

Selecting the right VoC data sources is critical to aligning with your specific goals. This strategic approach helps in targeting the most relevant and rich data pools. Here, we'll dive into various sources that can enrich your VoC program with meaningful insights, ensuring your data collection is not only comprehensive but also directly aligned with your strategic objectives. Let's explore these key sources in detail:

  • Social Media/Social Listening: Track brand-related conversations and trends for insights into public perception and direct brand mentions.
  • Surveys: Use well-crafted surveys to gain insights into customer preferences and loyalty.
  • Online Customer Reviews: Analyze customer feedback on platforms like Yelp or Google My Business for genuine customer feedback.
  • Live Chat and Chatbots: Use real-time communication tools to capture immediate customer data and common queries.
  • Web Behavior and Purchase Patterns: Study web data for insights into customer behavior and preferences.
  • Sales and Support Interactions: Review conversations for insights into customer expectations and issues.
  • Email Insights: Examine customer service emails for detailed feedback and opportunities for improvement.
  • Keywords and Hashtags: Monitor relevant hashtags and keywords associated with your brand for comprehensive data.

3. Extract VoC data and findings

Extracting meaningful insights from VoC data involves understanding key metrics that reveal customer perspectives. Here are some important metrics:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer likelihood to recommend your business. Scores range from 1-10, classifying customers as promoters, passives, or detractors.
  • Customer Effort Score (CES): Assesses how easy it is for customers to interact with your business, rated on a scale from 'strongly disagree' to 'strongly agree'.
  • Social Listening and Engagement Indicators: Track online interactions like shares, comments, and retweets to gauge your brand's online presence and reputation.
  • Sentiment Analysis: Uses AI to analyze the emotional tone of customer feedback, providing deeper understanding of customer sentiments.

These metrics are crucial for drawing actionable insights from your VoC data.

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Voice of Customers challenges

Challenges are vital in every aspect of life, not just in our careers or business environments, but also personally. As humans, we are wired to face and conquer challenges. This drive is what propels our growth, enabling us to improve ourselves and shape better versions of the things that hold our world together.

VoC and CX professionalsoften find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of customer feedback they need to process. This involves collecting, organizing, analyzing, and deriving actionable insights for crucial business decisions. To simplify, we'll focus on the top 4 challenges that VoC experts most commonly face.

  1. Time and Resources: Time constraints and limited resources are significant hurdles for VoC and CX professionals. The process of sifting through feedback, categorizing it, and analyzing it for actionable insights requires considerable effort. Often, teams are stretched thin, juggling multiple tasks, leading to potential burnout and decreased efficiency.
  2. Scattered and Unorganized Data: Feedback often comes from diverse sources – social media, surveys, customer calls, etc., each with its format. The challenge lies in consolidating this voc data into a unified, manageable format. Unorganized data leads to difficulties in tracking trends and anomalies, making it hard to create a coherent analysis.
  3. Data Modeling and Finding Sense: Beyond gathering customer data, making sense of it through effective data modeling is a complex task. It involves identifying patterns, segregating noise from valuable information, and understanding underlying customer sentiments. This process is critical to transforming raw data into strategic insights that can inform business decisions.
  4. Speed and Acting on Time: In a rapidly changing market, the ability to quickly process customer feedback and implement changes is crucial. Delayed responses can lead to missed market opportunities and dissatisfied customers. The challenge lies in balancing thorough analysis with the need for swift action.

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Effective Solutions to Enhance VoC Programs

Although tackling these challenges might seem tough, especially when efficiency often equates to additional costs, it's important to balance this with cost-effectiveness. We all strive to maximize efficiency without compromising our profit margins. The key is to find solutions that enhance our company's performance while also being financially smart.

Let's se how voice of customer tools like ClientZen can listen to your employees voice solving their main struggles while also listening to your clients and enhance their customer experience with just a few buck's.

Reduce up to 80% of your workload with ClientZen.

There's often skepticism about how much VoC tools can actually save on resources. But could they really cut workload by up to 80%? This is exactly what Prestashop's team experienced after integrating ClientZen into their VoC program. Their case demonstrates the significant impact and efficiency VoC tools can bring to business operations.

Prior to using ClientZen, the workload of analyzing customer feedback was overwhelming for the small two-person VoC team, realistically requiring a team of over ten. However, with ClientZen's efficient tools, these two team members can now effectively handle the workload, showcasing ClientZen's remarkable time-saving capabilities and its proficiency in managing substantial volumes of customer feedback.

Improving User Interaction with customer feedback

With ClientZen's ability to gather feedback from diverse sources like Intercom, Zendesk, Slack, and G2, data processing and modeling became much more straightforward for Prestashop's team. This efficiency allowed their customer experience team to handle client interactions more proactively and effectively, categorizing and responding to customer input with newfound insights from their VoC tool.

As a result, customer support interaction around Prestashop's products dropped by 9%, showcasing the tool's impact in streamlining processes and freeing up resources for other tasks.

Managing Customer Sentiment and reduce negativity by 15%

Managing and structuring customer feedback effectively, and accurately identifying sentiment, can indeed help mitigate negative perceptions. It's a challenging task, but with precise labeling and understanding of the issues, along with efficient use of resources, negative customer feedback can be significantly reduced. This is what Prestashop achieved using ClientZen.

By correctly labeling issues, they were able to track customer frustration at each step of the customer journey. As a result, negative sentiment during PrestaShop's onboarding phase decreased by 15%, demonstrating improved customer satisfaction. This success highlights Prestashop's proactive and agile VoC strategy, with ClientZen aiding in pinpointing and building upon areas of customer dissatisfaction.

Let's wrap things up

In wrapping up, it's clear that the success of a Voice of the Customer program hinges on effective management and utilization of customer feedback. The challenges are significant, from handling vast, diverse data to deriving actionable insights in a time-efficient manner. However, as illustrated by Prestashop's experience, the right voice of customer tools, such as ClientZen, can revolutionize this process.

By streamlining data analysis and customer insights extraction, these tools empower businesses to not only understand their customers better but also to respond proactively to their needs, enhancing customer satisfaction, net promoter score, and overall customer loyalty.

The key takeaway is that with thoughtful strategy and technology, Voice of the Customer programs can become a powerhouse for customer-centric growth and innovation, ultimately bolstering customer satisfaction and driving business success.

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David Pop

Marketing Manager at ClientZen