Voice of Customer (VoC)

Voice of Customer (VoC) encompasses the process of gathering and understanding customer feedback so customer responses directly improve the product and customer experience. Collecting customer feedback has historically been a fundamental part of growing a business. But the Voice of Customer shifts the focus from collecting aggregate data to individual data.

An ideal Voice of Customer program will provide a business-wide structure for addressing and utilizing customer feedback. VoC establishes a strategy that involves the entire company so all departments can work together to resolve the problem. This results in a coordinated approach to improving the customer experience, solving challenges, and driving growth for your business.

Why does the Voice of Customer matter?

Voice of the Customer programs are proven to help organizations retain customers, build better products, deliver better services, and systematically understand the customer experience to drive change. Organizations that understand their customer journey are much more likely to improve their products to fit their customer’s evolving requirements and therefore to foster their loyalty.

Bring the customer’s voice into your organization and you can expect the following results, providing you take action on the insights you receive:

Increase revenue: Through reduced churn, improved cross-sell opportunities, and the ability to attract new customers

Reduce costs: By improving processes, ensuring compliance, and creating greater process consistency

Promote culture change: By driving customer-centricity and cross-functional change.

Benefits of implementing a VoC program in your customer service?  

Here are some practical examples of benefits you can enjoy by implementing a Voice of Customer program:

• Integrate insights from your customers into your decision making.
• Understand your customers’ expectations better.
• Evaluate and prevent the risk of your customers churning.
• Measure your customers’ satisfaction at different touchpoints across the customer journey, and your various products and/or services.
• Close the loop with an individual or a group of customers to respond to their feedback.
• Take action, at a tactical and strategic level, to use the Voice of the Customer to make improvements.
• Evaluate the impact of these improvements on your customer metrics, like NPS, as well as your business KPI’s, like revenue, costs and churn.

With the right program in place, the Voice of Customer can directly correlate to business success metrics so it’s well worth the time and effort to connect with customers using the right channel, at the right time. Make sure you share the customer voice in real-time with the right people who can take action to deliver results. Otherwise, your program will fail.

Understanding loyalty and gathering feedback at key points in the customer journey have helped numerous organizations become industry leaders in their field.