Why Understanding Voice of the Customer is Critical for Your Business Success
Are you trying to figure out how to make your company more customer focused? Maybe it’s time to take a look a Voice of the Customer (VoC). Don’t rely on guesses about your customer base — actually learn their individual expectations, and drive business growth.
What is Voice of the Customer?
Voice of the Customer is the process by which your customer’s preferences and experiences are collected and shared throughout your company. According to the Gartner Group, 89% of companies expect to be competing on customer experience. With Voice of the Customer, you use knowledge about your customer’s preferences, dislikes, expectations, and so on, for your product or service-based business.
Once you know all of this information about your customers, you can make decisions that drive business success.
Three reasons why VoC is important to every company’s success:
1. Enjoy Better Customer Retention
According to a report by the Aberdeen Group, Fortune 100 companies with the best VoC programs experience 55% higher customer retention rates. Every individual has an experience when interacting with your product, team member, service, or company, so it’s important to know what to expect from them. Knowing what to expect means you can build a product relevant to them, and a relevant product means increased customer retention and brand loyalty.
2. It Gives You a Measurement of Customer Satisfaction
There are generally three customer experiences: negative, average, or extraordinary. Because of the prevalence of social media, a customer can easily log on to their profile and talk about their experience with your business. Most people don’t write about the average experiences — so satisfaction is all about being extraordinary.
Meet or surpass customer expectations when you implement VoC. Even the simple addition of a rating-based system like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure satisfaction is a way to start tracking patterns. Collecting information and knowing loyalty metrics like NPS helps measure customer satisfaction.
3. Personalize the Customer Experience
Customers are pleased to talk about their experiences; see them as a way to experience an “outside-in” view of your business. For example, Amazon is completely data driven so the top-selling products do well and get reordered while those that don’t sell drop. Entire departments are reorganized based on sales patterns. Implement this on a minor level to see big results in your business.
It has never been easier to personalize the customer experience. With the click of a button, you can personalize every customer experience via website changes, ad campaigns, targeted landing pages, and special offers. For people that don’t know where to start, listen to customers for immediate changes (just look at Twitter to see what a personalized experience means to the customer).
Other Benefits of VoC
Better customer retention. A clear measurement of customer satisfaction. A personalized customer experience. These are just three benefits of VoC because the best businesses are truly built off data.
In addition, VoC helps you walk away with benefits like:
- Understanding the needs of your customer
- Identifying pain points in your purchase process
- Improving product or service quality offerings
- Prioritizing customer needs in your long-term vision
- Planning hiring decisions
- Figuring out the vision or plan for your company
The Voice of the Customer should be a dataset every company uses in its company analysis and/or insights. Simple actions like matching your website to customer needs, writing an ad for your most popular age group, or designing a product for a growing segment can all come out of VoC. Take charge of your data and translate it into business success.
Kapiche is here to help you get the edge on your competition by quickly understanding your customers, what they think, and what to do with that information. Learn more at kapiche.com.
