Voice of the Customer: How to Generate User Feedback?

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What is the Voice of Customer (VOC)?

The “voice of the customer” is a process used to capture the customer’s feedback in order to provide the best service or product quality for customers.

In short, it is customer expectations or preferences of a product or service. Voice of customer captures everything that customers are saying about the product, service or business. Companies use VoC to see the gap between actual experience and customer expectations with the business. 

VoC and Customer Experience (CX)

Retaining customers is essential for business success and sometimes companies are not aware of the importance of customer experience that a company offers to its customers. Last researches show that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for better customer experience. Why is CX so important to customers?

The reason is simple.

Customer experience envelops the whole buyer’s journey and more than that.  It starts from the beginning when a prospect hears about your product or see your promotional ads and continues with every interaction with your business until they actually become your customer- the full end of the customer journey.

Picture 1. Hub Spot Buyer’s Journey

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How to Collect VOC Data?

It is important to realize that collecting customer feedback is a fundamental part of growing a business.  This helps you build a complete picture of the experience you are delivering to every one of your customers. And also, it helps you understand customer expectations. Once this information is collected, it can be delivered to the business so they can make strategic decisions.

To help you started, here is the list of most common ways to collect feedback.

1.Customer Interviews

Communication with your customer sometimes can be difficult, maybe frightening to you and sometimes time-consuming especially if you are dealing with a rude customer.

But at the same time, communication with your customers directly may help your business to uncover their experience and collect important feedback from them not just hearing them, but also with other types of communication such as body language.

2.Customer Feedback Forms

Feedback forms are a crucial part of voice of the customer, as they are valuable for your business, product or service improvement. If you’re asking yourself how to collect feedback, don’t worry, we have a way. Implementing feedback widget on your website. That is a great thing for you to hear and collect opinions from customers.

Many organizations count on one or two channels to measure and optimize their interactions with customers, which limits the efficiency and depth of customer insights. Without a feedback tool, the voice of the customer programs don’t offer detailed informations about customer preference, behavior, and satisfaction. Furthermore, leading brands and companies all want to gather customer feedback everywhere their customers in order to create a more seamless customer experience.

3. Live Chat

According to a study, 44% of online buyers say that the best feature is the live chat for e-commerce. Having a live chat is an amazing way to hear your customers in real time and collect feedback from them reducing your customers feeling unsatisfied. Using a live chat on your website is a smart way to capture the voice of customers data. You can use Paldesk live chat to provide the best customer experience.

Picture 2. Paldesk Live chat for Travel and Tourism

4.Social Media

We are all witnessing of the powerful impact of social media on business communication and customer feedback. Channels such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn are excellent for getting feedback from customers. And those feedbacks can help to improve customer experience. The core strength of social media is allowing you to have a more direct and real.time conversation with your customers or potential prospects. You can always use the omnichannel platform and interact with customers from Paldesk dashboard and have a complete insight into the voice of the customer.

5.Website Behavior

Your website is a perfect place to gather the voice of customer data, especially if you are in the e-commerce industry. Besides live chat and feedback forms and surveys, you can always analyze your visitors’ behavior on your website. Some of the most familiar analyzing tools are heatmaps, scrolls and visitors recordings. You can do all these metrics with Hotjar – one platform with all tools.

6.Online Customer Reviews

Online reputation is very important for your business and for new prospects. With online reviews sites like Capterra, get App. G2 Crowd, Finance Online and Angie List it is very important to understand the impact they have on your business and how can you use reviews on different sites to earn online reputation.

Moreover, 86% of visitors hesitate to purchase from a business that has online negative or bad reviews.

Picture 3. Define your brand voice

How to Use Voice of Customer (VOC) Data?

Today, al business, no matter how big or small they are, use a lot of data and analytics to find out customers pain points, common customer problems and have a better picture of customer experience.

For example, you can find out that your customers have the same issue and discover the reason why is product bounce rate so high. Having that in mind, there are three key areas you can apply your findings to; marketing content, improve customer experience and product development.

1. Marketing Content

Did you know that only 42% of B2B marketers gather feedback from customers as part of their audience research? That is quite a little number.

When you are analyzing your VOC data, try to look for phrases your customers have used to describe the reason why they are using your service or product. Also, it is important to have more information about the benefits you offer to your customer and the outcomes they have achieved with it.

Applying great content to your website by collecting VOC data will help you with:

• Case studies that will present your brand differences and benefits
• Precisely explain what you are and your service or product does and who you are
• Convert more prospects into buyers and upgrade product sales

Our Paldesk customer care team asked our e-commerce customers why they need to a live chat. The feedback we collected was “Convert e-commerce website visitors into buyers, track intent and improve your sales funnel”. This is the key message that we implemented on our e-commerce landing page.

The result?

Since we made the content change, our free trial registration forms are visited 56% more than before and we reached 64% more full registrations.

Picture 4. Paldesk landing page for eCommerce websites

2. Improve Customer Experience (CX)

We explained importance between the voice of customer data and customer experience previously. If your customer has a positive experience with your brand your business will grow faster. But, if you are not delivering a good customer experience your customers will share negative reviews and feedback online.

With VOC data you can uncover the segments that you need to be more focused, and most helping to improve customer satisfaction, reduce the number of negative reviews, online and offline too.

Relevant: Creating a Customer Service Philosophy

3. Product Development

Last, but not less important- product development. All data that you collect from your customers can help you primarily to help you develop a product that your customer really needs and can implement in their daily business activities. Asking the right questions to your customer and analyzing your VOC data, you are going to discover new opportunities:

• New features that could help your product differentiate from competitors
• Improvements that could improve your product usability
• Suggestions from your customers for correlative products
• Opening new markets

For example, Paldesk launched a new feature – easy popup. 

This feature came as customers feedback on their needs when it comes to promotional aspects of their service on websites. Paldesk is the only live chat that provides easy popup as part of omnichannel communication.

Picture 5. Paldesk new feature – Easy Popup

VOC Best Examples

These companies take their customer experience seriously. But besides that, we can see that by establishing a great customer experience, they’re sending us a message – to step up and be different. It is a way to win customers hearts.

ZAPPOS

Zappos is recognized for its excellent customer service and unique company culture. They say that listening is the number one tool any company can use. They respond to every customer questions, whether it’s via phone, email, live chat, Zappos blog or social media platforms.

APPLE

At Apple, customer listening is more than just lip service. Apple CEO, Tim Cook, receives up to 100s of customer emails every single day, and even responds to some of them. Imagine getting a personal response from Apple CEO. That is a great example of how to differentiate from others.

1-800 CONTACTS

1-800 Contacts was on a mission to find out how to deliver an outstanding customer experience in the digital world. Since 80% of their business is online, they used surveys to ask their customers individually what would make their experiences better. One customer jokingly asked to send him a candy bar and they did. Since then, they’ve been giving other gifts to their customers to make their day. This approach boosts their brand loyalty and social media engagement.

Picture 6.  Customer good news

Final Thoughts

We can conclude that the voice of the customer is essential to the growth of your business. By collecting customer feedback and listening to customers can surely help you to improve your products or services. Plus, to deliver a better customer experience. But it is not enough just to listen. Changes are necessary if you want to see continued success.

Also, a quote to keep you motivated to implement VOC:

“If you had some magic power and were able to discover exactly what customers are craving, and if you also knew how to produce their dream product at a low price, then you would be guaranteed to get rich! Therefore, capturing the exact Voice of the Customer is like striking gold.”  

– Kai Yang, Author of the Book the Voice of the Customer: Capture and Analysis