What is voice of the customer?
If you want to provide world-class customer experiences, you need to listen to the voice of the customer.
Regardless of your industry or business size, prioritizing the voice of the customer will bring you closer to success, allowing you to build better customer relationships that boost revenue and drive loyalty.
That’s because listening to the voice of the customer is essential to understanding your customers’ needs – and understanding your customers’ needs is essential to delivering excellent customer experiences at every stage of the customer journey.
Read on to learn more about the voice of the customer: what it is, why it’s so important, and how you can collect and use voice of the customer insights to strengthen your business.
What is meant by voice of the customer?
Voice of the customer (also known as VoC) is the sum of what customers are saying about your business, product, service, and the customer experiences you provide. Often used in market research and experience management, voice of the customer insights are used to understand how customers feel about your business – and identify where you can improve.
A voice of the customer program is a way of capturing and analyzing customer feedback, helping you to better understand their requirements, preferences, and frustrations.
By listening to the voice of the customer, you can ensure your business is truly meeting their needs and boost your customer satisfaction ratings.
The importance of voice of the customer
Why does the voice of the customer matter for businesses? Listening to the voice of the customer can help you to:
- Create products, services, and experiences your customers love.
- Build stronger customer relationships.
- Improve loyalty and retention.
- Get the edge on competitors.
- Increase your revenue and decrease your spending.
- Set your business up for long-term success.
- …and more.
Here are four benefits that reveal why listening to the voice of the customer is important for every team in your business.
1. Deeper customer understanding
VoC research allows businesses of all types to truly understand their customers’ needs – so they’re better equipped to meet them.
“The insights you glean from a voice of the customer program can help you to create personalized, tailored customer experiences at every stage of the customer journey”
This is important for acquiring new customers as well as for retaining and satisfying existing customers. Understanding what your existing customers value and need helps you to better serve them (leading to improved retention), but it also helps you to hone your product-market fit and ideal customer profiles, so you know how to market, sell, and appeal to new customers too.
The insights you glean from a voice of the customer program can help you to create personalized, tailored customer experiences at every stage of the customer journey, from knowing which product improvements will have the biggest impact to delivering customer service that delights.
2. Improve loyalty and retention
Listening to your customers and addressing their needs is crucial for long-term customer satisfaction. Now more than ever, customer satisfaction and the overall customer experience has become a critical differentiator for many companies. As Martin Kõiva, CEO of Klaus, told us: “I think the focus is moving to customer satisfaction, to excellent service. Because frankly, sometimes there isn’t much else to compete on because if everything else is pretty similar in some industries, then that’s where the competition actually happens.”
“Businesses that run voice of the customer programs spend 25% less on customer retention than those that don’t”
Understanding your customers – and acting on these insights – can keep them from turning to competitors. Research has found that businesses that run voice of the customer programs spend 25% less on customer retention than those that don’t.
3. Make better business decisions
By listening to VoC insights, you can ensure that your organization is aligned with the voice of the customer, so you can be confident that you’re always moving in the right direction for continued customer happiness and success.
Understanding the voice of the customer can help you to prioritize and make more customer-centric choices at every level. Not sure which feature to prioritize, which new product to build next, or what your next launch should look like? Armed with your voice of the customer data, you can make data-driven decisions that center on customers’ needs as you plan your product and business roadmaps.
4. Increase your bottom line
One study by the Aberdeen Group found that best-in-class voice of the customer programs have real financial impacts on business growth. The study saw major impacts across customer experience, employee engagement, and revenue growth, with top performers enjoying:
- 55% greater client retention rate.
- 23.6% reduction in customer service costs year-over-year.
- 292% greater employee engagement rate.
The cherry on top? They found that firms with best-in-class voice of the customer programs grow annual revenue by over 48% year-over-year – almost 10x greater than those trailing in VoC programs.
However, while these results are impressive, the study was careful to note that they were only possible because the best-in-class companies didn’t just collect customer feedback – they made sure to put those insights into action using the right processes and technologies to help them achieve customer-delighting results.
How to create a VoC program
So how do you start a best-in-class voice of the customer program that helps you to realize all these benefits?
There are lots of ways to create a VoC program, as well as loads of tools and software to help you build, run, and analyze it. But when it comes down to it, there are really only three major components to any voice of the customer program:
- Capture the data.
- Analyze the data.
- Act on the data.
Of course you can drill down and get much more complex, but these three steps are a great way to get started with your voice of the customer research. Once you have this simple VoC program in place, you can start to grow and expand it over time to help you get even more insights.
1. Capture the data
Use what you already have
You might think you need to start from scratch, but the truth is you probably already have a lot of channels for customer feedback that you can draw on. Customer communications – such as emails, live chats, feature requests, and other conversations housed in your customer support software – are all sources of valuable voice of the customer data you can incorporate into your VoC program. Other existing channels you can incorporate include customer success calls, social media mentions, and customer reviews.
Ask the right questions
Depending on what you want to know, you’ll probably want to supplement your existing customer data with more targeted outreach. To help your program have the biggest impact, you may want to set a few goals that will inform your research. For example, if you want to use your VoC program to help you decide what feature or product you should build next, you could run a survey to solicit feedback on what customers are trying to achieve or what they’d like to see on the roadmap. Or if your goal is to improve your customer experience, you could ask customers who contacted your customer support team how happy they are with the customer service they received.
Ask questions in the right way
It’s not just about what you ask – it’s about how, when, and where you ask it too.
“You want to be smart about asking the right question, at the right time, in the right place, to the right customer”
As Deepa Subramanian, CEO and co-founder of Wootric (now InMoment), told us: “Just as companies are discovering how important customer feedback is, survey fatigue is also setting in. It’s not just about sending surveys; you’re going to overwhelm customers if that’s the only approach you take. Customers love giving feedback, but you have to build that experience very carefully. You want to be smart about asking the right question, at the right time, in the right place, to the right customer. You know so much about this customer. Be really creative about reaching them or engaging with them.”
Surveys are a great source of feedback, but as Deepa mentions, a little creativity can go a long way to help them resonate with users. Using in-app surveys can help to reduce the survey fatigue, because you can catch people in the right context, when they’re already engaged with your product or thinking about your business.
Another useful tactic is to make your surveys as lightweight as possible, so they’re almost effortless for customers to complete. (Think: one or two simple questions asking users to rate something using a numerical scale or by picking an emoji.) This can help you to get more responses, because you’re not asking for a lot of time or effort from your customer. Then, as you analyze the results, you can always drill down into any areas or audience segments that warrant further investigation.
You can also experiment with other different formats. For example, if you’re looking to get really specific (and you’re willing to trade a higher volume of responses for more in-depth answers), you could run a focus group with key accounts, or even do a series of one-to-one customer interviews.
The most important thing is to always be mindful of your customers’ time, and try to make giving their feedback as simple, efficient, and effective for them as possible.
Ask the right people
Next up is the who. Again, the target audience of your VoC program will depend on your overall goals. Do you want to do a general pulse check across your entire customer base? Or are you looking for more targeted insights about specific pain points?
For example, if you want to use your voice of the customer research to improve your onboarding, you might target new users to rate the experience while it’s still fresh in their minds. Or if you want to understand how to improve your customer service experience, you could run a survey targeting customers who gave negative support ratings in the last six months asking them why they gave the rating they did and how you can do better.
2. Analyze the data
Consolidate data across sources
As we’ve seen, there are lots of inputs and touchpoints you can use for your voice of the customer research. Valuable information might live across a number of platforms and tools, such as your customer support tool and your CRM, or collected in Google Docs, spreadsheets, and more.
“By connecting vital sources of customer feedback, such as your customer support tool, with the other tools in your arsenal, you can help to keep crucial data in one place and up to date”
The first step is to consolidate the data so you can be sure you’re getting the full picture. An integrated tech stack can help you to do this more efficiently. By connecting vital sources of customer feedback, such as your customer support tool, with the other tools in your arsenal, you can help to keep crucial data in one place and up to date, improving data hygiene and making it easier for you to analyze.
Identify themes and trends
Once you’ve collected and collated all this data, the next step is to spot themes and trends. You can do this manually or leverage AI capabilities to help you surface recurring topics.
In addition to identifying overall trends, such as popular keywords, common issues, or changes in ratings (such as your customer satisfaction score or net promoter score), this is where you can really get granular. By drilling down into the voice of the customer feedback and segmenting it by audience type or journey stages, you can get an even clearer picture of how specific customers feel at different times. With this level of detail, you can start to create more tailored customer journeys to give each customer the experience they expect.
3. Act on the data
Share your findings across the business
Once you’ve completed your analysis, you should make your key findings widely accessible across your organization. To be truly customer-centric, the voice of the customer should be incorporated by every team, from product to support. By sharing the main takeaways, you can empower every team to learn from the VoC program and build it into their own strategies and day-to-day work.
Put a plan in place
Now that you know what customers really want, it’s time to make it happen. How can you turn insights into action? For example, if your VoC research reveals that customers expect more personalization, you can create customized messaging flows based on first-party data to ensure that they’re only getting targeted, timely, relevant messages.
“As part of your action plan, don’t forget to set a measurable goal to help you track your progress”
Or take our own example: when the Customer Advocacy team spotted mention of slow load times in customer feedback, they raised it with the Research, Analytics, and Data Science team, who had also seen it come up in NPS feedback. With these two strong data points, they were able to escalate the issue and action improvements.
As part of your action plan, don’t forget to set a measurable goal to help you track your progress. For example, if your goal is to improve onboarding, you may want to measure depth of feature use after a certain number of months or stickiness of customers; if you’re looking to improve the customer experience and build more brand advocates, your objective could be to increase your Net Promoter Score by X points.
VoC analytics
While there are plenty of tools out there that can help you to run your VoC analytics, one of the easiest and most efficient options is to leverage the analytics and reporting that are already baked into the tools you use every day.
Because you can use Intercom at every stage of the customer journey, and because you can use it across multiple channels and collect customer feedback in a variety of ways – from live chat messages to survey responses – it’s an ideal way to get closer to the voice of the customer.
With all this important data in one central place, it’s easy to run reports or dive deeper into specific segments to get even more insights and context. And by using clever machine learning capabilities, you can quickly surface topics that are top of mind for customers, allowing you to stay close to the voice of the customer.
Voice of the customer examples
There are lots of opportunities to hear the voice of the customer loud and clear – you just have to be ready to listen.
Here are some examples of channels you can use to gather customer feedback as part of your VoC program.
1. Surveys and feedback forms
Surveys and feedback forms are a great way to capture customer sentiment around specific questions. Whether you use a simple rating system or ask open-ended questions, surveys and feedback forms are a great way to quickly and easily hear directly from your customers. Some questions you can ask include:
- How easy was it to find what you were looking for?
- How was our service today? 😠😞🙂😃🤩
- How satisfied are you with Examply so far? [1–7]
- What could we do to improve? [Open text box]
Pro tip: With Intercom Surveys, you can capture and act on voice of the customer feedback, all at once. Our surveys can automatically trigger next steps based on survey results, making it easy to show customers that you’re listening.
2. Live chat
Live chat is a goldmine for voice of the customer research. Customer questions or support queries can signal where they’re being blocked, what they’re trying to do, and any other issues they’re having. And because these conversations are all happening in the messenger, it’s easy to search the text for patterns and find emerging themes (especially when you have powerful reporting features on your side).
3. One-to-one interviews
If you want to go deep, one-to-one customer interviews can help you to really understand your user’s experience and their pain points. Because you’re talking to them directly in the moment, you have the opportunity to ask your most pressing questions – and they have a direct channel to share any issues or frustrations they’re experiencing.
4. Focus groups
Another option for real-time discussion is to run a focus group. By gathering a small group of customers – selected by industry, plan type, or location – and running targeted sessions, you can have a productive conversation that may spark more ideas or commonalities than if you had interviewed each customer alone.
5. Social media and review sites
Many customers turn to social media and review sites to share their experiences – both positive and negative. As a result, these channels can be especially useful to monitor: they can help you understand what customers loved so much they wanted to tell the world about it, as well as what didn’t work so well for them, up to and including churn reasons. These are also key channels for prospective buyers when researching your brand, so addressing the concerns raised here – or even leaving a reply to let people know their feedback was heard – can go a long way.
Putting the voice of the customer at the center of everything
For customer-centric businesses, listening to the voice of the customer is one of the most important things you can do. Running a VoC program, collecting insights, and responding to customer feedback can help you to better meet your customers’ needs, so you can deliver better customer experiences and sustainably grow your business in the right direction.
Frequently Asked Questions about “Voice of the customer”
