Voice of the Customer

When a company is still small, customer feedback is easy. You know your customers. You talk to them. But when your company grows, this gets harder. Contact with customers becomes more indirect and their feedback doesn't always reach the right person. This is exactly what a VOC program fixes. It's a program that helps you collect, analyze, and follow up on customer feedback, both in an ad hoc and structural way.

VOC or Voice of the Customer means that you as a company gather and analyze the feedback, needs and preferences of your customers in order to improve your products, staff, processes or services. It's a type of market research that includes customer feedback analysis, in-depth interviews and ethnographic research. However, there are some distinctive differences between market research and voice of the customer.

Once this research is done, the insights gleaned are being transformed into prioritized projects, programs or backlog items that aim to improve the customer experience. These are hierarchically ordered and based on actual customer feedback, hence the name 'Voice of the Customer'.

It typically is a practice that is especially popular in product development but has since been used to improve processes and services as well in bigger companies.

The first thing you need to do in a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is - of course - to actually gather feedback from your customers. You can do this in either a quantitative or qualitative way, but a best practice is to combine both approaches.

According to Gartner, there are 3 types of feedback you can capture:

1. Direct feedback: Feedback is given directly to the organization when the customer knows the organization is listening and may expect a response. 
   
   Some examples: surveys, complaints, market research or panels, user testing, ...
   
   
2. Indirect feedback: The customer is speaking about the organization but not necessarily directly to the organization. Communications directly to the company may qualify if the VoC-related content is not related to the reason for the initial interaction.
   
   Some examples: social listening, review sites and text analytics applied to customer care interactions.
   
   
3. Inferred feedback: Operational, behavioral and transactional data that is associated with customer experience.
   
   Some examples: Order shipping, inventory, sales data (location, channel, products, ...) , 
    purchase history, customer service interactions, returns, website and app activity,... 

When you start intentionally gathering customer feedback, you'll quickly notice your next challenge: the volume of input that needs to be processed. For a good customer feedback analysis, it's important to centralize feedback and have an objective way to turn it into insights. That's why at Hello Customer we believe that linguistics and sentiment analysis is key in this process.

When your customer feedback is analyzed and categorized, you need to turn it into useful insights. Which part of your offering is performing well; which part is not? Are there recurring complaints and can you link them to a specific location, process or product?

In the end, it's all about root-cause analysis of both positive and negative customer feedback.

The strength of a VOC program lies in its ability to go full circle. If you're only gathering and analyzing customer feedback and doing nothing more, then inevitably nothing will change and nothing will improve. The best practice is to get a cross-functional team together that combines people from Customer Service / Support, Operations, Sales and top-level management.

Those people should be informed about the VOC analysis that has been performed and together take responsibility to make the changes and improvements recommended by the voice of the customer, a reality.