What is Voice of Customer Data Analytics: Why it happened, And How to Deal With It

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Voice of Customer (VoC) is not a brand-new concept. It’s a method that companies have been using for a long time to comprehend and prioritize customers’ needs. However, how VoC data is gathered and used to analyze and implement has changed.

Companies are discovering that new technologies make the collection of customer data more simple than ever before. And these technologies have created amazing new possibilities to improve customer service.

We’ll explain the basics of Voice of Customer data analytics and the various types. Also, we’ll look at how you can create a VoC strategy starting from scratch in just five easy steps.

Table of Contents

What’s the Voice of Customer Data Analytics?

Voice of Customer Analytics (often abbreviated as VoC) is the process of understanding the requirements of customers, their motivations, and the challenges customers face in their interactions with your company. It lets you spot the areas of customer satisfaction that are not being met and take corrective action.

Collecting customer feedback can give you a wealth of information to boost efficiency, making it among the most effective and cost-effective instruments for business. However, you must take more than just listening. You have to understand their motivations and desires.

VoC analytics enhances services, products and processes to meet customer expectations better.

Applying the information to all aspects of your customer’s experience is possible. Think sales, marketing and service—also, support.

To utilize VoC correctly, you must identify and listen to customer requirements, follow up, and repeat.

For instance, a commercial insurance company could use VoC analytics to determine the industries they should focus on. They could analyze their responses from surveys asking subscribers to select which industry they are in.

Utilizing VoC to discover your customer’s needs and then address them by offering valuable content is also possible.

For instance, an accident legal firm could ask their customers to discover what subjects they were in a state of confusion, prompting them to seek professional assistance. If the most requested answer was: “What’s the time frame for a response when I write an email request?’ ?’–they can then write an informative blog article or develop informative social media content to attract more clients.

The types of Voice of Customer Analytics

The kind of Voice of Customer analytics you’ll use will depend on your target audience and the questions you’re trying to answer.

Getting Started

There’s a wide range of survey tools that you can use.

This can be described as a platform for analytics and feedback that lets you analyze customer data in real time to help you make better decisions for your company. The automated technology of Lumoa eliminates the tedious manual task of analyzing, collecting and applying VoC data.

In this way, you can focus on closing the loop with your customers whenever you can.

Should you choose to use any platform that allows you to view information from all your customer feedback channels, whether from phone calls, surveys, Chat conversions, or phone calls and online review sites.

It provides a bird’s-eye at what customers say about your business, which is the most valuable information an organization can analyze to improve.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

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It is essential to listen first to gain insight into your customers’ experience.

These surveys are one-time and provide in-depth insights into how consumers feel about their experience with a company.

They typically last more lengthy than the other VoC gathering methods and could need participants to take longer to answer questions. For example, “What was your most memorable aspect about the product?” and “How likely would you recommend this product to others?”

For instance, take the time to read this satisfaction survey by Capital Bank:

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They’re looking for more than just a five-star rating and have identified areas where they’d like feedback, such as the time it took to process transactions and how easy it is to use digital banking options.

There’s also a space for customers to submit comments at the bottom.

You can gather VoC information through surveys such as Capital Bank’s, monitoring of social media customer service interactions and other sources of qualitative information.

You can also use quantitative data, such as web analytics or app usage patterns. Combining both kinds of data provides a comprehensive view of your client’s thoughts about your company and its products. It’s more than one method.

Telecommunications and banking companies surveying customers will be the largest source of customer feedback. Most of the interactions that customers interact with you are…

On your mobile or website app
In the phone conversation with the customer service representative

It is why surveys that appear on the screen when a user is using your product work very well for companies like Capital Bank. It could be their only interaction with the client after the purchase.

For telecom companies, You can move this step by requesting your customer service team to call current or previous customers to collect feedback. Record these calls (with the customer’s permission) and then review the recordings later to review the results and implement the feedback.

Please note what they have to say about your product or services and how they discuss their experience with you. Be aware of what they do not say about your products or services. For instance, negative phrases such as “I am annoyed by the length of time it takes”.

Find out what customer needs they are most concerned about. They could be:

Functional (i.e. Better mobile application)
Emotional (i.e. Friendly staff)
Status-related (i.e. you feel like VIPs)

After identifying the requirements, you can prioritize them according to their impact on business results, like sales revenue growth and market share.

Direct Feedback from Customers

Gathering feedback at every point during the customer journey is essential to understand customers’ needs better.

Direct feedback is a straightforward type of VoC based on a continuous dialogue between your customers and your business.

It could be a suggestion box such as an email address, phone number, or social media channels such as Facebook Messenger or Twitter direct messages (DMs).

The creation of a system for gathering feedback is essential, and then using it as a way to achieve constant improvement. A well-designed feedback system allows for ongoing discussions on new topics and trends. In the same way, make sure you regularly discuss your successes, challenges and lessons learned with the team members.

Remember that customer feedback is a dialogue between your customer and you.

When you are beginning to create your voice of the customer analytics program, be sure to keep these suggestions in your head:

Feedback is a dialogue that should continue, not a single event
The goal of collecting feedback is to improve products/services/processes continuously

Salesforce is an excellent example of feedback from customers properly.

Salesforce came up with IdeaExchange, an online forum that allows them to gather feedback and look over suggestions made by their clients.

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The team responsible for product development monitored the forum and analyzed customer suggestions before implementing them. They have received widespread support, as was proven by the number of votes received by the entry.

Following their decision on the suggestion they received, they thanked the initial customer who had made the entry.

Social Media Analytics

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Many social media platforms have analytics tools that help companies track mentions based on location, sentiment analysis (positive compared to negative), sentiment comparison with time or against other brands, and much more.

These tools will assist you in understanding what your followers are saying online about you.

You could also check your website’s analytics. Be aware of the KPIs (a key performance indicator), such as social shares, to determine which web blogs and pages your visitors are most engaged with and the bounce rate to identify those that need to improve their user experience.

Not only will your VoC strategy benefit from these tips, but you will also benefit from these insights—strategies for SEO.

Social media is a feedback goldmine for retailers specifically. It is because, unlike other industries such as banking, your customers probably already follow their favourite brands on social media platforms.

DataReportal shows that 75% of users utilize social media to look up products in 2022.

Be vigilant about all your tag lines, comments and direct messages. These are the primary sources of feedback.

The Reasons to Use the Voice of Customers Analytics

The Voice of Customer analytics can help you improve the experience of your customers and help you make better business decisions by capturing a lot of data about how customers interact with products and services.

It can help you understand what people think about their customers, what they are looking for and the best way to improve the quality of your products, services and processes.

It’s particularly crucial for retail, telecommunications, or banking brands since you have to deal with customer service.

Finding patterns, trends, and connections within your data that provide actionable information is crucial.

Read more: Essential Parts of a Website.

Discover the reason why your customers are purchasing the product you offer or offering by providing answers to some of the questions below:

What can I do to improve my product?
What can I do to improve the customer experience?
How can I convert more prospects into sales?

You could also provide outstanding customer service as this business did…

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How do you build the voice of Customer Strategy and Program?

Learn the problem/questions before Making a decision.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when they begin a Voice of Customer program is thinking they are aware of the issues that must be addressed and the best way to solve them.

Before you start to tackle the problem, it’s crucial to identify what the issue is. Find out the exact issue you’re hoping to solve with VoC data.

It’s tempting to draw on programs from other organizations as a source of inspiration or a guideline for your own. However, it would help if you could copy them in bulk.

Your unique circumstances require unique solutions and methods. One company might be more resourceful, while another may have different values. Yet, another could have different norms of culture and expectations regarding what should be carried out within their business environments.

In this way, you have to decide what success is before you start building the components of your plan.

You must answer the following question:

What do you think you can achieve?
What areas of your product or business do you need to improve the most?
What would you like your customers to say about you?

One of the best examples is the brand name retail Timberland.

Their Brand President from the past admitted that for the first couple of years, the brand did not have a means for customers to provide their feedback or offer suggestions. Additionally, they didn’t have any value system or mission statement. It resulted in years of unsuccessful marketing campaigns.

They broke the cycle by soliciting feedback from 18,000 of their customers. After reviewing the feedback, they decided to include the option to review on every page and the live chat feature.

The result was that these steps helped make tracking the performance of products much easier.

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Get Information about the Issue/Question

It is possible to gather data to understand the issue through various methods, the most common being the three mentioned earlier. Naturally, the most effective approach is to talk with clients directly through surveys and interviews.

Other indirect methods include analyzing social media conversations regarding your company or customer service information (e.g. making recordings during calls). For instance, Call centre agents that interact with clients could be able to record their interactions afterwards.

You could also look over customer support calls in which the customer could only solve the issue with help from a different person within your company (such as an administrator or department head).

In the final phase, you can review feedback forms that customers can fill out online or through mailers or email campaigns.

These forms usually require specific details about what they enjoyed and disliked about the products or services you provided and any suggestions they may make to improve.

If you’re conducting an email marketing campaign, you must choose reliable email marketing software. The best platform will depend on the kind of company you operate. For instance, Klaviyo is an email marketing service geared toward eCommerce companies.

But, looking into Klaviyo, other options will be more beneficial for those who run a service-oriented company.

It is best when multiple data sources are utilized to observe patterns across various sources instead of only one. It ensures accuracy while ensuring all information available has been gathered before the third step, which is to formulate hypotheses based on the data.

The means to gather information can be classified into two broad categories: direct and indirect methods.

An obvious method is creating an email campaign asking for customer feedback. An indirect way of doing this is using company data (such as conversions to social media or customer service information).

Synthesize the Voice of Customer Feedback through Insights and Analytics

Utilize the data to uncover insights into the nature, purpose and consumers’ feelings about your service or product in the present market.

Analytics and insights form the core of the success of a VoC program. Analytics is the source of raw data that determines the customer experience. In addition, insights allow you to understand the factors that drive your customers’ behaviour.

The first step of this procedure is to decide on the metrics you need to use to determine how your business is performing. The next step is to track the metrics you are tracking and then analyze them to discover patterns that confirm or disprove the theories of what drives the satisfaction of customers.

For instance, if you believe that a better design will result in higher satisfaction of your customers with your product, monitoring and analyzing results across multiple dimensions can provide evidence in support of or against this theory.

Enhancing one element of the design of your product doesn’t cause customers to rate it higher in general. However, it makes them recommend it more often over similar products in the marketplace. Enhancing one design aspect can increase overall customer trust (and thus increase profit).

Make an action plan based on the findings to improve Customer Satisfaction.

The next step is to create actionable insights using these data using “why” inquiries until you have answers. It, in turn, could be used in direct ways as guidelines for making decisions within your company:

What is the reason our salespeople need help achieving their goals?
What are the reasons why certain features need to be utilized?
Why do only 20% of our customers react positively to questions concerning our online presence?

Once you’ve identified and comprehended your customers’ most pressing issues or concerns and frustrations, you can start to develop strategies to resolve them.

For example, you find out that a frequent issue for your clients is finding details about how your business is run.

In that situation, developing better tools for internal communication or handouts that describe how you work could be beneficial.

Suppose many people complain about your product’s price being excessive or poor quality compared to competitors and other products. In that case, there may be a possibility to reduce both of these factors.

The time to let this be absorbed while writing your action plan will make sure that when you’re ready to implement modifications based on the information you’ve discovered from VoC research, the plan is as efficient as it can be and most importantly, it will result in an increase in profit.

Your action plan can be shared with the customers you’re working with

To ensure you are in touch with your clients and you, ensure you regularly communicate the results of VoC analyses with them. They must know you appreciate your feedback and are trying to improve the customer experience.

In addition, it allows participants to think about their own personal needs, values and expectations by asking questions that include:

How did they feel when they first began using a service or product?
How do those expectations line with reality?
What lessons did they pick up during their journey that might be useful later on?

Conclusion

Voice of Customer data can assist significant value to your toolbox. There are various ways to use it, regardless of the company you manage or your sector. With this data, you can make better choices about what your customers want and where your product could use enhancement.