Voice of customers, why do you need it?
As the pandemic winds down, we’re entering a new era of customer experience (CX).
Customers expect more than ever from the brands they use. They expect products and services to perform exactly to their needs–easy to set up, easy to use, etc–and more personalized and empathetic customer service.
In 2021, customers want to get in touch with your company from wherever they choose – in-app, on live chat, email, phone, etc. In fact, a recent Zendesk CX trends report shows that 64% of customers used a completely new support channel in 2020 and 73% of them plan to continue using it.
Providing omnichannel support comes with many challenges for businesses, but with a robust VOC (voice of customer) program in place, you can easily overcome them. You need to know how to listen to your customers, how to open more channels of communication, how to support them right away when you do, and how to analyze the information you receive for future success.
In this guide, learn how to create your voice of customer program, so you can get to know your customers better.
What is the Voice of Customer?
The voice of customers is compiling and analyzing customer data related to brands, products, or services. Analyzing this data can help you gather insights and direct you towards areas that need improvement in your services. Doing so will assist you to enhance overall customer satisfaction.
A VOC analysis compiles and analyzes customer feedback data from various sources such as reviews, consumer forums, social media, chats, and more. This can help you understand the customers’ experiences, along with their grievances and complaints about your brand, its products, and services.
When using VOC, it’s important to not just focus on positive feedback, negative feedback as being of use as well. Negative feedback is one of the most important as it can shed light on areas of your business, product, or services that diminish the customer experience.
You can put the customer data to use and understand the customers’ expectations, improve the product and service experience, increase sales, and propel your brand to new heights.
The Basics of Voice of Customer Programs
The overall approach to undertaking VOC effectively depends on three components, and they are,
1. Listen
The first thing that you need to do is gather the data from the right sources. You need to identify all the platforms that your customers use to express their thoughts about your brand, products, and services.
VOC Data Collection Sources
These are some of the most effective sources for collecting customer feedback data.
- Online Customer Surveys
Customer surveys are one of the oldest techniques of gathering insights. Brands and businesses have been leveraging this tactic to get in touch with their customers and even potential buyers. It can help you understand the issues faced by existing customers, you can even ask other consumers.
- Social Media
Social media is now the go-to platform for Millennials and Gen Z to communicate with brands. It is also the most utilized channel for consumers to express their experiences, issues as well as positives about the brand. Furthermore, you never know which conversation may gain traction and become a trending topic on social media. It’s best to keep track of conversations surrounding your brand, analyzing them, and most importantly getting in touch with the customers with bad user experiences as soon as possible to avoid a social media crisis.
- Customer Support Chats
Customer support chats can a great source of information. It can help you identify the most common issues or complaints raised by your customers. This can guide you towards areas of improvement such as in your products or services. You can also use these insights to prepare your customer support teams for almost all possible scenarios. On the other hand, analyzing the customer chats can also help you evaluate the performance of your various support teams.
- Reviews and Forums
Reviews and forums are some of the most sought-after sources for your target audience and new prospective customers to know more about your products and services. But it can also be a great source for you to understand how effective, reliable, and helpful the product is from the end users’ perspective.
2. Analyze
After you are done compiling the feedback of your customers from various sources, you need to analyze it. Only then can you understand your customers’ sentiments and opinions about your brand. But analyzing the massive volume of customer feedback data is not going to easy, especially if done manually. The task is too difficult to be done manually and you would lose much of your valuable time. You will need an effective text analysis tool that can analyze the data for you. BytesView is the perfect tool that can help you analyze customer feedback and extract valuable insights with ease.
3. Respond
While customer feedback is important, it’s just as important to respond to those customer queries as soon as possible. An effective voice of customer solution can help analyze customer support tickets based on predefined criteria. As for feedback on various platforms, you can scrape the data and analyze it with BytesView to identify issues that need your utmost attention.
Voice of Customers Best Practices
These are some of the best practices that you should undertake to increase the effectiveness of your analysis.
Define your goals before analyzing customer feedback
One of the first things that you need to realize is what you want to achieve from analyzing customer feedback data.
- What do you need to analyze?
- Is it about your products and services or your brand or organization as a whole?
- Do you want to perform a competitor analysis?
- Do you need feedback on new features and upgrades?
Once you have decided on your goals you will have a clear picture of what you want and can make the r9ight decisions to achieve it.
Gather feedback from multiple sources
Many brands or businesses use the only source of feedback to analyze what being said about their brand, product, or service. But that is a huge mistake as not all customers use the same platforms to express their user experience. Make sure to check all possible sources that users can use. This way you can single out the platforms which the customers use.
Use the proper tools to speed up the process
Gathering data from various sources can be a difficult task, hence, you need an effective tool that can do it for you. BytesView offers various plugins that can help you integrate the data from multiple platforms with ease. Furthermore, you can also integrate the BytesView API in your system for a more efficient customer support mechanism.
Respond as quickly as possible
Now, analyzing the data is important, but you must respond to their customers as well. If you don’t, you might lose customers and your marketing efforts would only keep replacing new customers for old ones. This can become a hurdle for the growth of your organization or brand.
Setting-Up a VOC Solution for your Business
There are three important steps to setting up a VOC solution, and they are:
Gather the data
Choose an effective mechanism that can help you compile the data from various sources. You can build your own scraping tool if you can have or can source the technical expertise or you choose a third-party data provider to do it for you. BytesView is an effective tool that can compile all the required data for you.
Analyze the data
Now the next step is analyzing the compiled data. Bytes View offers various prebuilt data analysis models that can help you analyze the data. Furthermore, you can also integrate the BytesView API with your system and train models with data related to your business to further increase its accuracy.
- Keyword Extraction
- Sentiment Analysis
- Intent Detection
- Automatic Ticket Labeling
- Entity Extraction
- Emotion Analysis
These are some of the various analysis models that you can leverage to extract valuable insights that can help you enhance the overall user experience.
Leverage the insights
After you have the required insights, you should revisit your goals and build and then use the insights to make informed decisions to achieve those goals. It can be for evaluating the general feedback of your products or services, new features, accessing your competitors, retaining customers, and more. In any way, a data-driven approach is always better than blindly making decisions that may make things worse.
Best Voice Of Customers Tools
Here are some of the best voice of customers tools that you can use.
BytesView
BytesView offers a pre-build voice of customers solution that requires no coding to set up. Any user having a general understanding of using a computer can use the tool with ease. It can analyze extensive volumes of customer feedback data with ease. You can compile the data on your own or you can ask the BytesView team to do it for you. You can get access various plugins that you use to compile the data with ease.
BytesView can also help you manage your customer support requests in real-time. The automated ticket tagging model can classify customer queries based on issues or intent and direct them to the right customer support executive, thus decreasing your initial response time.
Lexalytics
Lexalytics is an amazing voice of customer tool that can help you analyze and interpret the sentiments and issues of your customers. It also offers services to manage customer support queries in real-time. You can automate the classification of queries which the help of topic labeling and keyword extraction.
MonkeyLearn
MonkeyLearn is one of the widely known text analysis solutions that can help you with setting up a voice of customer solution. It too offers various plugins for various customer support channels for easy integration of data and analysis. It also offers various visualization tools to better interpret the analyzed data.
MeaningCloud
MeaningCloud is another popular text analysis-based voice of customer solution that can effectively analyze customer interaction across various platforms. You can easily compile the data and analyze it or integrate the API with your system for a more efficient process.
Medallia
Medallia is a great customer support tool that can analyze and interpret customer support data from various sources. The analysis techniques enable you to interpret the data with ease and extract valuable insights about your brand, its products or services, or even your competitors.
Wrapping Up
Performing a VOC analysis can seem intimidating at first, but when you the right tools at your disposal you can enhance the overall user experience. While some solutions gather and analyze data, they often only scratch the surface. Choose the right tools that can provide more in-depth analysis and help focus your attention in the right areas.
Until next time! Adios.
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