In 2015, a JetBlue customer sent out a dismayed tweet that his 4-hour flight was spent staring at a broken television set.
How did JetBlue respond? Well, they could have made a silly excuse or altogether ignored his tweet. But that’s not what they did. They reached out to the customer and arranged a credit for the technical difficulties and inconvenience caused.
A mere 23 minutes after the complaint, he tweeted:
“One of the fastest and better Customer Service:
@JetBlue! Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving.”
When Jetblue went out of their way to listen to the voice of customer, the favor was returned generously by him. Not only did they reinforce that customer’s loyalty, but the single tweet by him potentially attracted a lot more customers on the way!
Voice of Customer, or VOC, is a research strategy term that describes your customer’s feedback about your product/service and the expectations they have for it. It brings together various parameters like customer needs, expectations and opinions, sharply focused on improving your product and building a loyal customer base.
Voice of Customer program involves Qualitative and Quantitative research steps that aid in capturing the pulse of the customers to get a better understanding of their expectations and needs. This helps to steer your company’s efforts in the direction to build a product that will evolve into a reputable brand.
Voice of Customer targets reinforcing ‘closing the loop’ process. It is essentially going that one step extra to make sure your customers have a smooth experience with you which guarantees customer retainment.
As the term suggests, Voice of Customer is listening to your customers and their opinions.
It is an in-depth process of extracting a detailed view your customers have about the product or service you offer. If you care about your product, you would care more about the voice of customers. Turning a deaf ear to them is the first turn you take in the wrong direction. To deliver excellent customer experience, companies need understand the experiences they’re delivering to their clients. This is why voice of customer programs are crucial; the ability to listen to your customers will give you an upper hand to compete on customer experience. A customer feedback software can pitch-in to do the job for you!
When you remove your customers from the equation of generating revenue and building your brand, then you got all the calculations wrong. It’s a no-brainer that customer is the king and if you plan to have the monopoly in your domain, the voice of customers is the direct path to it.
Voice of Customer directs to building a strategy to involve the various wings of a company into a coordinated approach to having a great customer experience, addressing issues and resolving them quickly and effectively.
If you are marching to become the industry leader, your customers can spearhead the movement. Their contribution to molding your brand is often underutilized.
As Bill Gates rightly said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Now you know why tech giant Microsoft has remained an undisputed market ruler all through the years!
An effective Voice of Customer program allows you to connect and engage with your customers at every crucial touch point in the customer experience journey. This would improve the loyalty within your customers who would proceed to proudly endorse your brand. This directly results in more referred customers and handsome amounts of revenue.
In addition, top-notch best-in-class Voice of Customer users also enjoy 55% greater customer retention rates, have an average 23% decrease in year-over-year customer service costs and sport 292% greater employee engagement rates!
Merely listening to your customers isn’t sufficient; taking an effective action to resolve issues is key! Customer feedback tools thus find a place in the investment plans for your business.
No business has flourished in a day. It takes immense efforts to take care of every critical stage involved. Voice of customer programs are most effective when all the units like marketing, customer care, operations, and product development join hands to put forth a great customer experience journey. This can help the organization to identify blind spots quickly and make amends.
When your customers are happy, your brand grows, revenue soars.
When you treat your customers as king, you will eventually become the industry ruler!
Weave new concepts, ask the right questions, make quick decisions, and implement the best solutions!
The voice of customer is best heard as an engaging conversation. To build and scale a successful voice of customer program, timely collection and utilization of data is necessary. There are broadly four touch points of interactions with your customers in a business namely sales, support, transactions and ratings & feedback.
To build a great Voice of Customer program, the following practices can be adopted:
1. Open the gates wide for feedback: Listen in earnest to the voice of customers. This data which is collected must be both useful and actionable.
2. Make Feedback Collection a routine: Stay in touch with your customers regularly. A gentle follow-up with an email survey can easily fetch you a nod of approval and you can gain valuable feedback from them.
3. Analyze & Realize: Gain crucial insights from the feedback you collected. Locate the spots which require serious attention and immediate action.
4. Take Control, Take Action: Merely gathering and piling up a lot of data would prove to be useless unless some remedial actions are lined up in order. Address and resolve customer issues. When customers voice their opinions, they expect to be heard and see some corrective measures taken for it.
5. Retain and Monitor: Once you resolve customer issues quickly and effectively, they would be pleased. Without second thoughts they would pledge loyalty to your brand. Good customer retention means lesser churn. Lesser churn fetches more revenue. Having real-time monitoring on your customers helps you uncover patterns to track improvements.
Building a strong Voice of Customer program involves collecting active feedback from your customers to keep pace with their expectations from the brand. The following methods are effective to let you collect Voice of Customer data which is both useful and insightful.
Surveys: An engaging survey can extract opinions of your customers effortlessly. It can precisely help you locate the areas where customers are satisfied as well as dissatisfied.
Social Media: The entire world revolves around social media now. People take to their social networking sites to openly express their opinions regarding a particular product or service they just purchased. Keeping a close tab on the voice of customer, viz their comments and views can help you figure out certain patterns to predict customer behavior.
Intercept Surveys are real-time surveys involving direct interaction with your clients. For instance, approaching diners leaving a restaurant for a quick review is a form of intercept surveys. Our offline survey app can aid you in gathering feedback from customers, even in the absence of internet connection.
Net Promoter Score: NPS fetches user feedback using a simple question of rating the product on a scale of 0-10. The widely popular NPS tool helps you to identify your loyal as well as dissatisfied customers. Your customers are the ones that pay for your products and services day in, day out – so what they think of your offering can potentially make or break your business.
Asking the right questions in an engaging manner can not only fetch you accurate feedback but also fetch you higher number of responses. SurveySparrow allows you to build conversational surveys capable of providing a refreshing experience to your audience. Be pleasantly surprised to see higher rates of survey completion too!
You can collect voice of customer data to uncover insights to help you improve your customer experience.
A rich dashboard helps you gain in-depth info from your survey responses. You can employ this to uncover and predict requirement patterns and customer behavior.
Set up your SurveySparrow account, create a survey, listen to the voice of customers, and take active measures!
Don’t miss out on the NPS calculator we have created for you. Calculate your NPS score to find out where your organization stands!
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