Listening is a fundamental skill that impacts many aspects of life, personal and professional. Listening effectively builds loyalty, rapport, and trust.
It also helps us understand other people better and avoid misunderstandings. For example, by listening to a person’s non-verbal cues, we can tell if they are stressed or nervous.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
A well-developed voice of the customer program exposes your target customers’ top wants and needs. This information allows your business to optimize and improve your product and customer experience, improving customer satisfaction.
When companies improve their products and experiences, they naturally increase the proportion of new business driven by word-of-mouth. This is a cost-effective way to acquire new customers and build brand loyalty.
A great way to collect unsolicited feedback is by analyzing behavior data, such as on-page time in your blog, click-through rates in a newsletter, or the average length of an article in your digital product. Many software tools enable you to collect behavioral analytics quickly and accurately.
A good Voice of the Customer program has a clear purpose and goals for how customer feedback will be used. This will help leaders and staff across the business understand how their work impacts the overall customer experience and lead the company to improve its performance continuously. As a result, customer satisfaction increases as the business delivers on its promises and is consistent with its customers’ expectations.
Increased Customer Loyalty
Companies with a consistent Voice of the Customer program can improve team performance across departments, including product, marketing, and customer support. Employees who feel the company is listening and making changes based on customer feedback will be more engaged.
Studies show that the most successful VoC programs generate a 10x increase in annual sales. That is because customers are much more likely to purchase from a company they know is listening and responding to their needs.
VoC best practices stress a closed-loop form of communication that requires an active response to each positive or negative feedback. Unanswered feedback, especially from Promoters, can damage the brand and cause them to revert to Passives or Detractors.
It’s essential to have a VoC strategy that identifies and prioritizes customer pain points to drive actionable insights. Many pain points can be gleaned from business and outreach analytics, such as NPS score trends, survey results, text-based responses, and social media listening.
Increased Sales
Understanding customers’ needs is the key to growing your business. By implementing a Voice of the Customer program that collects and analyzes feedback from across all touchpoints, you can deliver experiences that perfectly align with your customer’s expectations, driving revenue growth and establishing a competitive advantage for your brand.
By providing a structured approach for collecting, sharing, and acting on feedback, VoC programs improve team performance across the organization. This includes marketing, product development, and customer service teams. For example, marketing can leverage feedback to create customer stories and testimonials used in marketing and social media to attract new customers.
A well-implemented VoC program will help teams prioritize goals, focus efforts, and ensure you deliver value to your customers. To get the most out of your VoC program, you must involve all stakeholders in a priority-setting exercise to identify the most important goals. This will help ensure the entire company is engaged in the program and committed to achieving the desired outcomes.
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Increased Customer Retention
As a result of listening to their customers, companies that use VOC find it easier to retain them. This benefits marketing, sales, customer service, and product teams because they can consistently improve the customer experience and products.
In addition, a consistent VOC program can help organizations avoid the mistakes that have led to considerable losses.
A VOC program should have a clear objective to guide feedback collection. Whether it’s reducing churn, increasing sales, or improving the marketing of a specific product, having a purpose will ensure that your customers’ feedback is being heard and that your VoC strategy is being used to achieve measurable goals. This step will also help you prioritize what needs to be done and when. If you know that Promoters aren’t being rewarded enough or that the number of Passives and Detractors is growing, you must quickly fix this problem.
Increased Product Innovation
Once the company identifies and prioritizes customer needs, the team can create or improve products to produce happy customers. The first step to this process is identifying and communicating the vision for a VoC program so that all employees have an idea of what the goal is and what strategies will work best to achieve it.
The most effective way to do this is by creating a list of goals based on customer feedback. This can include several metrics, such as NPS, survey results, in-product feedback, social media feedback, and more. Once the goals are identified, the company can choose a strategy to test for effectiveness.
In addition, the company can use the data gathered from the survey to identify specific areas of concern and determine possible causes of poor performance. For example, suppose customers complain that the website is slow to load or their navigation buttons are too small on mobile devices. In that case, these can be fixed quickly to increase customer satisfaction. As a result, the company can see an uptick in new business.
