Voice of customer data is all audience feedback that is collected by an organization from its audiences via reviews, survey forms, and social media comments to realize brand reputation and sentiment.
These insights can significantly impact marketing efforts, product roadmaps, and sales strategies.
VoC (voice of customer) data offers retail businesses a clear analysis of customer needs and their behavior. If the data is available in large amounts, it’s challenging to manage.
Thus, there arises a necessity for data and analytics service providers to effectively dig and structure such data, before revealing valuable insights that can change customer experience.
Why Do Businesses Need Voice of Customer Analytics?
Research by Gartner identified that businesses can increase both upselling and cross-selling success rates by around 15%-20% by gathering client feedback.
A recent study reports that approximately 94% of US audiences show more interest in making frequent purchases from an organization with a good customer experience (CX).
Businesses need the voice of customer analytics to understand how their audiences interact with products, websites, and services.
Businesses that invest a lot in the voice of the customer programs experience higher customer retention and employee engagement. Hence, they identify VoC to experience higher sales.
Requirements of the customers can be classified as being associated with social responsibility, cost, quality, service, safety, and delivery.
The satisfaction of all these requirements will lead to smooth operations of the organization. The major challenge is how an organization collects and synthesizes all the feedback.
There are multiple ways a business can obtain VoC. Some of them are:
- Industry data
- Sales reports
- Complaint information
- Present company data
- Interviews
- Direct observations
- Surveys
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What are the 4 Steps of VoC?
The complete VoC process consists of 4 major steps such as:
Plan: This step involves systematic planning on how to capture customer feedback, examining the sentiments, and implementing those key insights for organizational growth.
Feedback collection: Earlier surveys were the most powerful way of gathering customer feedback.
Later, with the advancements in digital communication platforms, customer’s voice has become louder on various platforms including community forums, online reviews, and social media.
Feedback collection also includes discovering the origins of VoC data that are associated with your organization, adopting feedback concepts across multiple touchpoints, and properly gathering the data.
Analyze: Soon after collecting raw data, you have to analyze the sentiment involved in the feedback via VoC analysis.
You can segregate the feedback information and extract valuable insights to ensure the respective VoC data is actionable.
Act: Both data and insights will become powerful if changed into action.
This step involves analyzing and solving repetitive challenges pointed out by the customers across various interactions.
Also, it implies the instant involvement of the team to respond to negative feedback.
How Do You Analyze Voice of Customer Data?
VoC data impacts the whole purchasing lifecycle from sales and marketing to consumer success and product.
Data Collection:
You need to focus more on listening to your audience’s experiences and gathering their feedback through interviews or sentiment analysis (interactions on social media & reviews).
It’s better to gather all the details that are already present online and ask directly to the audience.
Text Analytics:
Text analytics is a major component of the voice of customer programs.
By analyzing comments, text documents, and surveys, CX professionals can gain detailed insights into how consumers think and feel about products or companies.
Sentiment Analysis:
The sentiment analysis process involves a combination of NLP and ML, which is a major component of a retail company’s ability to adjust to the frequently changing demands of the industry.
Conducting the voice of the customer sentiment analysis provides insights related to the major problems faced by consumers in terms of customer experience.
By understanding what customer sentiment is about services or products, you can decide where changes are required across your product strategies, marketing, and branding to increase your customer base.
Sentiment analysis tools minimize the misalignment and provide a complete view of patterns occurring across the user experience.
Identify Trends:
Soon after analyzing feedback from customers, you should start the process of identifying trends. In this case, the voice of customer data analysis offers much-needed insights.
Here, you have to look at how many times in a year customer satisfaction has reached a higher level.
This analysis is required to understand which strategies are most effective and which aren’t.
This information can be used later to make better decisions that ultimately end up with enhanced customer experience.
Benchmarking:
Benchmarking provides an in-detailed comparison of your retail business process and practices with its competitors.
By benchmarking VoC data, your customer experience team should focus more on consistent improvement.
Visualization:
Data visualization is a critical stage in the process of capturing consumer feedback across all stages of their journey.
Using VoC data, you can develop dashboards or graphs to visualize user consumer data regularly.
This helps retail brands focus more on the specific needs of their customers at all steps of the purchasing lifecycle and optimize experiences to increase customer satisfaction.
Take Action:
Based on the details collected from VoC data analysis, you should make decisions related to customer service and product development.
This ultimately leads to an increase in brand loyalty, retention, and sales.
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Voice of the Customer Data Best Practices
Listed below are the crucial voice of the customer’s best practices to maximize a company’s growth:
Define your objectives
Establish clear goals of the voice of the customer program to gather feedback from shoppers making sure that they perfectly match your business strategy.
Define relevant, measurable, and achievable goals to facilitate progress tracking.
Select the perfect tools & mechanisms
Evaluate your resources and requirements before choosing relevant data-gathering tools and mechanisms to accurately collect and examine shoppers’ feedback.
If not sure, pilot various mechanisms to decide which ones provide powerful insights.
Develop a dedicated VoC team
Provide necessary training and knowledge to train and develop a team to execute the voice of the customer program.
Inspire cross-functional participation to promote a wider awareness of customer requirements and smoothen the decision-making process.
Visualize outcomes
Establish clear communication concepts to circulate the findings from the VoC program to suitable stakeholders.
Use presentations, reports, or data visualization to convey complicated information in a simple-to-use format making sure that insights are accessible to all participants.
User insights
Create an effective plan to make changes as per the insights received from the VoC program. Categorize actions according to resource needs, possible effects, and utility.
Allocate transparent ownership and the target date to make sure execution can be done on time and pass through an outstanding user journey.
Track and repeat
Constantly evaluate the effect of modifications done by monitoring KPIs and consumer feedback.
Be ready to make more adjustments and constantly track your VoC program to make sure it remains fruitful and relevant.
Nurture a culture of constant development by learning from setbacks.
Ask for customer input
Ask customers to participate in interviews, communities, or surveys thereby you will involve them in the VoC program.
Make it effortless for them to offer feedback by providing various platforms including social media, chatbots, phone, and email, and appreciate their honest and valuable input.
This provides a clear idea of whether the customer experience is constant over time.
Merge VoC data
Use data analytics tools to merge VoC data from numerous origins, offering a complete view of consumer needs and sentiment.
This integrated concept allows precise decision-making.
Keep up continuous commitment
Consider your VoC program as a continuous process and revisit goals, mechanisms, and objectives regularly to make sure they coordinate with your business requirements and consumer expectations.
Maintaining a strong commitment to VoC will assist you to stay active in the market and cultivate long-lasting success.
Understanding the Importance of Voice of Customer Tools for Your Business
VoC tools can be programs or applications that enable your business to collect consumer viewpoints and feedback.
These voice of customer tools can gather voice of the customer information either indirectly or directly to assist notify your buyer characters.
These tools are similar to mobile surveys and complicated as the utilization of predictive analytics to indicate which products to select and how much to charge for them to expect better returns.
There are unlimited voice of customer tools available in the market. As per Gartner VoC solutions integrate various origins of feedback including indirect and direct interactions with consumers.
With the integrated technologies of text mining, web analytics, social media monitoring, and speech analytics businesses can view their audiences’ voices completely.
As this industry is growing gradually, more and more companies need to adopt fresh VoC tools under the guidance of professionals.
When choosing which kind of VoC solution, it is crucial to spend some time analyzing how that tool meets the requirements of your company.
VoC tools are effective at collecting a large quantity of descriptive data, but fail to convert that data into actionable format.
Your responsibility is to ensure that you have selected the right VoC provider to save your organization money and time.
How to Use Voice of Customer Data like a Pro?
Listed below are a few ways to use the voice of customer data like a pro:
Data collection:
VoC data can be gathered from numerous origins. To obtain an extensive idea of user sentiment, retail companies have to rely on advanced analytics tools to examine the data.
Analysis and reporting:
After using analytics for feedback analysis and offering insights to retail industries via dashboards, visualizations, and impressive reports.
Sentiment analysis:
It is a powerful tool to analyze the emotion behind consumer feedback that helps retail brands measure consumer satisfaction and focus on key areas where improvement is required.
Text analytics:
Mainly used to discover key phrases or keywords in audience feedback that are associated with a brand, allowing it to discover trends in audience feedback.
Social media monitoring:
It allows retailers to discover and decide what’s the opinion of consumers about a company and its services & products on all social media platforms.
Customer journey mapping:
This allows retailers to map all steps of the shopper’s journey, helping them to discover major pain points and take appropriate action to boost the shopper experience.
Integration with different systems:
Best VoC platforms can be merged with different systems including marketing automation, customer service channels, and CRM.
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7 Ways Voice of Customer Data Shapes Retail Industry
Nowadays, product developers are using enterprise VoC solutions and product lifecycle management tools to filter their designs according to accurate information.
This helps them come up with fresh ideas related to the product, and speed up the process of product innovation.
There are 7 reasons to incorporate retail analytics tools into the retail industry to understand the benefits of VoC:
Applicability & markdown reduction
In the retail industry, companies always try to consider customer trends & adopt them. This can be done to improve shrinking margins and inventory.
Retailers can do one thing, they have to come up with dissimilar product differentiation to meet users’ demands.
If shoppers find that you are providing a specific product that is not available in many stores, they should come back to your store frequently and you can build a strong reputation in the market.
If retailers don’t pay attention to capturing and implementing consumer insights into the product planning & pricing approach, they lose the trust of their consumers.
Sustainability
Once the customer insights are converted into binary format, VoC technology can offer a highly detailed viewpoint on sustainability.
Also, VoC will inform retailers to create customer-oriented production and supply chain processes to generate relevant selections.
Customer engagement
Nowadays, all retailers and brands are using social media to have a strong connection with audiences.
Over 71% of retailers agree that customer input matters a lot in the process of product creation.
Listening to the needs of target customers can make retailer and shopper relationships even stronger, and their feedback is valuable for product designers to come up with innovative products.
Retailers can minimize costs related to sampling, reduce ignored merchandise with low consumer interest, and decrease oversampling if retailers listen to their target audience input.
Production efficiency
The latest survey conducted by Sourcing Journal reveals 45% of industry experts agree that powerful planning during the product development cycle can make a huge impact on operation efficiency.
So, it’s better to expand a VoC strategy to the whole supply chain.
In the end, the VoC data results in enhanced production agility, reduced inventory, and a decreased environmental impact.
Enhanced revenue
Incorporating the voice of customers can provide more visibility on your retail campaigns and deliver more powerful sales & marketing concepts. This results in an increase in revenue.
For example, via NLP and AI technology, you may find that your shoppers have a good opinion regarding in-store display.
Based on this report, you can repeat the success of the outcomes and enhance the present displays while producing fresh and identical concepts for upcoming productions.
Store layout & design
VoC analytics helps retail companies in designing stores and creating a much better experience that responds to the interests of their shoppers, driving enhanced sales & foot traffic.
Product development
Voice of customer AI analytics guides retail businesses to discover preferred features of enhancements, creating impressive products that connect to their preferences.
VoC analysis is a good deal for product managers to filter and organize a product blueprint and follow the entire customer’s lifetime.
This will provide a clear understanding of a product and whether its features are meeting the expectations of shoppers.
Voice of the Customer Methodologies for Retail Business Growth
Listed below are the most familiar methods of VoC for retail business growth. Each provides unique approaches to collecting data and capturing numerous kinds of data.
Surveys
Both retail and eCommerce industries conduct NPS (net promoter score) and CSAT (customer satisfaction) surveys through email, app, or live chat after clear user lifecycle touchpoints including upon cancellation, after onboarding, and after purchasing to recognize the pain points of audiences.
Chatbots & Live chats
Chatbots & live chats are helping retailers solve various issues of audiences that don’t need interaction with a support agent but they can be powerful for gathering VoC data.
Moreover, when audiences come up with the same issues frequently and haven’t solved them, retailers have to reconfigure the chatbot to solve problems permanently.
Customer reviews
You can find multiple services and online product review sites with effective VoC data that can be extracted directly with many APIs or web scraping tools.
Like social media comments, they provide candid, open sayings, but they normally go into detail.
Online review statistics by Oberlo state that 56% of audiences read at least the top 5 reviews before making a product purchase.
Website behavior
User behavior such as frequent visits on site, time spent, purchases, and follow click-throughs can be analyzed from how visitors interact with the website.
Various tools such as Crazy Egg, Google Analytics, and Hotjar can extract this information to understand user experience and their behavior on the website.
This is numerical data but once combined with comments from surveys and feedback forms, companies can understand what they are expecting and their behavior towards services or products.
Call center data and sales calls
Listening to the customer service calls that are recorded to improve the quality of service is the best way to find out minor or major issues of audiences.
Also, sales calls offer data related to what clients are looking for in a product and how a company stands among its competitors.
Want to learn sentiment analysis to attract more customers and increase your sales?
Industry Use cases
Following are the voice of the customer industry use cases:
Healthcare Industry
The healthcare sector provokes powerful emotional reactions such as fear, relief, hope, confusion, and worry.
Hence, the voice of the customer focuses mainly on sentiment analysis, an approach to predicting emotion from comments or opinions of audiences across various platforms.
Banking Industry
The banking and personal finance sector has undergone major change and disruption in the last few years.
Reducing churn is the major challenge faced by banks as they provide multiple offers and bonuses to steal customers from competitors or retail them.
Automotive Industry
The automotive industry uses a combination of digital retailing and AI solutions in their services that results in enhanced loyalty, and margins.
Hospitality Industry
The hospitality industry uses the voice of customer data to deliver extraordinary services to its visitors.
Aviation industry
Voice of customer data is used by the aviation industries to build brand reputation and retain customers.
They can identify the needs of their customers and quickly respond to them.
Conclusion:
Customer satisfaction is very important to have repeat customers and an excellent brand reputation that enhances financial performance through returning revenue.
Retail companies follow the voice of the customer strategy to make their product better, create remarketing campaigns, produce impressive marketing copy, and deliver exceptional user experience.
By leveraging VoC data, they can discover multiple opportunities that can result in an enhanced experience for present and upcoming customers – making it smoother to increase annual revenue.
References:
Voice of the Customer: What is it and How to Find it
What Are Voice of Customer (VoC) Tools?
Voice of the Customer (VoC): Streamline data collection + analysis to inform strategy
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