6 Considerations for Your Voice of Customer Program

By Ben Oldham, Keatext

​​Mobius Vendor Partners is proud to partner with Keatext, the provider of our AI text analytics tool used in our surveys. Keatext helps us better analyze customer sentiment and feedback using AI.

As a text analytics company, we’re deeply involved in the customer experience space and we know how the pieces of the process fit together. In this post, we give you a complete view of the activities involved in a voice of the customer program.

1. Why you need a voice of customer program 

We have a complete post on this topic that you can check out! The TLDR: businesses that invest in the voice of the customer see a measurable return on investment. Studies have shown that these companies:

• Have much higher client retention and employee engagement
• Spend less on customer service
• Generate a year-over-year increase in annual revenue that’s 10 times greater than other companies

Especially since the huge shift to digital experiences in 2020, customer experience has emerged as the new battleground for brands. Having a voice of customer program is mission-critical to stay competitive.

2. What to consider in collecting customer feedback 

The quality of everything that follows in the customer feedback loop depends on the quality of feedback that you collect and how you organize it. A solid voice of customer methodology that standardizes your VOC practices will help guide your feedback collection process. The main challenge is when you have several distinct channels where feedback might be coming in: reviews, surveys, support tickets, chat conversations, social media, even contact center phone calls.

Building trust with customers means opening channels for communication. Instead of shying away from the voice of the customer – especially when it’s negative feedback – giving customers a platform to voice their opinions is actually a good thing for your business.

3. Setting up your feedback channels for success 

Each feedback channel can be managed in different ways to enhance the quality of VOC data collected. You can imagine that certain channels like surveys can be curated more than others. For instance, CX teams have control over the questions presented in a survey, whereas they do not have the same control over product reviews. So, considering how to best collect feedback from each channel is important for the success of your VOC analysis.

4. Making your VOC program actionable with text analytics technology 

Collecting feedback, of course, is only one piece of the puzzle. Analyzing the feedback you’ve collected is a challenge on its own, and there comes a point where you will need a technology solution to manage the volume of feedback you’re getting and dig into more granular insights. Text analytics technology is the bread and butter of the analysis involved in a VOC software. It automates the important work of simply reading through all the comments left by customers.

As a technology applied to the voice of the customer, text analytics can:

• Identify topics mentioned by customers and the associated sentiments
• Detect trends in the data and track them over time
• Pinpoint the topics that have the greatest impact on a customer satisfaction rating like NPS or CSAT
• Generate recommendations on how to improve business areas that are reflecting a poor customer experience
• Produce quantitative voice of customer metrics from qualitative text data

This level of automation leverages AI, and when compared in this lens, not all text analytics solutions are the same.

5. How to report and share insights to close the feedback loop

The basic idea of this stage of closing the feedback loop can be summed up as “insights are no good unless you can get them to the right people”. It’s easy to overlook this stage: out of the 95% of companies that collect customer feedback, 10% actually apply it to product developments, and only 5% follow up directly with customers about the feedback they left.

6. Getting executive buy-in for your voice of the customer program 

Executives considering a new initiative will mostly be concerned with the return on investment (ROI). As a business, if you’re going to spend money on something, you hope to see that investment reflected in greater performance. In the realm of customer experience, this could look like:

• Greater customer retention and less churn
• Increase in customer satisfaction scores like NPS
• Improvement in brand reputation online
• Customer loyalty reflected in repeated purchases, upsells, or resells
• Understanding of how CX metrics translate to larger business objectives, especially revenue

Advocating for the tangible results you hope to see from your VOC program will go a long way in demonstrating ROI at the executive levels.

Read the full blog here.