Why Every Business Needs a Voice of Customer Strategy

Whether you are product testing, introducing a new feature, or simply looking to increase business revenue, customer experience constantly affects all your business decisions. You want all your customers to have the best experience when engaging with your business because, at the end of the day, they are the ones driving your brand image and value. 

But hold on. How do you examine the gap between what you promise to deliver and what you actually deliver? Step into the realm of Voice of Customer (VoC). 

It’s a place where expectations meet reality, and if done right, it is one of those aspects of CX that can completely change your company’s trajectory. 

According to Salesforce, 63% of consumers expect businesses to know their unique needs and expectations, and this can likely be achieved by having an effective Voice of Customer strategy in place.

Voice of Customer acts like a constant pivot tool, telling you what needs to be fixed, how soon it needs to be fixed, and how critical it is to the customer lifecycle. It is also an excellent exercise to know how in sync your brand is with your customer base, how much importance you give to their feedback, and how receptive you are to criticism.

What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the customer is a methodology for gathering customer feedback about your product, service, business, or consumer experience. It includes collecting this data, analyzing it, and using it to change internal processes and strategies to bridge the gap between promised customer service and actual consumer needs and expectations. This can further nudge product development, marketing strategies, and overall business goals in the right direction.

Companies with a customer experience mindset drive revenue 4-8% higher than the rest of their industries, according to Forbes. 

Taking a step back and shifting gears from a reactive mindset to a more proactive mindset will help companies better their CX experience. VoC can help you achieve this by equipping you with the power of happy consumers. One happy customer interaction has the ability to cascade into multiple new customers and business opportunities.

Let’s look at how you can capture data to analyze Voice of Customer:

1. Direct Input for VoC: This includes any direct interaction that you have with a customer. This could be via call, email, chat, IVR, survey forms, feedback calls, or through call center experiences. All this data is a direct indication of how your customers feel about your business.
2. Indirect Input for VoC: Gathering information from third-party sources such as review forums, social media platforms (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook), and news websites that post negative/positive feedback about your business.
3. Inferred Input for VoC: Purchase history, time on the website, items on the wishlist but not bought, and conversion time all give insights into inferred consumer data.

Also Read: What is Cold Calling?

Why is Voice of Customer Crucial for Businesses?

Voice of Customer helps business owners mold their products and services into something that the market truly desires. It is also a great building block for innovation as it sets benchmarks for what people have liked in the past, their current preferences, and how they might evolve in the future. This helps product development teams build products that last and don't become obsolete with changing trends. 

In order to fully exercise VoC’s benefits, it demands that you are open to constructive feedback and aren’t just looking for praise and applause. Ask probing questions and expect a good variety of positive, negative, and neutral answers.

1. Refine Marketing Campaigns: Your marketing campaign, which you plan to use to create a unique brand identity, will always be incomplete without factoring in the customer's voice. Marketing teams should use VoC to introduce tailor-made content for different stages of the buyer’s journey. This way, you ensure that your campaigns are impactful while still aligning with consumer preferences.
2. Enhance Team Collaboration: The sales, marketing, product, customer success, support, or finance teams of any business usually don’t cross paths on a day-to-day basis. Feedback from a good voice of customer strategy can help you identify gaps within the organizational structure and hint where more collaboration is needed to deliver a better customer experience.
3. Innovate Product Development: A smart business will take VoC feedback, good or bad, and channel it to improve the performance of its product development team. VoC helps you stay relevant to the shifting consumer trends and preferences and gives you an edge over your competitors when designing future products.
4. Predict and Prevent Crisis: As we mentioned earlier, customers want you to be proactive, not reactive. Early detection of potential issues in the sales journey can help alert your sales reps by collecting customer feedback via VoC early on. This will enable your sales team to upsell and cross-sell effectively as well.
5. Align Organizational Objectives: If you or any of your team members or employees have doubts about your company’s vision and aren’t on the same page about where it is headed, a periodic VoC practice really helps to align all the stakeholders. It makes sure that all of you are working on a unified customer-centric objective.
6. Elevate Customer Service Quality: VoC strategies help companies understand the severity and impact of different customer issues, allowing prioritization of issues based on urgency. This practice significantly helps improve resolution times and contributes to better CSAT scores.

How to Implement Voice of Customer

Before you jump to the how-to section of this blog, you should have clarity about WHY you want to implement a voice of customer strategy. Begin by asking yourself the following three questions before going down this route:

• What are my business objectives, and what do I want to know from my customers?
• What tools and technologies will I use, and how do I plan on analyzing the acquired information?
• How will I measure success and ensure continuous improvement?

Only once you have the above answers should you proceed to devising a VoC strategy. Below is a simple blueprint of what an ideal VoC strategy should include, but remember to customize it according to your specific business needs.

1. Capture Customer Interactions
   • Start by defining the customer segments you’d like to target and which products/services you want to focus on. You can only examine one product/service at a time, so be patient.
   • Establish clear objectives and KPIs you want to measure and how you want to define the success of this activity.
   • Choose the right tech for data collection, analysis, and reporting. Different methods of data collection may include surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, quality assurance software to record customer service calls, etc.
   • Once all the systems are in place, make sure your telesales reps and employees actively encourage feedback and document customer pain points.
2. Process and Interpret Data
   • Use qualitative data to fix product bugs and improve customer service processes. Quantitative data will help you identify the efficiency of these processes. For example, if you are an e-commerce platform, you would want to collect data about the number of customers who do not proceed after adding items to their cart. A high abandoned cart rate signifies that your payment gateway is too complicated or there were hidden costs at checkout that were intimated earlier.
   • If your company has a telesales component in its daily functioning, you would want to implement call recording and analyzing software to monitor call quality as part of your VoC strategy. SquadStack’s QualityAI could be a great addition to your existing setup to elevate your telecaller performance and provide you with actionable insights that can be used to refine your telesales scripts, training programs, and customer service protocols.
   • Create a culture that values feedback within your company. Everyone from sales to product development needs to see VoC as a priority and act on these insights generated. Push your employees to integrate VoC learnings into their daily tasks and edit your department SOPs accordingly.
3. Act and Provide Value to Customers
   • Be prompt with your VoC strategy. Customers shouldn’t have to wait years for you to go through hundreds of approvals to change your processes for the better. The value transfer should be instantaneous.
   • Keep the feedback loop going. Inform customers about the changes you’re making based on their feedback.
   • Schedule regular reviews to assess the effectiveness of your VoC strategy and make adjustments as needed to improve processes and outcomes.

Choose SquadStack's Call QualityAI for a Better VoC Strategy

Implementing a compelling Voice of the Customer (VoC) strategy hinges on obtaining precise and actionable insights from customer interactions. SquadStack’s Call QualityAI is crafted to enhance your VoC initiatives through exceptional call quality monitoring and analysis. Here’s how our tool can revolutionize your Voice of Customer strategy:

Automated Quality Check (AQC) Engine

Our quality assurance process is driven entirely by AI. The Automated Quality Check (AQC) engine is the next step in call quality intelligence, making the process quicker and more efficient. Unlike traditional methods, which are often slow and costly, SquadStack’s AQC removes the need for human intervention in the initial stages. This means you receive rapid, accurate assessments and can use them to fine-tune your VoC process.

Comprehensive Quality Assessment Parameters

A sampling generator selects a set of connected calls, ensuring all critical factors are considered, including business outcomes and at least two calls per telecaller. These selected calls are processed through the Audit UI, where a machine learning system evaluates them against 23 parameters using a simple yes/no format. Each parameter is scored based on this binary assessment, and the results are stored in a database.

These 23 parameters correspond to the C5 attributes identified by our team as essential for a high-quality call experience: Connect, Convey, Convince, Close, and Compliance.

Superior QA Experience = Refined VoC Strategy

A better quality assurance experience is the gateway to building an ironclad voice of customer setup. With SquadStack’s QualityAI, you get access to customer insights that usually hide in plain sight if you don’t have access to proper tools and software. With QualityAI, you can:

• Extract Valuable Insights: Our advanced speech-to-text technology provides accurate transcriptions of your call recordings, making it easy to understand what your customers want in real-time.
• Enhance Call Quality Analysis with Advanced Parameters: Comprehensive quality assessment parameters allow you to delve into your call data and identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement. This helps segment customers into user buckets and tailor the VoC process accordingly.
• Audit Your Current Setup: Assess the effectiveness of your telecalling systems and pinpoint opportunities for optimization.

Upgrade your telecalling strategy with AI-driven call intelligence. Start a free audit of your calls with SquadStack’s QualityAI and see how it can enhance your Voice of Customer (VoC) initiatives.