How to Capture the Voice of Your Customers and Use it to Your Advantage

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In today’s digital era of immediacy and technological innovations, customer expectations are rapidly changing. With those changes comes the urge to understand our customer’s needs and wants in greater detail.

So, how can we gather and keep track of customer preferences and expectations?

The answer: Voice of Customer (VoC)

What is Voice of Customer?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a term used by businesses to describe and better understand customer experiences with their products and services. Many times VoC focuses on customer needs, expectations, and behavior.
VoC has become a competitive advantage for growing companies as they use it to help them act on customer feedback and understand a customer’s complex decision-making process. VoC can be executed in a flexible, diverse, and multi-faceted manner with many different techniques and methods used to gain information on customer needs.

How to Capture VoC?

There are quite a few different strategies that companies can employ to capture VoC, get feedback and learn more about their customers.
Here are some key VoC methodologies you can utilize today.

• NPS and other surveys – NPS and other surveys are great ways to help you understand any issues your customers are facing. They can also help you keep a pulse on any trends you need to look further into. In order to get the best results, make sure your survey is concise and easy to understand with targeted questions about your business.
• Email, live -chat, phone calls – Gathering data from email, live chat, and calls can be an excellent way to collect customer feedback. Using these data sources will allow you to make sure customers are satisfied and learn about the issues your customers face regularly. Surveys at the end of these interactions are also helpful to gauge how satisfied your customers are.
• Customer reviews – Direct customer reviews can help you learn about the experiences your customers are having. Many times customers will go out of their way to write a customer review if their experience was either really positive or really negative. This can give you a good idea of what’s working and what isn’t.
• Social media – Social is an interesting way to learn about customer concerns as well. It can be a helpful tool to follow what’s trending and what conversations are taking place surrounding your product, industry, and company.

To get the most out of your customer feedback, it’s important to ensure that customer opinions are gathered in a timely way. This should be right after a customer conversation and not a week or a month later. You’ll also want to make sure the right processes are in place to ensure that feedback is acted upon and not collected for no reason.

The latest integration of Gladly and Stella Connect not only makes it a breeze to gather customer feedback in the moment but allows it to be instantly actionable to both agents and managers. See how it works.

The Benefits of Listening and Acting on Customer Feedback

VoC will allow you to get closer to your customers as consumers and as people. Here are the benefits of implementing a VoC at your organization:

Retain your customers

When you put a program together that allows agents and managers to take action based on customer insights, you’ll be able to quickly drive improvements to the customer experience. This lets your customers know you are listening to their feedback, ensuring they stick around longer.

Deliver better service from customer feedback

By receiving customer feedback regularly, you’ll be able to quickly pivot and ensure you’re providing customers with the service they expect.

Stay ahead of the competition

Figuring out how your customers view your business in relation to your competition and peers is a great data point to stay ahead of the competition. Actively getting feedback from your customers can help you position your company and create an image in your customers’ minds of how you’d like to be perceived in the marketplace.

Drive more revenue

VoC can play a vital role in driving revenue to your business. As you continue to get feedback from customers and make improvements from analyzing the data, your customers will, in turn, be happier with you. Any customer that is happy with your products or services will be more likely to become a repeat customer and recommend you to other potential customers.

Inform product innovation

During the design and development process of your product, it is important to bring in customer sentiment to make important development decisions. Access this customer information early in the development process to greatly improve your success and help your team deliver an exceptional user experience.

Understand the customer experience better to drive change

Real-time feedback presents a unique opportunity for you to listen to your customers and use their voice to create future customer experiences that makes them feel known.

Give Agents and Managers Instant Access to Customer Feedback

The Gladly integration with Stella Connect provides a simple and easy way to instantly collect feedback from your customers without slowing down your agents.
With Stella Connect, you can collect real-time customer feedback via text or email as soon as the customer conversation is closed within Gladly.

Gathering customer feedback is one of the most important steps you as a company can take to understand how your customers view their experience with you, and what you can do to make it better.

Learn more about instant customer feedback and our integration with Stella Connect.