How to Leverage the Voice of Customer Strategy for Brand Growth

Studies indicate that half of American consumers read reviews before choosing a brand. If you are a business owner, you need to not only listen to the customer’s voice but also act on it. Doing this will ensure that the feedback you receive leads to tangible improvements, which in turn, will result in more positive reviews. This is important in an era when brands are leveraging the power of social listening.

By considering the voice of the customer (VOC), you can ensure that solicited or unsolicited advice doesn't go unnoticed. As a result of the feedback, your team can refine its experiences, improve customer relationships, and provide a greater business impact. In this article, we will look at how to leverage the voice of the customer.

What is the Voice of the Customer (VOC) Strategy?

A voice of the customer isn't an opinion poll. It involves understanding customer expectations, identifying their pain points, and using insights to generate meaningful business. It consists of capturing customer feedback and utilizing it to enhance business outcomes, including products, services, and the overall customer experience.

Statistics indicate that 89% of brands typically compete by offering a good customer experience, meaning they cannot achieve success if they do not understand their customers’ needs. The good news is that a strong VOC strategy can enable them to use customer feedback to enhance the customer experience (CX) and ensure lasting customer loyalty. To ensure that customer feedback is effectively utilized, it's essential to implement a Voice of the Customer (VOC) program. 

To determine the VOC, you will need to analyze the customers' direct (showing what customers say) and indirect (market research, product usage data, and analytics) input. You can also conduct a brand voice audit to determine if your brand is effectively communicating with the right audience.

Why the VOC Matters

VOC plays a crucial role in understanding customers’ needs, enhancing customer service, and elevating your brand to the next level. Here are some main reasons why the VOC is important:

• Higher customer retention and loyalty. Good customer service is one of the reasons why customers patronize a brand. When businesses consider customer feedback and use it to improve their services, they demonstrate a genuine commitment to developing products or services that meet customers' needs. This can result in higher customer satisfaction and increased customer loyalty.
• Higher revenue. Building on our previous point, when a business develops a product that meets customers’ needs, it can increase sales. When customers are satisfied, they are more likely to recommend the company to others.
• Better customer experience. The VOC program aims to improve the customer experience (CX) at various stages of the sales journey, from the initial interaction with a company to the point of purchase and beyond. VOC provides businesses with valuable insights into customers' expectations and desires, enabling them to make the proper adjustments to meet these needs. 
• Better products or services. Listening to customer feedback enables you to easily identify areas for improvement in products and services, ensuring that production meets the customer’s needs.

VOC Data Collection Strategies

There are different strategies that businesses can use to collect data from customers for creating a VOC program. These include:

• Customer advisory council. One alternative is a customer advisory council that meets the customers and collects their feedback.
• Product reviews and surveys. You can create a survey and request that your customers complete it either online, by mail, or on the phone. These surveys don’t have to be long. Instead, they can consist of a few questions that customers answer. If you need richer data, you can leverage an in-depth questionnaire sent via email to highly engaged audiences. 
• Mystery shopping program. The mystery shopping program enables customers to complete audits and receive feedback on products, brands, services, and topics, allowing them to gather valuable data. This can help brands understand the customer’s buying journey and identify areas for improvement.
• Net Promoter Score. This is an excellent way to measure customers’ loyalty and ask if they are likely to refer to the company’s products or services. 
• Social media. You can utilize social media listening tools to monitor brand mentions across various social media platforms. You can collect feedback from multiple platforms, such as Quora and Reddit, or other online platforms where customers share their views.  
• Live chat. When handling customer queries, calls, or messages, you can capture live chat data to collect important customer information.
• Focus groups. These work in a similar manner to customer interviews. However, they aren't done one-on-one but involve small customer groups interacting with the brand. The groups can be significant in collecting customers’ feedback on new products and gauging how they react to an advertising or rebranding strategy. 
• Phone calls. You can gain essential insights from phone calls and phone recordings, primarily because they can reveal customers’ emotions. On the other hand, chatbots are typically limited in their ability to discern the level of information.
• Sales team and customer service department. Your staff, who interact with customers daily, can provide valuable insights into customers' expectations and needs. Since your customer service department spends a significant amount of time speaking with customers, they are best positioned to understand customers' pain points and the issues affecting different customers. On the other hand, your sales team understands the customer’s needs and can help match the theme with the products or services. 

Steps in Building a VOC Program

Here are the steps you need to follow when building a VOC program:

• Understand your audience. You want to ensure that you are collecting VOC from the right customers, which is why you need to choose the right buyer persona, customer segments, or a specific demographic. 
• Audience characteristics. You also need to capture your audience’s characteristics to choose the most effective way of collecting feedback.
• Understand your core values. You want to ensure that you understand how customers associate with the brand, including its core values. Doing so can be instrumental in forging deeper connections with customers. 
• Choose the right VOC tools. Many VOC software programs can analyze customer data to ensure feedback on multiple channels.  
• Watch patterns and trends in data. You can use qualitative data to identify trends and patterns, such as areas that require improvement, lower usage of certain features, or areas of customer service that need enhancement.
• Get interdepartmental support. Different areas of a business can benefit from other information. This means it's essential to share the information across various departments. This can enable employees to communicate what they are doing and the customer’s expectations.
• Take action on the VOC data. If you only collect the data and don't act on it, the whole process will be useless. Therefore, use the data to take specific actions, such as enhancing customer support or launching new products or services.
• Measure your success. Customer satisfaction is the biggest goal, and should be your top priority. After identifying and addressing a challenge, you need to track how customers respond to the change and whether it will produce the desired outcome. 
• Revise. Remember that customer feedback and ratings will not always remain the same. This is why you need to regularly make the desired changes to ensure that your current strategies are helping you gauge customer experience (CX) optimally. For instance, consider periodically updating the survey questions to gather new information or explore new methods of customer interaction.

Final Thoughts

Brands should regularly collect customer data to help them continually improve their products, processes, and customer experience (CX). By following the steps outlined in this guide, brands can leverage customer voice to drive growth.