Voice of Customer
VoC, or Voice of Customer, is about identifying your customers’ voice – and, not least, listening to what it has to say. There is a great deal of valuable insight to be gained.
Voice of Customer is a concept that is gaining increasing traction – and for good reason. Not because the term itself is particularly brilliant, but because a VoC measurement contains a great deal of valuable insight. But what does VoC mean in concrete terms?
At its core, Voice of Customer is an organisation’s overarching effort to collect, analyse, and act on customer feedback. What often sets it apart from other approaches is the very broad net you typically cast when examining your customer voice. The overall voice of the customer draws on a vast number of sources – and holds enormous potential.
Where do you collect your Voice of Customer?
The major advantage of VoC is that it allows you to systematically capture and analyse feedback from almost every conceivable source – both direct and indirect. This can include, for example:
- Customer surveys
- Sales data
- Social media
- NPS surveys
- Complaint cases
- Website behaviour
- Customer-facing employees
- Interviews and focus groups
- Review platforms
- Media
- Market data
- Observations
In short, anywhere your customers express themselves – directly or indirectly – about your brand and your product.
What can you use Voice of Customer for?
The close understanding of your customers that you gain through a Voice of Customer programme can be translated into extremely valuable insight for the entire organisation. Typically, a VoC measurement is initiated either to take the pulse of the overall situation – when it comes to customers’ perception of the company – or to evaluate a specific product or initiative.
With VoC, you gain genuine, in-depth insight into how your customers view you and your products. This can enable you to:
- Improve existing products and solutions
- Develop new products and solutions that your customers demand
- Identify potential crises and issues at an early stage
- Avoid wasting resources on initiatives your customers do not care about
- Increase customer loyalty
- Create sharper, more effective marketing
How to get started with VoC measurement
As mentioned, Voice of Customer is the sum of what your customers express about you – both directly and indirectly. For that reason, it requires insight and a systematic approach if you want to collect and analyse data that delivers real value at the other end.
First and foremost, you need to be clear about the purpose of the study before getting started. Be precise about what you want to investigate – otherwise the task can quickly become overwhelming.
Make sure your data collection methods align with what you want to shed light on. It is easy to waste effort in this area, as the net you can cast is – as previously mentioned – very broad. Focus groups and interviews are well suited for some objectives, while a thorough analysis of existing data may be sufficient to illuminate others.
If you plan to use interviews and surveys in your study, careful consideration of the questions is essential. Qualitative interviews with open-ended questions can uncover many blind spots, while surveys using rating scales can help quantify and clarify specific areas.
Be extremely systematic in your data collection and avoid being overly confident when you reach the analysis stage. There is a reason this is considered a science and a highly sought-after discipline. If your data and analyses are to be used for concrete decision-making, your methods must be sound from start to finish.
There is a wide range of customer analysis approaches, each with its own strengths and weaknesses – and we know the best path to insight into your customers. You are, of course, very welcome to get in touch with us; we would be happy to contribute the expertise you may be missing.
We’re ready to help you move forward
Get in touch with us if you’ve started to recognise your customers’ voice – and you’re ready to listen.
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