.jpeg)
With social media, smart devices, and high-speed internet, consumers can share their opinions to the four corners of the world in seconds. This means that entirely new trends can arise at the click of a button. Markets are moving faster than ever before, and businesses need to keep up.
A quick way to get the pulse of the market is to run a VoC program. Today, we’re going to dive into what a VoC program is, some must-have questions to put into the survey, and the easiest way to build and execute a VoC strategy successfully.
Defining Voice of the Customer (VoC)
Voice of the Customer data gives companies a snapshot of what their customers say about a given topic. A program like this is designed to help you to better understand your customers’ needs, experiences, and preferences. Fundamentally, a VoC program refers to any kind of research that seeks to understand the customer's sentiments.
A VoC can be directed inward or outward, depending on the business's goals. For instance, you can use a Voice of the Customer survey to identify ways to improve your customer experience, or you could use a similar survey to uncover whether or not a particular new product idea is practical or not. Because of their ability to quickly and effectively deliver results, VoC programs have grown to become one of the most critical market research segments for businesses today. With the right platform, they can be done remarkably fast, allowing you to quickly identify trends and respond to them faster than your competitors.
Research shows that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for an excellent customer experience. This is a huge opportunity for businesses. However, to build a great experience, you need to know what the customer wants. To find that out, you need an excellent VoC program.
The real benefits of VoC for your business
One of the single most important differentiators between successful companies and unsuccessful failures is how closely they listen to and understand their customers. Once you know what they need, you can go above and beyond, creating experiences that not only ease a pain point but are positive and memorable. That’s how you can inspire customer loyalty to your brand. There are many benefits to running a VoC program. These include:
- Improved Service To Customers
- Better Manage Your Brand
- More Effective Innovation
- Streamlined Marketing
- Reduce Customer Churn
By running VoC programs, you can also discover the fundamental pain points in a customer’s experiences with various products. This information can help you improve your own offering and design new products to address these needs. This is about honestly getting feedback on your performance from the people that count. You can also use VoC to manage your brand better. Are you sure that people perceive you the way you intend? Understanding and responding to your target market’s perception of your business is integral to building trust and loyalty among customers.
We’ve already touched on how VoC can boost your innovation efforts by identifying the key areas where customers are looking for solutions. VoC can also make your marketing easier by understanding what kind of tone and message to focus on for each segment of your target market. Finally, you can use VoC to reduce customer churn by listening to feedback, improving your services, and demonstrating that the customer's opinion matters. Your customers will appreciate your responding to feedback and be more likely to do business with you.
Best VoC questions to put in your next survey
The best VoC questions will be the questions that will deliver the benefits we have just been discussing. You can divide these questions into four overall categories:
- Brand Loyalty Questions
- Product and Services Questions
- Attribution Questions
- Perception Questions
Brand loyalty questions do precisely what it sounds like — assess your customer loyalty. This is where you ask questions like, “how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend?”.
Next comes the product and services questions. These questions should focus on defining the value that customers are receiving from investing in your products and services. An example of a product and service question would be, “Were you satisfied with our product?”
Then comes attribution questions. You should include attribution questions in a survey like this to help you understand more about your sales funnels and how well they are working. A question in this category could include, “Where did you hear about our service?” It’s easy to see how this question could help you with your marketing by showing what efforts are truly bringing in results.
Finally, there are perception questions. These seek to reveal a customer’s feelings about your company and brand. Here's where you could ask a question like, “What comes to your mind when you think of our brand?” All of these questions would be great to include in your next VoC survey.
The Top VoC strategies
There are a few overall strategies to consider when building out your VoC program. One technique many marketers use is social media. By simply exploring social media, marketers can directly engage with their customers and participate in insightful conversations.
You can also view recorded call data. Listening to recorded customer calls can give you a better idea of how good your service is and let you hear feedback directly from the mouth of your customers – their voices.
Another popular VoC methodology is to use a live chat system to collect real-time customer feedback.
Finally, one of the most effective ways to carry out a VoC program is to send a survey to your target market. That brings us to the most efficient way to tap into VoC data's opportunities.
The easiest way to do VoC – aytm
The easiest way to do a VoC program is to create great surveys using aytm. We make it easy to do agile market research, allowing you to quickly input your target market’s characteristics and add your questions. Then, we’ll rapidly send your questions to your specific target market and get you their opinions — and you’ll have the data back in no time. It’s really that easy.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can take your DIY survey design skills to the next level, check out our DIY eBook. Ready to go already? Sign up for a free account today to get started!
.jpg)
