Listening to your customers is now more important than ever. According to a recent McKinsey report, improving customer care is the fastest-growing priority for customer care leaders. And Voice of Customer (VoC) programs are among the most effective tools in the box.

Voice of Customer (VoC) is all about tuning into what your customers really think. It’s a way for businesses to collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback to improve products, services, and the overall customer experience. Think of it as tapping into your customers' direct thoughts and emotions so you can deliver exactly what they want.

Whether through surveys, reviews, or social media, VoC helps you turn customer insights into better business decisions. In this article we’ll delve into what Voice of Customer is and why it matters. We’ll look at VoC best practices before getting into the details of how to set up your own Voice of Customer program.

What is Voice of Customer (VoC)?

“Voice of the Customer” (VoC) refers to a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, expectations, and desires. This data expresses the motivations, preferences, and pain points driving customer behavior. VoC feedback enables organizations to identify key areas for improvement, prioritize initiatives that matter most to their customers, and innovate better.

What is a Voice of Customer program?

A Voice of Customer (VoC) program is a systematic way to gather, analyze, and act on customer feedback. It helps you to capture customers’ requirements. Feedback is usually collected using surveys as well as existing data from social media, reviews, and customer service interactions.

The goal of a VoC program is to understand how to serve your customers better, and to use these insights to retain customers and grow the business.

Voice of Customer Made Easy:
The Professionals’ VoC Handbook

Written by a CX expert, this handbook simplifies VoC strategies and helps you get the most from customer feedback.

What's inside:

• Easy-to-follow VoC strategies
• Tips for analyzing feedback
• Plus: Bonus VoC checklist

Download your free copy today!

What is Required for a VOC Program?

A successful Voice of the Customer (VoC) program requires several essential components to function effectively. Let’s break down the main ingredients you’ll need to get started:

1. Clear Methods for Capturing Customer Feedback

The backbone of a good VoC program is the ability to collect customer viewpoints consistently and at scale. Surveys are usually the main focus, but it could also include online reviews, focus groups, social media listening, and customer support interactions.

Ideally, you will want to check in with your customers regularly to track any trends and measure the success of your VoC program.

It’s crucial to ensure that the methods you choose are designed to reach your target audience effectively and are adaptable as customer preferences evolve. Don’t forget to capture feedback across the entire customer journey, from first interaction to post-purchase experiences.

2. Coordinated Storage and Management of Data:

Gathering feedback is just the first step. How you store and manage this data is equally important. A VoC program requires a centralized system for organizing all incoming information to make it easily accessible for analysis.

This could involve using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or specialized VoC platforms that allow for data integration across departments. Proper data management ensures that all feedback is available for analysis and you can track trends over time.

3. Thorough Analysis and Communication of Insights:

Once feedback is collected and stored you’re ready to analyze the data to identify trends, pain points, and opportunities for improvement. This might involve qualitative and quantitative analysis, using tools like text analytics, sentiment analysis, and statistical modeling.

AI analysis tools like Thematic are a popular choice because they allow you to rapidly analyze large quantities of data. Thematic works by uncovering the main themes in your customer feedback and the sentiment behind the text.

A big advantage of tools like Thematic is that the insights generated are clear and actionable. You can immediately see what the main themes are at a glance on your dashboard, and then dig down into the sub-themes and AI-generated summaries to learn more.

Equally important is communicating these findings to key stakeholders throughout the organization, from customer service teams to product development and leadership. This ensures everyone knows what your customers are saying and what needs to be done.

4. Driving and Measuring Impact:

A VoC program is only as valuable as the actions it inspires. Once insights are shared they need to drive change. This could involve improving customer service processes, tweaking product features, or developing a new product or service based on customer demand.

To close the loop, it’s important to track the impact of these changes by measuring key performance indicators (KPIs). This might include customer satisfaction, retention rates, NPS metrics, and revenue growth. Continuous measurement helps ensure that the VoC program leads to meaningful improvements and keeps evolving with customer needs.

Why Customer Surveys Matter for VoC programs

VoC programs usually start with customer surveys. Survey data is the backbone of VoC because they allow you to ask your customers specific questions and get their opinions on the topics you’re interested in.

Existing customer data is useful, but it may be outdated or only reflect transactional behavior. Whereas survey data allows you to understand customer emotions, preferences, and pain points more deeply. Bringing the two together gives you a clearer picture of what your customers think.

For a successful VoC program, you need to think carefully about how you’ll design and deliver your customer surveys. Consider what questions you need to answer and whether your customers would prefer email, social media, a dedicated feedback page on your website, or within an app.

Data from surveys tailored to your VoC goals can be supplemented with additional customer data. For example, online reviews, chat conversations, customer service data, and social media interactions can help give a more complete picture of the Voice of the Customer.

What are the Benefits of a VoC Program?

Now we’ve covered what a VoC program is, let’s take a quick look at what’s in it for your organization. VoC programs usually have two main aims:

a) to understand how well the business is catering to their customers today

b) to understand opportunities for change and improvements around customer experience

If you understand your strengths and which levers you can pull to drive better performance, you are already on the path to better business outcomes. The value of a VoC program is always in the actions it drives, rather than the data it generates.

Here’s some specific examples of how organizations can benefit from a good VoC program:

Improved Customer Experience

With customer feedback driving your decisions, you can make targeted improvements to the customer journey. This could mean refining your product, speeding up customer service interactions, or streamlining the overall user experience. A positive experience leads to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Increased Customer Retention

When customers feel heard and valued, they are more likely to stay with your brand. A VoC program allows you to quickly identify and address issues before they escalate, reducing churn and boosting retention. Happy customers are more likely to return and recommend your business to others.

Better Product Validation

VoC programs can uncover unmet customer needs and untapped market opportunities. By paying attention to what customers are asking for, you can upgrade and add new features to existing products and services.

And you can also innovate and create new products or services that directly address their desires. Enhanced product validation can set you apart from competitors and drive growth.

More Accurate Customer Profiling

VoC programs provide a clear window into customer thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They help businesses better understand customer needs, pain points, and preferences. This deeper understanding allows for more informed decision-making and helps tailor offerings to meet real customer demands. For example, marketing teams can hone their messaging and develop campaigns to exactly match customer concerns.

Increased Revenue

Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty directly impact the bottom line. Happy customers spend more, stay longer, and are more likely to refer others. By enhancing their products, services, and experiences based on VoC insights, businesses can drive increased revenue and profitability.

Voice of Customer Made Easy:
The Professionals’ VoC Handbook

Written by a CX expert, this handbook simplifies VoC strategies and helps you get the most from customer feedback.

What's inside:

• Easy-to-follow VoC strategies
• Tips for analyzing feedback
• Plus: Bonus VoC checklist

Download your free copy today!

How Important is a VoC Program?

In a recent survey of marketers, 61.2% reported their VoC program increased customer satisfaction or NPS. Another 37.9% recorded increased customer retention.

In case you’re still not convinced, here are our key reasons to focus on improving your VoC strategy:

• Understand customer needs and expectations: VoC tools help collect valuable feedback, offering insights into customer expectations which you can use to enhance your product or service.
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty: By actively listening to customer input and addressing concerns, you can strengthen customer loyalty, leading to higher retention and positive word-of-mouth.
• Increase revenue and profitability: Satisfied customers tend to make repeat purchases and recommend your business, directly contributing to revenue growth and profitability.
• Stay competitive: Staying attuned to customer preferences helps you stand out in the marketplace and maintain a competitive edge.
  

VoC Best Practices

A successful Voice of the Customer (VoC) program translates into actionable insights and meaningful improvements. Here are our recommended best practices for developing an effective and accurate program:

1. Define Clear Objectives

Before launching a VoC program, establish clear objectives. Determine what you aim to achieve with customer feedback. That could be improving customer satisfaction, enhancing products, or identifying new market opportunities. You will want to tailor your program to your specific needs and your industry. For example, a VoC program for an eCommerce business will have different priorities compared to a financial institution or SaaS provider. Clear goals guide your program's focus and help measure its success.

2. Choose the Right Feedback Channels

Utilize a mix of feedback channels to capture a comprehensive view of customer opinions. Common channels include surveys, online reviews, social media, and direct customer interactions. Each channel provides unique insights, so integrating multiple sources ensures a well-rounded perspective.

3. Ensure Consistent Data Collection

Consistency is crucial in collecting feedback. Use standardized methods and questions across all channels to ensure data reliability and comparability. Consistent data collection allows you to track changes over time and compare feedback across different touchpoints.

4. Analyze Data Effectively

Transform raw feedback into actionable insights through thorough analysis. Use qualitative and quantitative methods to identify patterns, trends, and key themes. Advanced analytics tools and AI can help uncover deeper insights and automate analysis, making it easier to spot actionable trends.

5. Prioritize Feedback Based on Impact

Not all feedback is equally valuable. Prioritize feedback based on its potential impact on your business goals. Consider factors such as the frequency of the issue, its effect on customer satisfaction, and its alignment with strategic objectives. Focus on high-impact areas for improvement.

6. Act on Feedback

Gathering feedback is only valuable if you act on it. Develop a clear action plan based on the insights you gain. Implement changes, address issues, and communicate improvements to customers.

Demonstrating that you’ve acted on their feedback reinforces customer trust and satisfaction.

7. Close the Feedback Loop

Inform customers about the changes made as a result of their feedback. This "You Said, We Did" approach shows that their opinions matter and encourages ongoing engagement.

Closing the loop helps build stronger customer relationships and drives continued participation in your VoC program.

8. Monitor and Measure Success

Track the impact of the changes you implement to ensure they achieve the desired outcomes. Use key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure success, such as customer satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), or retention rates.

Regular monitoring helps refine your VoC program and ensures continuous improvement.

VoC Case Study: Watercare’s VoC Program

Watercare is New Zealand’s largest utility company. After severe storms in the region, the business found themselves in a customer service crisis. Their usual process for managing the customer experience wasn’t enough to handle the scale and complexity of the situation.

Watercare decided to establish a VOC program to help them become a customer-centric organization and figure out what was and wasn’t working. They chose to use Thematic’s AI analytics software to mine their feedback data for insights.

Right after the storms Watercare knew that customers were getting frustrated by unresolved issues and repair processes. Using Thematic summaries they realized that customers were asking for better updates. This enabled Watercare to shift to targeted problem-solving rather than fire-fighting.

Another key insight from Watercare’s VoC program was that improving the employee experience has a positive impact on customer experience. Their CX team used these findings to create a consistent approach to addressing complaints. This included sharing hero stories with staff to drive consistent customer excellence.

Questions to Consider Before Starting your VoC Program

You want a VoC program that is strategic, focused, and capable of driving real improvements in your organization. But achieving this requires thoughtful planning. Below are several crucial questions to consider before you get started.

1. What are your objectives?

Define clear goals for your VoC program. Are you aiming to enhance product quality, improve customer service, or boost loyalty? Specific objectives will guide your strategy and help measure success.

2. Who is your target audience?

Identify which customer segments you want to hear from—new customers, loyal ones, or those who have left. This focus will ensure that the feedback you gather is relevant and actionable.

3. What methods will you use?

Decide on the channels and tools for collecting feedback. Will you use surveys, interviews, or social media? Choose methods that align with your goals and are convenient for your customers.

4. How will you analyze and act on feedback?

Plan how you will process and interpret the data. Ensure you have the tools and resources for both quantitative and qualitative analysis, and outline a strategy for implementing changes based on the feedback.

5. Do you have internal alignment and resources?

Ensure that all relevant departments are on board and that you have the necessary resources, technological and human, to support the VoC program effectively.

How to Start a VoC Program Easily

In this section of the article, we'll walk you through the step-by-step process of setting up your own VoC program.

1. Understand your audience

The first step is to identify who your VoC program is for. Think about which stakeholders in your organization are most likely to care about the VoC program.

This will probably range from product, marketing, and sales teams to senior leadership and finance. Don’t forget to identify specific colleagues and consider what level of involvement they will need to have.

Using the RACI framework

An effective way to decide who you want to involve is the RACI model. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

• Responsible likely refers to you and anyone else who is directly working on the VoC program.
• Accountable is your immediate leadership.
• Consulted individuals and teams are typically operations, marketing, and sales. They will be involved in executing the insights you identify. Compliance, Risk, and HR also need to have an opportunity to feed in to make sure your program isn’t dead before it starts.
• Informed includes senior leadership and finance departments who need to be aware of the program to some degree.

2. Segment customers

Next, list out the key customer segments that your organization should prioritize. Define these groups by their strategic value and commercial appeal. Make sure that you can identify them in your data, as this will be a fundamental part of a successful VoC program.

Key takeaway: All feedback is valuable, but focus on the voices that matter most to your business. Use a strategic lens to guide your decisions and direct your efforts effectively.

3. Identify key customer touchpoints

What does your customer’s journey look like from their first interaction with you all the way to eventually churning? If you don’t yet have one, design a journey map or a process map for all the steps your customer goes through when engaging with your organization.

Understanding how your existing customers interact with your organization is crucial for building an effective VoC program. These interaction points will shape the components of your customer program, telling you what to include or adjust when you collect customer feedback.

4. Plan for actioning insights

Now is the time to start thinking about what will happen after the program has been established. How does your organization’s structure map out against key touchpoints and moments of truth in your customer’s lifecycle?

Start identifying and mapping out who has the ownership and responsibility for executing each stage of the journey. Identify who needs to sign off on any changes your program uncovers. Build those relationships and get their buy-in for your program early, as you will need them to pave the way and execute your findings.

5. VoC tools & software

Choosing the right tools is critical since it can make or break your VoC program. Here’s just some of the tools you might consider:

• Feedback forms
• Survey tools
• Social media listening tools
• Forum monitoring tools
• Online reviews
• Digital analytics and tracking

How to choose the right tools for your VoC program

To understand which tools and data sources you should prioritize for your organization, let’s go back to the essence of VoC programs.

An effective and efficient VoC solution focuses on capturing customer data by asking them directly for their thoughts. This could be in the form of a rating, a multi-choice question, or unstructured feedback.

Surveys are the backbone of capturing VoC since they specifically ask customers for their opinions on specific topics. Every alternative data collection method takes and interprets existing customer data. This means errors, misinterpretations, and inaccuracies can easily creep in.

How to deliver your customer surveys

You will also need to think about how to carry out and deliver your surveys. This might be via email, social media, a dedicated feedback page on your website, or within an app. This will depend on how you usually communicate with your customers.

The best VoC tools & software

Here are some of the top tools and software we recommend to support your VoC program and analyze customer feedback:

Contact Center Automation

• NICE: This comprehensive CX platform allows you to manage customer interactions across multiple communication channels including email, social media, chat, and phone calls.
• InMoment: InMoment tracks customer journeys across all channels, including contact centers, digital channels, and in-person interactions.

Surveys

• SurveyMonkey: Specifically designed for creating online surveys, SurveyMonkey is easy to use and even allows you to create surveys on a tablet or phone.
• AskNicely: AskNicely automates the collection of Voice of Customer (VoC) data by gathering NPS feedback at any stage of the customer journey, across any channel.
• QuestionPro: This specialist survey platform offers a large range of question types as well as custom scripting for greater flexibility.

Feedback Analytics

• Thematic: Thematic’s AI-powered system is designed to analyze feedback data from all communication channels with sentiment, theme, category, and driver analysis, as well as interactive tools to understand and improve CX. This AI tool supports both self-service and professional analyst needs.
• CallMiner: This speech analytics software uses AI to analyze customer interactions across voice, text, and chat channels.
• Stratifyd: Using natural language processing (NLP), Stratifyd analyzes customer feedback to identify sentiment, key themes, and recurring issues.

You also might want to consider all-in-one platforms like Qualtrics, Medallia, and Sprinklr. Companies sometimes start with all-in-one tools to build their confidence, before moving on to specialized tools like Thematic which offer more flexibility and customization options.

6. Integrate your tools

Collecting feedback from your customers is a crucial part of becoming a better business, but it isn’t enough.

Feedback needs to be contextualized and flavored based on who your customer is. This is why connecting your customer feedback to your systems is fundamental. Anonymous feedback is worth a lot less than feedback you can tie back to a particular customer.

Link your feedback with your customer segmentation you mapped out earlier in this guide. Then you’ll be able to identify what your most important or strategic customers are saying.

Link your insights to other data sources

Integrating your tools also enables you to layer your customer data with other sources of data, such as operational and financial metrics. This can make your valuable insights even more powerful.

A great example is Art.com who worked with Thematic analyze their customer feedback. Art.com’s leadership wanted to understand what initiatives they should prioritize. By integrating their customer feedback with data on customer behavior like frequency and value, they were able to identify the best ways to improve their profitability.

The quality and the relevance of your feedback grows as you allow your systems to connect to one another. The more holistic it is, the more valuable your feedback data becomes.

7. Collect feedback

Collecting quality customer feedback is critical for VoC success. Surveys should form the backbone of your VoC feedback, followed by any other relevant data sources. Think about how you will collect and integrate this data as the program progresses.

Sample Questions to ask in your VoC Surveys

Here are some sample questions you can ask in a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program to gather valuable feedback from your customers. These questions can be tailored to various stages of the customer journey or specific aspects of the customer experience.

1. General Satisfaction

• How satisfied are you with our product/service?
• On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
• What do you like most about our product/service?
• What is the one thing we could do to improve your experience with our company?

2. Product/Service Feedback

• How easy is it to use our product/service?
• Which features do you find most valuable, and why?
• Are there any features you believe are missing or could be improved?
• Have you encountered any issues while using our product/service? If so, please describe them.

3. Customer Service

• How would you rate the quality of customer service you received?
• How satisfied were you with the response time of our customer support team?
• Was the issue you contacted us about resolved to your satisfaction?
• How could we improve our customer support service?

4. Customer Journey

• How did you first hear about our company/product?
• Was the purchasing process easy and straightforward?
• Did you encounter any difficulties during the ordering or payment process?
• How satisfied are you with the delivery/shipping experience?

5. Competitive Benchmarking

• How do we compare to other companies you’ve used in this space?
• What made you choose us over our competitors?
• Have you used any similar products/services before? If so, how did they compare?

8. Customer Loyalty

• What keeps you coming back to our company?
• Have you considered switching to another provider? Why or why not?
• What could we do to increase your loyalty to our brand?

9. Post-Purchase Feedback

• How satisfied are you with the product/service after using it for [X] days/weeks/months?
• Does the product/service meet your expectations?
• How likely are you to make another purchase from us?

10. Open-Ended Questions

• What can we do better?
• What’s one thing you wish we had done differently?
• Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about your experience?

Methods of Data Collection for VoC Programs

Your customer feedback will likely come in through many channels. This could include:

• Surveys: Sent directly to customers post-purchase or after an interaction, asking for feedback on specific topics. They might be delivered by email, on an app, by SMS, or a website pop-up.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys: Focus on a single question measuring customer loyalty: "How likely are you to recommend this product/service?"
• Social Media Monitoring Tools: Track mentions, comments, and direct feedback from platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
• Hashtags and Brand Mentions: Analyze brand-related hashtags and mentions to understand sentiment and emerging trends.
• Direct Messages: Gather feedback from customer direct messages (DMs) sent to brand accounts.
• Interviews: Conduct one-on-one interviews with customers, either in person or via phone/video calls, for in-depth insights.
• Focus Groups: Bring small groups of customers together to discuss their experiences, perceptions, and suggestions.
• Mystery Shopping: Use anonymous shoppers to evaluate the customer experience at retail locations or service points.
• Voice-to-Text Analytics: Convert and analyze customer service call transcripts to identify key themes and issues.
• Sentiment Analysis Tools: Use AI-powered tools to gauge customer sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) from textual data across channels.

Cleaning and preprocessing your data

Some data may need to be cleaned before it can be analyzed. This is especially true if the data comes from non-traditional sources. For example, you’ll want to remove any sensitive or personal information such as names, addresses and emails. With Thematic this can be done automatically as you upload your data.

You will also want to filter out unwanted or irrelevant data such as greetings, irrelevant chatter, and any company mentions that aren’t feedback. A good AI feedback analysis tool like Thematic will do this automatically.

Consider offering incentives

Offering incentives can boost engagement, but it also raises the cost of your program. If you choose to incentivize, make sure the value generated justifies the expense.

If you do decide to offer incentives, opt for eCommerce vouchers or cash rather than discounts or freebies from your services. Many market research codes of conduct advise against service-based rewards.

Remember that incentives don’t have to be financial. The strongest motivator is showing customers that their feedback is valued. Implement “You Said, We Did” initiatives to demonstrate how their input led to improvements. This approach encourages more participation and openness.

Finally, celebrate your successes internally and share them with your customers. Often recognition is the best incentive.

8. Analyze feedback

You probably have lots of different types of feedback, including customer complaints, surveys, online reviews, and chat conversations. To get a holistic view of your customer, you need to analyze each data channel consistently so that you can compare the results.

This approach helps you combine analyses into a unified Voice of the Customer. You can then identify key concerns and preferences, and see how they vary across different touchpoints or channels.

AI for Feedback Analysis

Using AI-powered tools is an effective way to manage this process. Advanced AI excels at understanding human language, making it ideal for turning unstructured data into meaningful themes.

Best practices involve identifying patterns and relationships in the feedback, creating codes and themes, and developing a taxonomy. This process transforms qualitative feedback into quantifiable categories, helping you pinpoint common issues and their impact on customer satisfaction.

Thematic is a great example of harnessing Generative AI with excellent results. Thematic combines its proprietary AI models with GPT4 to interrogate huge datasets and identify juicy bits of insights in minutes.

Using Thematic for your VoC program

Thematic has lots of unique features that make it a great choice for analyzing your VoC feedback. Here’s how Thematic can enhance your VoC program:

1. Upload your data

First you’ll want to connect your customer feedback channels to Thematic. Thematic offers a wide range of ready-made integrations, ranging from Zendesk and Medallia to Trustpilot and Intercom.

2. Explore your themes

Thematic automatically identifies themes in your data in real-time. They are divided into themes and sub-themes so you can easily see which topics are most important to your customers. You can easily track specific themes across all your data sources and see how they change over time.

3. Modify your themes

Thematic gives you total control over your themes. You can modify or delete themes and sub-themes to match your business goals. This is great if you want to focus on particular topics for your VoC program. Why not try out Thematic on your data with a free guided trial and see how it works for you.

9. Derive and Share Insights

Insights are only valuable if they are appropriately interpreted and shared. Sharing your VoC insights consistently across teams ensures everyone is aligned. That’s especially true for any teams who need to act on your findings, such as marketing, operations, and customer service teams.

You can maximize the potential of your VoC insights by ensuring you make them accessible as possible. Try to think from the perspective of non-technical teams, senior leadership and finance. What would make it easy for them to take action on your insights or greenlight future VoC projects?

We recommend presenting your insights in user-friendly data visualizations or simple dashboards that anyone can use. A great solution is to use an AI analysis tool like Thematic so that all of your insights are in one place. Thematic’s clear visualizations make it easy to view the top themes in your VoC data, track changes and understand customer sentiment.

10. Prioritize improvements

As you analyze your customer data, you’ll discover numerous opportunities for improvement. There will probably be more than you can realistically address. Prioritizing where you invest your resources is crucial. Here are some tips to help you prioritize effectively:

Some insights can be skipped

It’s perfectly reasonable and often necessary not to act on every insight. There are several factors to consider when deciding which feedback to prioritize.

For instance, feedback from paying customers typically holds more value than that from free users. Similarly, insights from customers who don’t fit your target profile should be deprioritized compared to those from key segments.

Focus on feedback related to essential improvements rather than "nice-to-haves." Investing in changes with the greatest impact will yield better results and should take precedence.

The Kano Model

You might choose to use a specific method to help prioritize your insights. The Kano Model is one approach that helps determine if an improvement is necessary.

According to the Kano Model, some aspects of the customer experience must meet a basic threshold. Beyond that, additional improvements don’t add much value. For example, an impeccably spotless toilet doesn’t increase customer satisfaction much more than a clean one.

Other features improve linearly. The more you enhance them, the better. A good example could be a faster service. Lastly, some features delight customers because they exceed expectations, such as a surprise upgrade at a hotel.

11. Win stakeholder buy-in

Once you've identified key improvements, it's time to gain support and drive change. The program leader needs to hold others accountable for executing the changes. Be an advisor by supporting and guiding them with your insights.

Top tips for getting VoC stakeholder buy-in

It’s common to focus on revenue drivers like repeat purchases, upsells, and customer lifetime value when you’re creating your pitch or board presentation. But to add urgency, highlight the unexpected costs customers face and why they matter.

1. Start with how much it costs to acquire customers. Costs to consider are sales collateral, conversations and the efforts around getting customers onboard.
2. Point out what it costs to serve your customers. This includes daily management of their orders and delivery as well as tech support and customer support.
3. You should also factor in the costs related to returns and any actions required to resolve those situations. Don’t overlook customer retention incentives like loyalty programs, volume discounts, and extended warranties. These can be necessary to retain current customers, attract new ones, or address operational issues.
4. Finally, there’s the cost of negative word-of-mouth. Unhappy customers might share negative feedback with their contacts that can cost you revenue.

The aim of these calculations is to encourage stakeholders to take action on your VoC insights. So we recommend highlighting anything in your VoC insights that could impact these costs as risk elements.

When trying to get buy-in for your VOC program, managing all the costs and returns can feel overwhelming. Our downloadable Calculating ROI of CX guide can help you structure your costs, track revenue, and calculate the impact of your VOC program. The guide includes spreadsheet templates you can use to make your own calculations based on your own data.

12. Implement and monitor changes

The value of your program lies in the actions it drives and the impact those actions create. Your focus should be on improvement and measurable results.

It's crucial to track the impact of any change you implement. Before making a change, define how you will measure its success. Identify the metrics and benchmarks you expect to move. Set these parameters in advance and monitor the results over time. The responsibility for measuring and claiming success rests with you and your team.

This is what will keep your VoC program afloat - delivering change that was informed by your customer data.

The future of VoC

A strong Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is vital for businesses to thrive. By collecting customer feedback from multiple channels, analyzing it, and prioritizing actions, companies can improve continuously and boost customer satisfaction. The key is not just listening but acting on your feedback, and closing the loop to build customer loyalty and trust.

The future of VoC is AI, automation, and real-time feedback. AI will help analyze unstructured data quickly, uncovering trends and actionable insights. Real-time feedback will allow businesses to address customer needs instantly, while predictive analytics will help anticipate future behaviors.

Personalization will also play a bigger role. VoC programs will shift towards delivering tailored insights and creating more customized customer journeys.

Businesses that embrace these advancements will build stronger, more responsive connections with their customers. If you haven’t already started, now is the time to develop your VoC program!

Further reading on Voice of the Customer

Want to know more about VoC? We’ve got you covered. Here’s some further reading from our VoC experts to help your program:

• Simple Guide to Voice of Customer Analytics: Tools & Strategies
• Voice of Customer Examples: How Different Industries Use VoC Insights
• The Best VoC Analytics Tools: Analyze Feedback Easily
• The Top 11 Voice of Customer (VoC) Tools
• Simple Guide to Voice of Customer Analytics: Tools & Strategies
• Unlocking the Hidden ROI of VOC: A Comprehensive Guide
• Calculating the ROI of Customer Experience: Complete Guide
• Reduce Customer Churn with the Voice of the Customer (VoC)

Kickstart Your Voice of Customer program

Ready to get started? Why not try out Thematic on your customer data and see for yourself why so many companies use us for their VoC programs.