According to a recent study just 23% of consumers were “very satisfied” with the customer experience. Yet 68% of businesses reported their customers were “very satisfied”. This just proves that many companies don’t really know their customers as well as they think they do.

A solid Voice of Customer program helps you listen to your customers and take their opinions into account in your business decisions. And to give your program the best chance of success, you need to be using the right tools to simplify your feedback collection and analysis.

In this article we’ll run through the best VoC analytics tools for creating surveys, collecting customer feedback, performing AI analysis, and more.

We’ll take a look at the key features and functionalities you should be looking for, as well as comparing the leading tools currently on the market.

Why VoC Analytics Matters

Voice of the Customer (VoC) refers to your customers’ needs, expectations, and desires. This could include any data where your customers express an opinion about your business, such as surveys, online reviews, focus groups, and social media engagement.

VoC data is invaluable for truly understanding your customers. But the value of this data depends on what you do with it. To really dive into what your customers think and feel, you need efficient ways to collect, collate, and analyze your data.

The final step is to translate your findings into actionable insights and get your whole organization involved in implementation.

Why VoC Analytics Tools Matter

Many organizations use VoC analytics tools like Thematic to streamline their feedback analysis. These tools typically use AI to identify and analyze the key themes in your data.

They allow you to rapidly analyze large quantities of data in one place and to better understand how your customers feel about your brand through sentiment analysis.

Here’s some more specific examples of why VoC analytics matters and how you can use it in your organization:

Identify Product Issues Fast

VoC analytics is great at picking up common customer complaints about product flaws or service gaps. For example, AI analytics tools like Thematic can automatically scan your data and identify recurring issues.

In the example below you can see Thematic’s summary feature showing issues which have arisen in the past month.

This enables teams to quickly go in and prioritize which issues to address based on how many customers are affected and the severity of the problem.

Improve Customer Support

These same principles can be applied to improving your customer support experience.

By analyzing feedback from support tickets, live chats, or surveys, businesses can better understand any issues customers are experiencing with CX throughout the customer journey.

For example, customers might mention long wait times or unsatisfactory responses. Digging deeper into the data with AI analytics tools can help organizations understand exactly what is going on.

These insights can then be used to improve CX training or response processes, and ultimately better meet customer expectations.

Personalize Marketing Campaigns

In a crowded marketplace with so many options, personalization can be a powerful differentiator. VoC data can help businesses better understand exactly what their customers want and how they like to buy.

For example, clothing brands leverage VoC insights to create more personalized marketing campaigns by targeting customers with the styles or products they’ve shown interest in.

Boosting Retention and Loyalty

With 37.9% of marketers reporting that VoC programs increased their customer retention, this type of data is great for understanding brand loyalty.

Surveys can be a powerful way to follow up with customers who haven’t purchased from you in a while. You can also supplement this data with online reviews or social media mentions to get a more holistic view of why customers leave or stay with your brand.

For example, if your VoC feedback shows that your customers really value fast shipping or loyalty rewards, companies can double down on those aspects to improve retention and increase repeat business.

Product Innovation Based on Customer Needs

Listening to exactly what your customers want is a great way to create new products or enhance existing ones.

For instance, a software company might uncover through customer surveys that users want a certain feature. Including this feature in future versions increases customer satisfaction and also shows your users that you’re listening and responding to them.

What Are VoC Analytics Tools?

Voice of Customer analysis used to be done manually using lengthy and time-consuming processes. Today more and more companies are using AI analytics tools like Thematic that can rapidly analyze vast quantities of unstructured data including social media comments, survey responses, or online reviews.

The top tools on the market use smart analytics and AI to organize the data, spot patterns, and highlight trends. Users can quickly interpret large amounts of data and gain actionable insights that will really make a difference to their organization.

AI tools like Thematic are a great option since they automatically analyze your feedback and determine the main themes and sub-themes in your customer data. Thematic also performs sentiment analysis so you know exactly how your customers are feeling.

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Key Features to Look for in VoC Tools

The purpose of VoC analytics tools is to make it easier and more efficient for your organization to access and action valuable insights. In this section, let’s take a closer look at the most important features you should be looking for when choosing a VoC tool.

Text Analysis

The fundamental feature of every AI analytics tool is text analysis. Advanced analytics tools use AI, NLP, and machine learning to identify patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent through traditional manual analysis techniques.

Thematic’s proprietary AI automatically analyzes your feedback and determine the main themes and sub-themes in your customer data. These are usually the topics your customers are mentioning most frequently in surveys, online reviews, or social media mentions.

In the example below you can see how customer service interactions can be broken down in this way using thematic analysis. This makes it easy for you to get top-level insights or to dive deeper into the data to identify exactly what’s causing the issue.

Sentiment Analysis

Text analysis is supplemented by sentiment analysis which allows you to understand how your customers feel alongside what they are saying.

Sentiment analysis works by quantifying how positive or negative the language is. In the example below you can see three different reviews referring the same theme. There are two negative and one positive mentions.

Sentiment analysis by itself only tells us that one customer is happy and the other two are not happy. When we combine this with thematic analysis we can understand why they feel that way. This allows us to better understand our customers and to address their needs.

Integration with Feedback Channels

Having top-range AI analytics capabilities is only useful if you can use them on your data. When you’re comparing VoC analytics tools, don’t forget to look at their integration options.

This way you get a 360-degree view of your customer interactions, making it easier to improve the overall experience and streamline customer feedback management.

Top VoC Analytics Tools

Let’s run through the top VoC Analytics tools currently on the market and what each of them is capable of:

1. Thematic

Thematic is an AI-powered platform that makes it easy for you to analyze customer feedback at scale. Thematic works by automatically identifying themes, or topics, in your data in real-time. These are divided into themes and sub-themes so you can instantly see which topics are most important to your customers.

Thematic’s clear visualizations make it easy to view the top themes in your Voice of Customer data, track changes, and understand customer sentiment. Thematic quantifies your qualitative customer data with metrics like impact on NPS (Net Promoter Score).

You can easily drill down into your customer feedback data to see exactly what the problem is, and share this information with the right people in your organization.

Thematic G2 reviews

“It does an excellent job using a single view to break down the verbatims into themes displayed by volume, sentiment, and impact on our beacon metric, often but not exclusively NPS.”

“Their AI model does a great job to jump-start your categorization model with the ability to merge, tweak, add new themes quite easily.”

“It takes time to think through the best way to represent your data and its not something to just casually attempt.”

2. Medallia

Medallia is a broad customer experience management platform that offers a range of VoC tools such as surveys and social listening as well as text analytics features.

Medallia offers AI and machine learning tools that let you analyze structured and unstructured insights. Since everything is in one place, you can use their analytics tools to quickly scan your data and get insights into what your audience cares about most.

On the flip side, though, users have reported difficulties with analyzing unstructured feedback and reliance on third-party assistance to configure the platform.

And since Medallia is a comprehensive CX management solution, its analytics features are more limited than the specialist AI analytics tools on this list.

Medallia G2 reviews

“The integration with other programs is simple and straightforward, particularly with the help of our Medallia Professional Services team.”

“The dependency on third-party to configure anything in the platform is challenging.”

“We’d love to see better analysis of unstructured data, leveraging AI and advanced text analytics tools. We still struggle to tell stories using their TA topics.”

3. Qualtrics XM Discover

XM Discover is the AI analytics software that Qualtrics purchased from Clarabridge. So XM Discover tends to work best if you are already gathering data with Qualtrics.

To get started, you select a specific industry AI model and then begin training it to customize it to your business and market context. This means it can take weeks or months to start getting your VoC insights.

Reviewers have also reported that there is a steep learning curve when it comes to using the platform and analyzing customer feedback to discover insights.

XM Discover G2 reviews

“Our team did not have the expertise to fully utilize the features with this product.”

“A little bit of a learning curve to understand setting up and configure.”

“Requires a lot of admin time for set-up, onboarding, and maintenance.”

4. Chattermill

Chattermill is an AI-powered customer experience intelligence platform which uses machine learning models to label datasets. These are then used to train algorithms to identify patterns in your customer feedback and predict outcomes.

Chattermill makes it easy to analyze all of your data in one place with pre-built connectors to over 50 customer feedback channels.

But there are some limitations when it comes to text analytics. Chattermill uses predefined categories and an unsupervised layer to group phrases and tag feedback data with themes. This means you can add new themes, but you can only delete themes you’ve added manually. Users have also reported issues with tagging errors and limited report personalization.

Chattermill G2 reviews

“Chattermill allows you to compile survey data in one place and find trends.”

“Sometimes the tagging is wrong and is tagged with too many themes. In the most part the correct theme is there, but often it includes other unrelated themes.”

“Lack of report personalization can sometimes be an issue: even though the tool is easy to use and does report fast.”

Comparing VoC Tools: How to Choose the Right One

Recommendations for Choosing the Right VoC Analytics Tools

1. Define your Business Goals

The first step in choosing the right Voice of Customer tools is to clearly define your business goals and VoC strategy. Once you know what you want to achieve, you can select customer tools that match your requirements.

For example, you might want to get customer feedback on a new product that you’ve launched. In this case you’ll probably want to send out surveys to customers and collate as much VoC data as you can on this product.

To get the most out of your data you’ll want a VoC analytics tool that you can easily integrate with your feedback channels and that has the analytics capabilities to show you any issues your customers are experiencing with the product. This includes any issues that you are not expecting. You can then use these valuable insights to improve customer satisfaction.

Thematic’s proprietary AI gives you a helping hand with this type of analysis by automatically identifying themes and sub-themes in your VoC data. You can then go into the Theme Editor and adjust the themes to meet your specific requirements.

2. Evaluate Features Critically

To get the most out of your investment, look for tools with multi-channel feedback, advanced analytics, real-time reporting, and easy integration. Choose a tool that has everything you need to collect customer feedback and make sense of your qualitative data effectively.

3. Read Reviews and Get Demos

Check user reviews and try demos to see if it fits your needs. Thematic currently offers a free guided trial that allows you to try out the platform using your own data.

4. Consider Accessibility

Any type of tool is only as good as the people who use it, and insights are only valuable if they are appropriately interpreted and shared.

Think about who will use the AI tool and what they will use it for. For example, if you plan to give access to non-technical teams like customer support or marketing, think about what they need to get the most out of your VoC insights.

This is especially important if you plan to share your customer insights with key stakeholders. Thematic’s clear visualizations make it easy to view the top themes in your Voice of Customer data, track changes and understand customer sentiment.

Try Thematic on Your Data

Still not sure which is the best VoC analytics tool for you? Why not try out Thematic on your VoC data with a free guided trial and see how it works for you.