Voice of Customer Archives

If your brand isn’t capturing customer feedback, unfortunately it won’t know how to improve—this is where the voice of customer (or “VoC”) comes in. This article is designed to give you InMoment’s take on what voice of customer examples look like.

In the customer experience industry, we call capturing customer feedback a “voice of customer” program, and at InMoment—we know that it’s not enough to capture feedback, you need to capture it, understand it, take action, and make sure customers know their feedback is being heard. We call this “experience improvement.”

What Is Voice of the Customer?

In technical terms, a VoC program is the process of gathering vital information regarding what customers think and feel about their experiences with a business.

What is the Voice of Customer Process?

At InMoment, the VoC process is called “Continuous Improvement,” and can be broken down into five easy steps: design, listen, understand, transform, and realize.

Step #1: Design Your Program

In this stage, you have the opportunity to set up a strong foundation for your program; a strategy that aligns with the overall business values, financial objectives, and brand promises. This is one of the most important stages that is often overlooked, as you have one shot upfront to invest the time, energy, and resources into getting your program right from the start. You will thank us later throughout the process!

Step #2: Listen To Your Customers

Over the years, listening to customers has dramatically evolved. What used to be limited to sending out surveys through direct feedback, the industry has evolved to include indirect and inferred customer data sources as well. This can include listening posts like customer support interactions, emails, live chats, direct surveys, online product reviews, social media comments, and more!

Step #3: Understand Your Customer Data

For any data to be useful, of course you need to take the time to dig in and understand what your customers are actually saying. Most brands with a VoC or experience improvement program will centralize the data streams and use advanced analytics and behavioral science experts to identify what customers are actually saying. In the modern experience landscape, we have AI machine learning tools that can take your data even further, enabling you to look into customer emotions, intent, and sentiment. This understanding of the customer data stage is critical, and will set you up for the next step.

Step #4: Transform Through Taking Action

In the transformation stage, this is where you’ll thank us that you took the time up front to design your program and identify what success looks like. Now, you have the opportunity to take action on customer data.

Here’s a voice of customer example in action: maybe you can see customers are purchasing lots of one specific product, but the repeat purchases are extremely low. This is an opportunity to figure out the drivers of repeat purchases for your specific brand and its products, and apply those across the board. Can you lower the price? Can you rebrand or repackage the product to match more successful ones?

Step #5: Realize Business Value

This is where voice of customer and experience improvement programs shine. After you pull the necessary triggers in the transformation process, you’ll get the opportunity to evaluate and demonstrate real and tangible results for your business. Whether it’s reducing costs, avoiding customer churn, acquiring new customers, or something else—voice of customer programs will help you get there. Check out some more ideas on identifying and executing ROI opportunities in this Solve for X video.

Listening to the Voice of Customer Examples

Next up, here are some specific voice of customer examples that can help you listen to customers and gather their valuable feedback.

Direct Feedback Methods:

Email surveys: Sending your customers a link to a survey via email
SMS surveys: Sending your customers a link to a survey via text message
Customer interviews: Arranging 1:1 quantitative interviews with specific customers to understand their experience
Live chat: Capturing your customer commentary in chatbots gives you an opportunity to see recurring themes, problems, challenges, and opportunities
Focus groups: Inviting certain customer segments to provide in-depth qualitative feedback on their individual and unique experiences

Indirect Feedback Methods (also known as unsolicited feedback):

Call center recordings: By capturing call center or contact center recordings, you can understand factors like call frequency and burdens to the center.
Social media commentary: This publicly listed information is a gold mine when it comes to understanding how customers are likely to recommend your brand to friends or family, and can be captured in your voice of customer platform with a social scraping tool.
Product or location reviews: This up-and-coming indirect feedback method helps you understand how your product or location ranks amongst competitors, and will typically leave clues for how to improve your public rating.
Web chat transcripts: These notes might show how many people have contacted you asking for more details, stock levels or sneaker quality in the past.

Inferred Feedback Methods:

Customer behaviors on your website: use this data to see behaviors such as if customers are abandoning items in their cart, or perhaps there are web pages that are visited less often than others and have room for optimization.
CRM data: whether your brand uses Salesforce or another brand, it can be helpful to overlay operational feedback with CRM elements like purchase history, a loyalty program, or a customer’s store account, which will show an important operational and segmentation piece of the puzzle.

Bringing Voice of Customer Examples to Life

Here are three of InMoment’s clients who have implemented the data collection strategies described above to provide their customers and employees with great brand experiences:

Foot Locker

As you can imagine, Foot Locker had a ton of data points on their hands. The brand had loads of customer behavior intelligence, but this data was coming from so many sources that it was hard to see the big picture. Using the InMoment XI Platform, this brand was able to consolidate all of its operational data sources and listening posts into one platform, giving it the intelligence needed to create a unique experience for every customer. The result? Foot Locker reduced customer listening costs, added new listening posts across video and social media, and experienced faster and more accurate resolution to its business challenges.

Docusign

Signing a digital agreement is now table stakes for most companies. That’s in large part thanks to DocuSign, a brand where growth is driven by customers who share the easy, secure e-signature experience with colleagues and clients. To listen to its customer feedback, the DocuSign product team uses in-app NPS microsurvey feedback to continually optimize end user experience. This Net Promoter Score program, powered by InMoment, also identifies brand enthusiasts who are the engine of a robust customer advocacy program.

Glassdoor

This brand uses the InMoment Platform to capture a unified view of employer experience, and now thousands of cross-industry employers across use the Glassdoor website to help them recruit and hire quality candidates.

Putting the five phases of continuous improvement to the ultimate test, Glassdoor monitors and improves the entire customer journey using microsurveys to capture sentiment at moments that matter for employees. Integration with Salesforce enables front line teams to close the loop with customers in real-time. Advanced text and sentiment analytics empower Glassdoor teams to analyze feedback, and customized dashboards ensure that each team can quickly see what is important to them and prioritize improvement efforts.

Wrapping Up

Voice of customer and experience improvement programs have dramatically evolved over the last few decades—what used to be limited to direct survey feedback has extended to include indirect and inferred feedback methods too. The power of a VoC program is in the five elements of achieving continuous improvement: design, listen, understand, transform, and finally, realize business value. We truly believe it’s improving experiences that turns customers into lifelong brand advocates, helping your business achieve its objectives at the same time.

At InMoment, we help our clients design, listen, understand, transform, and realize their experience improvement and voice of customer program goals every day. Get in touch to learn more about how experience improvement can transform your business today!

A lot of folks believe that voice of customer (VoC) programs and market research mean the same thing—but they’re actually quite different! In fact, each discipline differs in purpose, design, analysis and outcomes.

However, even though they’re different, it’s important to point out that one isn’t necessarily better than the other—and brands need both if they want their customer experience (CX) programs to reach their potential.

So, with that in mind, let’s get into a quick primer!

Breaking Down the Difference Between Voice of Customer & Market Research

What Is the Definition of Voice of Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the process of gathering vital information regarding what customers think and feel about their experiences with a business.

How Does VoC Fit into Your CX Strategy

VoC programs are an essential part of any CX toolkit. They’re designed to fulfill many critical functions for your overall customer experience program, including, as their name implies, understanding customer needs. They’re also useful for understanding customer expectations, as well as what those individuals may want from you before even they know. This information can then be used to adjust operations, inform marketing efforts, and help your organization create both short- and long-term Experience Improvement (XI).

Not all VoC feedback comes from typical listening methods like surveys and focus groups, either. A lot of it comes from unsolicited feedback (website reviews, social media comments, etc). Unsolicited feedback is helpful because it gives customers a chance to express themselves entirely in their own terms, which may alert brands to problems and journey breakages that they weren’t aware of.

All of this boils down to the ability to not just capture individual and collective customer feedback, but act upon it. Taking action is crucial to Experience Improvement and building connective relationships.

What Is the Definition of Market Research?

Market research explores hidden relationships within industry data, collected by a market research firm, in order to predict and forecast future events and behavior within the market.

What Is the Role of Market Research in Your Business?

While Voice of Customer is all about feedback, market research takes a slightly wider lens by focusing on understanding the trends around your business.

Primary research is useful for testing new communications and services that your company wants to put out there, while secondary research looks at the dynamics and sizing of the marketplace around you. Conducting these types of research can help your company identify your target market, segment your customers, and identify growth opportunities.

Your company can supercharge its market research efforts by defining the population you want to target with a survey, then creating samples that ensure you’ll have a match. We’ve found that surveys like these are most effective when they’re blind, meaning that the customer or individual stays anonymous while taking them, and challenge you to do the same! This method is great for reducing response bias.

This handy chart breaks down the differences between these two methods

So, Why Do You Need Both?

VoC and market research aren’t the same, but your CX program and your organization need both in order to truly understand your customers as people. That fundamental, holistic understanding fuels unforgettable experiences that build loyalty while also creating additional revenue! So be bold in your strategy and use both VoC and market research. Your customers will feel heard, your C-suite will be impressed, and the experiences you provide will be meaningfully transformed.

Click here to read our full-length white paper on why your brand needs both VoC and market research. Our very own Eric Smuda has spent decades in both fields and provides an in-depth look not just at why these disciplines are important, but how your organization can wield them effectively.