Employees sitting around the table designing a business strategy

Following on from our previous blog, What is Voice of Customer (VoC)?, we’ll now explore how to build a successful Voice of Customer strategy.

Developing a VoC strategy can help companies improve customer experience (CX). It can provide relevant insights to anticipate customers’ needs and understand their decision-making process. It also helps drive systematic CX change, resulting in increased customer loyalty and revenue.

Design your strategy so that it guides you how to best collect customer feedback, analyse it, and manage the actions arising from it. Here’s a few tips on how to get you started:

DEFINE YOUR GOALS AND METRICS

Setting your goals and metrics should always be on top of the to-do list when designing any strategy. Have a clear idea of why you want to collect customer feedback in the first place, and how you’ll measure the success of your VoC initiatives. Start small, be specific, and don’t try to measure every aspect of your business at once. Over time, you can add additional goals to your strategy.

PICK THE RIGHT METHOD

Choosing the right channels to gather customer feedback is key to gaining relevant insights and representing your customers’ engagement accurately. Your methodology will highly depend on your audience, company’s nature, and objectives.

If you’d like to reach a wider audience and capture the entire customer journey, you should consider collecting multi-channel feedback. Avius offers physical survey kiosks, perfect for capturing in-the-moment feedback, as well as online surveys to find out customers’ opinions pre and post visit.

Multi-channel surveys - on desktop, phone and kiosk

START COLLECTING FEEDBACK

Once you define your goals and find the right channels, you can start capturing feedback from all your customers. Make it easy for them to express their opinion on your business. Place your kiosks or tablets in high footfall and dwell areas. Send your satisfaction survey online to a selected group of customers to get more detailed feedback on their experience. Ensure your survey questions are relevant and branched well. If you’re unsure how to design your survey, ask experts, such as Avius, for help.

GET EVERYONE INVOLVED

In order to build a successful Voice of Customer strategy, it’s crucial for everyone in the business to understand and support the process of gathering and reviewing customer feedback. From the CEO and senior management to customer service team and cleaning staff.

You should have a dedicated VoC or CX team which will track the progress of your initiatives. However, it’s important you demonstrate to all your staff what benefits VoC will bring to customers and employees alike. Update everyone on the results and actions arising from capturing customer feedback to keep them committed.

EVALUATE INSIGHTS TO DRIVE CHANGE

Collecting customer data is an important, but small part of a good Voice of Customer strategy. You should regularly evaluate gathered insights to drive change. But don’t miss out on any opportunities by only tracking customer satisfaction scores.

A recent survey from McKinsey shows that companies substantially raise customer satisfaction scores through significant improvements in operational performance (primarily by speeding up and simplifying interactions). These improvements can lower customer churn by 10-15%, increase the win rate of offers by 20-40% percent, and lower costs by up to 50%.

Therefore, use VoC insights to:

    • Improve your products or services
    • Reward your employees
    • Identify problems, resolve them, and mitigate the risks of them reoccurring in the future
    • Personalise messages and create bespoke offers to grow customer loyalty and advocacy
    • Make informed investment decisions
    • Change staffing rotas and improve operational efficiencies
    • Follow up with unhappy customers to reduce churn


COMMUNICATE THE CHANGES TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

Customers always appreciate when they are listened to. Unfortunately, Microsoft report found that only half of us believe most brands take any action on their feedback. So, keep your customers regularly updated on what changes you’ve implemented as a result of their feedback. It will encourage others to leave feedback and appeal to potential prospects.

REVISIT THE STRATEGY

Don’t worry if you don’t get everything right the first time. You might not always see the cracks in your strategy unless you roll it out for a while. Bear in mind that customers’ expectations and behaviour often change, and you too have to continuously adapt.

By Natalia Kaczmarek