Michael Podolsky, Co-founder and CEO of PissedConsumer, a review platform that helps consumers be heard and brands improve their service.
I often emphasize in my writing why customer satisfaction is an absolute necessity–and why brands that fail to heed this will risk negative impacts to retention, revenue and reputation.
Central to mitigating this risk is listening to your customers and taking action based on what they tell you. Not just as a crisis aversion measure, but also as a basis upon which to make strategic changes and improvements that bring your brand and your customers closer together.
Here I’ll look at how voice of customer analysis can fulfill this need and how it can be applied to your business.
What is voice of customer analysis?
Simply put, voice of customer (VoC) analysis is a systematic means of sorting and interpreting consumer feedback with the aim of reaching conclusions that benefit the customer experience, and through that, your brand.
The benefits include:
• Increased Customer Retention: Knowing the needs of your customers pays off. When properly applied, VoC analysis can initiate changes that contribute to customer retention.
• Better Customer Understanding: Deep analysis of customer feedback will naturally shorten the gap between what your customers want and what you think they want. VoC marketing assessment can help your team separate what is working from what isn’t.
• Uncovered Market Opportunities: Large-scale VoC data analysis will not just identify the gaps in your own operation. When applied to your competitors’ customer feedback, it could reveal patterns in customer testimonials that point toward untapped growth potential and insight that spearheads a competitive advantage through market differentiation.
• Optimized Operational Efficiency: Bottlenecks and frequent customer complaints are revealed when you apply VoC analysis, the identification of which will prove of worth to not just the customer-facing contingent of your business, but the insights gained may shine a light on the possible shortcomings of your internal processes.
Working With Voice Of Customer Analysis
The above advantages make a good case for VoC implementation, but how can your business go about integrating it?
1. Define your goals.
While VoC analytics are useful in all cases because they can reliably identify blind spots and areas that need work that would have otherwise been overlooked, as with any strategy, it helps to have a target. So, ask yourself what you want to achieve.
Are you, for example, looking to identify reasons for low or falling retention rates? Low customer experience and satisfaction scores? Poor overall performance versus your competition?
Planning around an objective brings a clear purpose to your VoC analysis and will place the insights gained into a practical context that can be applied strategically.
2. Collect holistic data.
While clear targets are useful in terms of what goals you want to achieve, a hyper-focus on some data sources at the expense of others is not. You’ll want to collect as much data as possible from across as many diverse sources as are available—customer service interactions, online reviews, social media—it’s all equally relevant.
The larger the dataset, the more likely you are to be able to infer patterns in customer behavior—the type of useful insights that won’t be revealed in the customers’ own words, but rather through how they act.
3. Gather insights with data analysis.
The next step is to sift through the gathered customer data for useful insight. Large amounts of data are dealt with using AI-driven tools that employ natural language processing to identify sentiment and pertinent keywords.
This process will seek out patterns, trends and themes in customer behavior, both overall and in specific contexts, such as toward a particular product or aspect of your business—customer service, for example.
4. Assess continuously.
Consistently test and gather customer feedback on any changes you make to gauge their effectiveness and identify areas for refinement. If it works, let your customers know you’ve listened carefully to what they’ve had to stay and that you’ve made improvements based on their valuable input—and will continue to do so.
Build a beneficial feedback loop.
Regardless of what industry you are in or the scale of your business, VoC analysis provides your company with a systematic procedure that practically applies the principle of listening, learning and then acting. By demystifying the data, VoC analysis could be the missing ingredient that sees your brand meet and exceed customer expectations, and develop a dynamic and evolving customer satisfaction strategy that pays off.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
Read the full article here
