What is a Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program, and Why is Everyone Talking About It?

In today’s world, communication between businesses and their customers is a two-way street. Thanks to technology, consumers can publicly share their opinions and recommendations, becoming either promoters or critics of brands. 

These opinions present both a challenge and an opportunity for businesses: they influence brand positioning while providing insights into customer experiences and preferences in real-time.

When customers speak, brands listen. The best way to do this is through a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program like Leal 360’s. Learn what it’s all about and how to implement it.

What Exactly is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer program is a strategic process for gathering customer feedback about a brand, its products, and its services.

The fundamental difference between VoC programs and other feedback collection methods lies in their comprehensive approach and broad scope. VoC programs aim to understand customer perceptions and motivations behind both direct and indirect feedback.

These programs are continuous processes that generate strategic insights and drive profound changes.

Other feedback collection methods, such as satisfaction surveys, focus groups, and review analysis, have a more tactical focus and limited scope. While they can provide insights into specific areas or topics, they are often limited to a single point in time.

An effective VoC program integrates multiple feedback collection methods to offer a holistic view of customer experience, satisfaction, preferences, perceptions, and expectations with the brand.

How Does a VoC Program Benefit Your Business?

A Voice of the Customer program enables businesses to anticipate customer needs and preferences, gaining the insights needed to improve products and services while ensuring timely and appropriate responses to feedback.

These overall benefits translate into several specific advantages:

• Identifying unmet needs and innovation opportunities:
  A VoC program uncovers unaddressed needs and new consumer preferences, enabling the development of innovative products and services that respond to real market demands. By proactively adapting to customer expectations, your business can stand out from competitors and establish itself as a leader in customer satisfaction and experience.
• Enhancing customer experience:
  By analyzing continuous, comprehensive feedback, you can identify and address weak points in the customer journey, improving every interaction with your clients. Remember, 75% of consumers are willing to pay more for products from companies that provide excellent service.
• Increasing customer retention:
  Understanding and addressing customer needs helps build long-term relationships and increases the lifetime value of each customer. A customer who feels heard is more likely to remain loyal and less likely to switch to competitors.
• Reducing costs:
  Customer feedback reveals areas within internal processes that can be optimized, from supply chain management to customer service. By addressing root issues, you can avoid the costs associated with acquiring new customers, managing dissatisfied clients, and handling high volumes of support interactions. Retaining customers isn’t just about selling more; it’s about selling more efficiently. Acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
• Improving brand positioning:
  Timely feedback management reinforces a positive perception of your brand, improving its market positioning. Listening and responding appropriately to feedback can turn critics into allies and detractors into promoters of your brand.

How Does a VoC Program Work?

A Voice of the Customer program involves continuously capturing, managing, analyzing, responding to, and monitoring customer feedback. This process is typically divided into five main phases:

🟡 Capturing Feedback

The first phase focuses on collecting as much feedback and data as possible about your customers’ experiences across the entire customer journey and various touchpoints.

Feedback collection should be proactive. Don’t wait for it to come to you—go out and gather it. Tools and sources include:

• Company website (contact forms and reviews)
• Social media (comments, ratings, interactions)
• Customer service and employee insights
• CSAT satisfaction surveys
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys
• Mystery shopper services for in-store experience analysis
• Focus group interviews
• Consumer data analysis to build a comprehensive customer profile

With Leal 360’s Voice of the Customer module, you can implement various initiatives to collect customer feedback, from managing Google and social media reviews to sending NPS surveys and using mystery shoppers to analyze in-store experiences.

🟡 Managing and Responding to Feedback

Once feedback is collected, it must be managed and addressed promptly by the relevant department. Recommended steps include:

1. Categorize and prioritize feedback based on urgency.
2. Respond promptly and empathetically to customers.
3. Take corrective actions and inform customers of the changes made.

Leal 360’s Campaigns module allows you to manually or automatically manage and respond to customer feedback based on their interactions and behavior.

🟡 Analyzing Feedback and Generating Insights

Once data is collected, it needs to be processed and organized to uncover meaningful insights. The goal is to transform data into actionable information and detect patterns to better understand customer expectations.

Leal 360’s CDP - My Customers module allows you to analyze consumer data, understand purchasing behavior, and create a complete profile for each customer, enabling you to predict their needs and preferences.

🟡 Turning Insights into Actionable Steps

After generating insights, prioritize them based on potential impact and feasibility, and allocate resources to key areas. Actions may include adjustments to products or services, changes in internal processes, or updates in customer communication.

Leal 360’s Benefits module enables you to create personalized promotions based on customer preferences.

🟡 Monitoring Applied Measures

The final phase involves monitoring the impact of implemented improvements. Measure the return on investment (ROI) and customer satisfaction resulting from these changes. This ongoing evaluation ensures your strategies remain effective and customer-centric.

How to Analyze and Leverage VoC Data

As mentioned earlier, your customers' feedback can come from multiple sources. This feedback often consists of both qualitative and quantitative data: comments, reviews, ratings, transactional data, and performance and engagement metrics. 

Analyzing this data comprehensively and in-depth is essential to understanding your customers' motivations, expectations, needs, and preferences.

The best way to conduct an exhaustive analysis of your customers’ feedback is by applying artificial intelligence to their data. This allows you to create complete customer profiles and segment them according to their feedback and purchasing behavior.

For example, with the RFM model offered by Leal 360, you can segment your customers based on their purchasing behavior. Meanwhile, the NPS functionalities enable you to categorize them into promoters, neutrals, and detractors of your brand. 

Once you have the segmentation, you can create dynamic audiences. Using the insights gathered, you can develop personalized and automated promotions and campaigns targeted at each audience segment.

5 Tips for Implementing Your Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program

Implementing an effective Voice of the Customer (VoC) program allows you to deeply understand your customers’ perceptions and improve their experience. Here are five key tips to gather feedback from your customers, from centralizing data to leveraging advanced technology.

1. Use Diverse Sources

Collect customer feedback using different tools with varying focuses and scopes: satisfaction and recommendation surveys, analysis of comments and reviews, in-store experience assessments, and more.

Each tool can target a specific area, metric, or indicator. For example:

• NPS surveys measure how likely your customers are to recommend your brand.
• CSAT surveys measure immediate satisfaction.

While NPS serves as a global indicator of customer loyalty, CSAT evaluates satisfaction with a specific interaction or experience, providing more targeted feedback. Both tools are valuable and complementary.

2. Centralize Your Data

Gather and store your customer data in one place. This enables comprehensive and integrated analysis, giving you a global view of each customer and your market. You can centralize customer data using the CDP - My Customers module from Leal 360.

3. Evaluate the Entire Customer Journey

It’s easy to focus all efforts on a deficient area. While addressing noticeable issues is essential, true threats and opportunities can often be hidden. Regularly evaluate your customers’ entire journey, even areas that are performing well.

4. Look Beyond the “What” to Find the “Why”

Ratings, comments, and surveys can indicate what problems your products, services, or operations may have. However, the best solutions address the root causes behind the symptoms. Analyze the data deeply to uncover the source of the problems identified by your customers.

5. Leverage Technology for Data Analysis

Analyzing large and diverse amounts of feedback can become a daunting task. The good news is that technology can help. Data intelligence simplifies and enhances the analysis of customer feedback. Leal 360 enables you to generate insights in minutes and in real-time with a comprehensive analysis of your customers’ data. We’ll show you how.

A Successful VoC Program Needs the Right Software

Technological advances present a unique opportunity to differentiate yourself from competitors. Artificial intelligence allows you to provide better customer service and experiences. Your customers know this:

• 81% expect faster service as technology advances.
• 73% expect greater personalization.

Choosing the right software is essential to implementing an effective Voice of the Customer program. You need software that enables you to collect feedback from multiple sources, complement it with your customers’ behavioral and contactability data, analyze it, generate insights, and take corresponding actions. You need an integrated, intuitive, and powerful platform. You need Leal 360.

How Leal 360 Helps You Implement a Successful VoC Program

Leal 360 offers much more than a Voice of the Customer program; it provides a platform to manage customer relationships. It integrates a Voice of the Customer program (Voice of the Customer module) with a customer data platform (CDP - My Customers module), omnichannel marketing software (Campaigns module), and a loyalty solution (Benefits module).

Implement a complete VoC program with the diverse functionalities of the Voice of the Customer module:

• Measure customer satisfaction and recommendations with CSAT and NPS.
• Segment your customers into promoters, neutrals, and detractors using the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Respond to customer feedback manually or automatically to convert detractors into promoters.
• Centralize and manage customer comments on Google and Facebook.
• Analyze and enhance customer service and experience at each branch using the crowdsourced mystery shopper service.

With Leal 360’s mystery shopper service, your customers act as undercover agents to evaluate the service provided at specific locations through gamified, geolocated missions. This allows you to continuously and objectively monitor what’s happening at your points of sale.

Additionally, with the CDP - My Customers module, you can go beyond comments and ratings. Capture and analyze demographic, transactional, behavioral, and psychographic data to generate valuable insights. Use these insights to execute personalized campaigns and promotions with the Campaigns module and the Benefits module.

Leal 360 provides all the tools needed to deliver the best customer experience. Turn detractors into promoters of your brand and improve the experience at every branch of your business.

Schedule a Free Demo of Leal 360 Today!

80% of consumers say that the experience provided by a company is as important as its products and services. Up to 96% of your customers might leave due to poor customer service. Now is the time to listen to your customers to boost your brand. Leal makes it possible. With Leal 360, it’s easier to sell more and better.

Discover how to implement a VoC program with us. Schedule your demo and let’s talk!

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