Voice of Customer (VoC): How to Measure and Interpret It
Are you looking to improve your customers' experience and strengthen their loyalty? The key to success lies in your ability to listen and understand them. This is what Voice of Customer (VoC) is all about, an approach that aims to capture your customers' expectations, needs and perceptions at every stage of their journey.
But how do you implement an effective VoC strategy? What are the concrete benefits for your company? This article will give you the keys to making the voice of the customer a real driver of growth and loyalty.
What is Voice of Customer (VoC)?
Voice of Customer" (VoC), or "Opinion Mining", is an approach that aims to understand what your customers feel and expect. It focuses on gathering customer needs, preferences and expectations throughout the customer journey.
VoC relies on different points of contact with the customer. These points of contact include online interactions (social networks, website, chatbot, etc.), in-store visits, and exchanges with customer service.
There are many ways to gather user feedback. Satisfaction surveys, telephone interviews and online reviews are just some of the commonly used methods.
The aim is to capture valuable information about the overall customer experience. But VoC goes beyond simply collecting opinions. It translates data into concrete actions to improve your offering. This means analyzing this feedback and integrating it into your strategies.
VoC is therefore essential to better meet customer needs. This benefits both your consumers, who see their opinions taken into account, and your company, which adjusts more effectively to the market.
Why should the voice of the customer be a central issue for your company?
Impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty
The voice of the customer strengthens satisfaction and loyalty by aligning your offerings with their expectations. By taking customer feedback into account, you can adjust your products and services to better meet their needs. This helps improve your CSAT and NPS scores, key indicators of customer satisfaction with your brand.
Good customer feedback management also helps reduce churn. Understanding customer needs through feedback creates a stronger connection. This increases the likelihood that they will remain loyal and actively participate in a rewarding customer relationship.
The relationship between VoC and product innovation
Integrating the voice of the customer into your strategy fostersproduct innovation. Insights gleaned from customer feedback tell you what needs to be improved or developed. This guides and prioritizes product development roadmaps based on real consumer expectations.
This proactive approach to product development and optimization gives you a competitive edge. You can anticipate market trends while responding concretely to customer demands. Products resulting from this approach are generally better adopted in the marketplace.
Continuous improvement of operational processes
By collecting and analyzing customer interactions, you can improve your internal processes. By analyzing the customer journey, you can identify weak points in your customer service or areas for optimization.
Adopting a logic ofcontinuous improvement based on the voice of the customer drives business success. Your operational processes can adapt and evolve to meet changing customer needs. This not only makes operations more efficient, but also boosts employee commitment.
Example of the use of the voice of the customer at Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs
Groupe Pierre et Vacances Center Parcs (PVCP) decided to implement Batvoice AI's Voice of the Customer solution to better understand their customers' needs and frustrations. Thanks to this data-driven approach, they were able to identify a major irritant in the customer journey: invoices.
Analysis of customer calls revealed that 12% of interactions were about bills. Batvoice AI's solution was able to define this call reason as a major sticking point, based on the words used by customers and the identification of negative feelings expressed in their voice.
To understand the problem further, the PVCP team decided to print out a typical invoice sent to customers. On closer examination, they realized that the document was difficult to understand for the average non-accountant.
With this in mind, the PVCP Group decided to simplify and clarify the format of its invoices. This action, directly inspired by the voice of the customer, has significantly reduced friction in the customer journey and improved overall satisfaction.
This example perfectly illustrates how active listening to the voice of the customer, coupled with a data-driven approach, can guide a company's strategic decisions.
How do you implement a Voice of Customer strategy?
Step 1: Data collection
Collecting data is the first step in understanding your customers. It's essential to multiply data sources to get a complete picture of the voice of the customer.
Here are the main sources to consider:
- Customer satisfaction surveys, sent out by e-mail or via a form on your website, are a great place to start. Complement them with market research and surveys to obtain information on customer expectations and perceptions.
- Individual interviews and focus groups enable in-depth discussions with your customers to gain a detailed understanding of their experiences and needs.
- Spontaneous feedback and comments from customers, via e-mail, contact forms, chatbots or even letters, are not to be overlooked. Every interaction counts!
- Social networks are a goldmine of information. Analyze mentions, comments and private messages on the various platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn...) to take the pulse of your customers.
- Online reviews on your website, Google My Business and specialized sites like TripAdvisor or Trustpilot are also worth keeping a close eye on.
- Analyze telephone conversations with customers, and call patterns with Speech Analytics if you have a call center or after-sales service. Transcripts of live chats with your advisors are also invaluable.
- Qualitative feedback from your teams in direct contact with customers (sales, marketing, customer support, customer success...). Their daily exchanges are a real gold mine.
By collecting data via these different channels, you can ensure that you have a 360° view of your customers' voice. The next step is to centralize all this data for easy analysis.
Step 2: Data centralization
Once data has been collected, it's crucial to centralize it on a single platform. This is a prerequisite for being able to analyze it effectively and derive relevant insights.
Centralizing your data gives you anoverview, enabling you to cross-reference data from different sources, and ensure their quality and consistency. It's also an opportunity to structure and cleanse data to facilitate future exploitation.
Data centralization enables fast, easy access to data for different teams, avoiding data silos, whether for one-off analyses or to feed real-time dashboards.
Several solutions exist for centralizing your VoC data, such as data warehouses, data lakes or Customer Data Platforms. The choice will depend on the volume and variety of your data, as well as your use cases.
By centralizing your VoC data, you lay the foundations for powerful and effective analysis, transforming the voice of your customers into concrete actions to improve their experience.
Step 3: Data analysis
Once the data has been collected and centralized, the next step is to analyze it and derive relevant insights. The aim is to understand market trends, customer behavior and expectations, so as to guide your strategy.
Analysis will enable you to make decisions based on facts, not intuition. Identify friction points in the customer journey, reasons for satisfaction and dissatisfaction, unmet expectations... These insights will guide you in prioritizing your improvement actions.
Combine qualitative data (verbatims, opinions, feedback...) and quantitative data (satisfaction scores, NPS, engagement rates...) to get the full picture. Advanced analysis tools, such as text mining or sentiment analysis, will help you extract insights even from unstructured data.
For a relevant, actionable analysis, it' s crucial to involve your company's various teams (marketing, sales, customer service, product...). Organize collaborative workshops to cross-fertilize expertise, challenge your hypotheses and co-construct your action plan based on voice-of-customer insights. This collaborative approach, facilitated by data visualization tools, will ensure that insights are fully understood and acted upon by operational teams.
Step 4: Defining your Critical to Quality (CTQ)
Once the insights from the voice of the customer have been identified, they need to be transformed into CTQs. Critical to Quality criteria are the characteristics of a product or service that meet key customer requirements. They are the key indicators that enable you to translate the voice of the customer into concrete actions for improvement.
To define them, identify the elements of the voice of the customer that have the greatest impact on satisfaction and loyalty. Then set clear, measurable objectives for each of these elements. For example, if speed of delivery stands out as a key point, a CTQ might be "deliver orders within 24 hours 95% of the time".
It's essential that they are aligned with your business objectives. Every improvement action launched must contribute to your strategic priorities, whether it's reducing churn, increasing average basket size or improving customer satisfaction.
Make sure your criteria remain actionable, with concrete action plans associated with them. Each CTQ must have a designated manager, allocated resources and an implementation schedule.
Step 5: Defining and implementing the action plan
Based on the defined CTQs, draw up a detailed action plan involving all stakeholders. This will ensure alignment with objectives and the feasibility of initiatives. Each action must be achievable, measurable and carried out by an identified person in charge.
To facilitate implementation, set up automated workflows and ensure that each team member understands their role and the expected impact of their action.
Finally, don't forget to regularly review your action plan to adjust it to new customer insights or market developments. Flexibility and adaptability are key to the effectiveness of your VoC strategy.
Step 6: Performance monitoring and ongoing strategy adjustments
Once you've launched your action plan, it's crucial to monitor its performance to maintain the relevance of your VoC strategy. Set up regular analyses to assess the impact of actions taken, and compare results with defined objectives.
Don't hesitate to adapt your strategy to new information and market trends. As customer expectations evolve, it's essential to remain agile and know how to adjust your action plans if necessary.
To achieve this, maintain open communication within your team. Ongoing collaboration allows you to quickly identify opportunities for improvement and ensure that adjustments are well integrated into the overall strategy. This is key to consolidating your competitive position over the long term.
The contribution of Batvoice AI Speech Analytics to call center VoC challenges
In a call center, every conversation with a customer is a valuable opportunity to understand their expectations and frustrations. But with very high call volumes, it can be difficult to analyze every interaction manually. That's where Speech Analytics comes in.
Speech Analytics automatically transforms your recorded calls into actionable insights to improve your service quality and offers. Batvoice AI 's Voice of the Customer solution goes even further, combining automatic transcription, semantic analysis and acoustic analysis for a more accurate interpretation of the topics addressed and the emotions expressed.
By analyzing in real time the feelings expressed by your customers, the reasons for satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and the irritants in the customer journey, you'll be able to adapt your scripts, processes and offers as closely as possible to real customer expectations.
Batvoice AI gives you a powerful tool for understanding your customers' needs in depth and responding proactively. By continuously improving the quality of your service, you strengthen the relationship of trust with your customers and consolidate your competitive edge.
