Voice Of Customer Surveys

Voice of customer surveys, or VoC surveys, are a strategic tool used by businesses to collect and analyze customer feedback. They provide an in-depth understanding of customer needs and preferences, which ultimately allows businesses to serve their customers more effectively. VoC surveys primarily look at customer expectations and highlight the various products or processes that could be improved to meet those expectations.

By deploying a voice of customer survey, an organization can more easily listen to and implement customer feedback. The insights obtained from these surveys are crucial for businesses as they work to identify gaps in service offerings. VoC surveys also highlight areas for potential expansion. 

The successful deployment of such surveys requires adherence to certain voice of customer survey best practices. For example, it’s important to design surveys that are clear, concise, and have the potential to solicit meaningful responses that offer actionable insights. 

Businesses should also pull from a representative sample of their customer base to get the most accurate results. When working with diverse demographics, it’s important to view customer perspectives from all angles to glean the most helpful feedback.

Voice of the customer survey examples could include questions like, “On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your overall experience with our product/service?” (rating question), “Would you recommend our product/service to others?” (yes/no question), and “What suggestions do you have for improving our product/service?” (open-ended question).

Other voice of customer survey examples might center around specific aspects of business operations, such as customer service. For instance, the survey might ask, “How would you rate your interaction with our customer service team?” or “What suggestions do you have for improving our customer service?”

By following best practices and drawing inspiration from successful examples by others, businesses can design and implement effective VoC surveys. Here’s a more in-depth look at the benefits of these surveys: 

• Better Understanding of Customer Needs: VoC surveys allow businesses to gain deeper insights into customer expectations, preferences, and dislikes. These insights can be used to guide the development of products and services that better meet customer needs.
• Improved Customer Experience: By studying the customer’s perspective, businesses can improve their customer experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Identify Opportunities for Improvement: VoC surveys highlight gaps in products or services and identify areas where the business can improve.
• Increased Revenue: Organizations that align their offerings with customer needs and expectations can boost customer retention and acquisition. This, in turn, can boost revenue.
• Inform Strategic Decision-Making: The insights gained from VoC surveys can inform strategic decision-making, helping businesses to prioritize their resources and efforts more effectively.

Voice of Customer Program

A voice of customer program is a structured process for gathering and analyzing customer feedback to drive improvements in products and services. This feedback is leveraged to enhance the customer experience, which can ultimately result in business growth. 

The first step in establishing a VoC program is to define clear objectives. Businesses should outline what specifically they’re aiming to achieve. For example, their goals might include boosting customer satisfaction, reducing customer churn, and identifying areas for product improvement. By outlining objectives early on, businesses can maintain a structured focus on their ultimate goals. 

The next step involves data collection. This is often achieved through surveys, interviews, focus groups, direct observation, and social media monitoring. Each of these methods can provide different insights, and so it’s important to select the ones that best align with the program’s objectives.

Following data collection, a voice of customer analysis is performed. VoC analyses look for patterns and trends in data that provide actionable insights. The analysis process typically includes both quantitative and qualitative methods. Tools such as customer journey mapping can also be useful in understanding the customer’s experience across all touchpoints with the company.

To ensure the success of a VoC program, it’s important to follow certain best practices. Among these voice of the customer best practices are:

• Continuous Feedback Collection: VoC is not a one-time thing, but an ongoing process. Regularly collecting and analyzing customer feedback helps organizations stay up to date with changing customer needs and preferences.
• Actionable Insights: Voice of customer programs should focus on producing actionable insights. This means not just collecting data, but also interpreting it in a way that can drive improvements.
• Closing The Loop: This involves following up with customers to let them know that their feedback has been heard and acted upon. Doing so can significantly increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Integration With Other Data: VoC data should be integrated with other customer data like purchase history, customer support interactions, and web analytics. This provides a more holistic view of the customer and can result in more nuanced insights.

Voice of Customer Tools

Conducting VoC surveys and analyzing customer feedback requires a variety of tools and technologies that can help collect and interpret customer input in a comprehensive manner. These tools offer different levels of sophistication and cater to a wide range of needs and budgets.

Voice of customer tools generally fall into two broad categories: feedback collection tools and data analysis tools. Feedback collection tools are designed to solicit customer feedback through methods like online survey platforms, which allow businesses to design and distribute surveys and gather responses.

For a VoC program to deliver actionable insights, however, asking the right questions is just as important as leveraging the right tools. Voice of customer questions typically cover several areas. For instance, internal voice of the customer survey questions might ask employees to rate their understanding of customer needs, or how well they think the company responds to customer feedback.

Voice of customer questions for new product development are also vital, as they can help companies ensure that new products meet customer needs and expectations. Questions in this area could include “What features are most important to you in this type of product?” or “What problems do you encounter with current products that you’d like to see solved?”

VoC plays a pivotal role in Six Sigma, a methodology focused on process improvement and reducing variability. In this context, “voice of customer Six Sigma” refers to the process of gathering customer feedback to spot “critical to quality” (CTQ) elements, or those aspects most important to customer satisfaction. The Kano model, for example, is one tool often used in Six Sigma to categorize customer needs into basic, performance, and delighter categories.

Voice of customer examples related to Six Sigma typically involve identifying CTQ elements and turning them into measurable specifications. For example, if customers in a restaurant indicate that quick service is a CTQ element for them, this could be translated into a specification like “90% of orders should be delivered within 15 minutes of ordering.”

Voice of Customer Examples

Studying voice of customer examples is a great way for businesses to learn how to incorporate these tools to the fullest extent. It can be especially helpful to view voice of customer examples related to your specific industry. If you work in healthcare, you should browse voice of the customer examples in healthcare to get a better understanding of how VoC surveys can benefit the healthcare industry in particular. 

For instance, consider the adoption of VoC surveys by a large hospital network to learn more about the patient experience. They implemented a VoC program that sent out surveys to patients upon discharge. The questions aimed to understand critical customer requirements examples, focusing on their interactions with medical teams, as well as a hospital’s cleanliness.

After analyzing the VoC data, the hospital network found that many patients felt rushed during their interactions with doctors and were unclear about their treatment plans. As a result, they implemented changes to communicate more effectively with patients. Subsequent VoC surveys showed an increase in patient satisfaction scores, demonstrating the value of the VoC program.

Often, VoC results are compiled into reports. These reports highlight key study findings and provide some sort of guidance on where businesses should take things next. To get an idea of what this looks like, you can view a voice of customer report example. Good samples outline what went well with the survey and what might be improved the next time around.

It’s also important to view voice of the customer questions examples to see the breadth and depth of questions that should be asked to gain a holistic understanding of the customer experience. Different questions may be more relevant to certain businesses and industries than others, so it can be most useful to focus on those that pertain to your unique organizational needs.

Ultimately, no matter your industry or customer base, it’s a good idea to leverage VoC surveys to hear directly from customers. Analyzing this data in a meaningful way can be challenging, which is where platforms like Authenticx come in. With Authenticx, healthcare organizations can dig deeper into the customer voice to identify pain points and improve their offerings.

Authenticx aggregates, analyzes, and activates customer data to unify customer interactions across channels. This makes it easier for users to extract relevant insights and use them to drive meaningful change.