Voice of the Customer Programs: What They Are and How to Make Them Work for You

What are Voice of the Customer (VOC) Programs?

Voice of the Customer is the practice of analyzing a customer’s thoughts, actions, or intentions towards a brand. The goal of VOC programs is to create a positive and consistent customer experience, across channels. To be successful, VOC programs requires buy-in from cross-functional teams.

 

How is Voice of the Customer Measured?

Methodology

VOC programs run the gamut from omnichannel contact center programs to how the sales team is trained to capitalize on upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Similarly, the methods to capture what customers want are equally varied. Any touchpoint where customers interact with your brand and free form format of their thoughts are provided can be used for VOC analysis. 

Including:

• Interviews – Phone, In-person, live chat, and video
• Surveys – on-site, Computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI), email, Internet, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
• Chatbots
• Call-center notes and recordings
• customer emails
• Focus Groups
• Text Analysis
• Online review monitoring
• Biometrics
• Transcription services

 

Techniques

• Marketing-Mix Modeling (MMM) strategy
• Building Buyer Personas
• Website behaviour tracking – scroll depth, eye tracking, and heatmaps
• Social Media monitoring for social consumer market insights (CMI)

 

Software

• Survey Analysis Software
• an online research community platform

 

The Key Metrics that are tracked in Voice of the Customer studies

• Sentiment
• How people experience products (CX)
• Social Engagement Index or SEI
• Social Net Promoter Score
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

 

What kinds of questions are best answered by Voice of the Customer surveys

• The “why’s” behind a brand’s performance in the market place
• Fully understand the customer’s perspective & motivations driving business performance
• What customers would like to see
• What can be improved for the customer
• What is working for customers and what is not

 

The Benefits of Voice of the Customer

• See where the brand is not meeting customer expectations
• Identify and fix possible problems before they become major issues
• Customers can how they use a particular product that the brand hadn’t thought of before, opening up a new market
•  Identify add-ons, features, or additional products customers would be interested in using
• Test customer response to a new concept or product before it goes to market

 

Problems with Voice of the Customer Programs

• Our brains use mental shortcuts to save energy and speed up decision making. When asked direct questions about those decisions, we naturally construct a narrative that explains their actions in a way that ensures consistency with our internal model of the world but fails to capture our true motivations.
• Psychologists have found that the relative importance of an item is heavily influenced by the ease with which we can retrieve it from our memory. This often correlates heavily with the amount of coverage an issue gets in the media. For example, financial advisors surveyed are likely to highly rate the importance of financial strength after a financial crisis.
• Our memories are flexible and can be influenced by new information, our mood, physical environment, and social context. Every time we remember something, we change our memory. We are even susceptible to create false memories of events that didn’t happen.
• Our memory is biased towards remembering what happened during the most intense moment of experience and what occurred at the end of the episode
• Our herd instinct means we are heavily influenced by what other people in our network and beyond are doing
• “The sheer volume and complexity of [VoC] data has made understanding human language at scale a serious challenge… Ineffective or garbled translation of this data does a disservice to both brands and consumers. For brands, bad data leads to bad insights and poor business outcomes. For consumers, misinterpreting their expressed opinions means that they’re not being heard, and likely not being served well.” Rob Key, Converseon

 

Getting Started

 

Additional Tips

1. Executives need to lay out policies and guidelines to avoid inadvertent bias in AI and machine learning solutions as a key-value and measurable KPI
2. To overcome the potential bias of single human input, multiple individual humans representing your target audience must provide input. An adjudication process should be in place if there is a disagreement
3. Effective systems need to be optimized to perform not just on “The Queen’s English” but also all variations, dialects, and expression styles like sarcasm, slang, new expressions, and shorthand
4. Use an evaluation like an F1 score (a combination of precision and recall) or Area Under Curve to test your classifier perform before “unleashing it in the wild”
5. Techniques like “organic topic discovery” are critically important to identify trends, concepts and opinions that bubble up naturally in conversations that might otherwise flow under the radar
6. Technologies in this space should not aim to fully replace humans, but rather augment their intelligence and judgment at a vast scale. Analysts and domain experts should be able to review low confidence records and intervene if needed
7. Given the growing risks associated with poor models, it’s becoming increasingly incumbent upon organizations to take control of their data directly and not simply cede the responsibilities to third parties without fully understanding their processing and technologies.

 

Companies with excellent Voice of the Customer strategies

Verizon

Identifies customer pain points
According to Verizon data scientist Jingjing Cannon, Version developed a new-product risk model to identify and quantify customer pain points throughout customer journey at stages including learn, buy, get, use, pay and stay/leave. They use sentiment analysis, natural language processing, and deep learning to classify large scale of customer feedbacks, bucketing them into customer journey stages. A quantitative classification approach uncovers the main revenue-driving pain points and root causes. This risk model predicts how new-product launches impact company revenue and provides early development risk monitoring to guide decision making.

 

Tulip Food Company 

Created 16 new products

Founded in 1887, the Tulip Food Company has long provided high-quality Danish bacon to customers around the world. Up until now, they have been known for their range of sliced, diced and back bacon products. Tulip hired innovation consultancy Norgard Mikkelsen, who in turn approached Further, to help energise their creative process and crowdsource new product development ideas from bacon consumers in six international markets. Further’s three-phased research process allowed Tulip and Norgard Mikkelsen to rapidly create sixteen new product concepts, all based on first-hand experiences of bacon products. With Customer Immersion, they followed their target audience closely as they planned meals, shopped, prepared and ate various bacon products. Next, they worked closely with the innovation team to combine the findings and drafted sixteen new concepts for evaluation. The new concepts were tested over two days with the same participants to determine their appeal, distinctiveness and relevance. Tulip Food created sixteen new product concepts, all based on first-hand experiences of bacon products.

 

Greif Inc.

Picked up $3-millon in market share

Greif Inc. is a world leader in industrial packaging and services that formulates a specific sales strategy for each client as part of their overall account planning process. They worked with PMG on a data-driven, Voice of the Customer, survey project to get better insights into the mindsets of their customers and improve their current strategies to achieve a positive ROI. PMG’s analysis of the survey data provided a Performance Improvement Map for each customer based on their responses. The Performance Improvement Maps were introduced into the client’s account planning process, which enabled them to conduct strong discussions with each customer.

PMG observed that a few key customers indicated that Greif could partner with them to improve their internal operations, so Grief worked with these companies to increase throughput, energy savings, and reduce waste. As a result, Greif picked up about three million dollars more in volume in very attractive markets—at a cost to them of about $150,000 to $160,000.

 

 

Our best resources for learning more about Voice of the Customer

Blog Articles

How Verizon Uses Voice of Customer Data to Guide Product Launches

The Evolution of Market Research: Mining Social Consumer Market Insights

Why ‘Getting it Right’ in Social and VoC Listening is a Human Right

To Hear the Voice of the Customer, Your Systems Must Listen Like a Person

From Sentiment Analysis to Enterprise Applications

Why Focus Groups Are Essential to CX

The Death of Marketing-Mix Modeling, As We Know It

How to Capture the Voice of the Customer with Market Research

Voice Of The Customer Surveys – Useful Or Fundamentally Flawed?

 

Case Studies

Skybet Uses Insight to Encourage Responsible Gambling

The Sweet Smell of Bacon Product Innovation

Industrial Packaging Company Improves Market Share with PMG Customer Satisfaction

 

Webinars

Voice of the Customer – Is It Really Necessary?

 

Additional Resources:

Consumerology: The Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping (new revised edition, including a new preface from the author)

 

Find a company that specializes in Voice of the Customer