The Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a term used in business to describe the in-depth process of capturing customer’s expectations, preferences and a strong dislike. From a pragmatic point of view, the VoC refers to the way an organization collects customer feedback, analyzes the data, distributes it to the right people and acts on these insights in order to generate financial benefits.
In the days before Industry 4.0, if you had a customer that was upset or disgruntled at your product or service they would just verbally complain, and their dissatisfaction was locally contained and never propagated across digital social mediums. These days, social media makes it easier for customers to share their complaints with a broader audience, potentially hurting your organization’s brand reputation.
That’s why it’s so important to have the necessary technological tools to capture the Voice of your customer and all its relevant data, including customer surveys (online/offline), net promoter score, live chat/chatbots, social media channels, online reviews and so much more.
To capture all the VoC data, you need to consider establishing a VoC program in your organization.
Benefits of a Voice of the Customer Program
A VoC program is proven to help organizations retain customers, build better products and deliver better services. A VoC program enables you to systematically understand your company’s customer experience in order to drive change. Organizations that understand their customer journey are much more likely to improve their products to fit their customers’ evolving requirements and therefore foster their loyalty.
Bringing your customer’s voice into your organization can provide the following benefits:
- Reduced costs by improving processes, ensuring compliance and creating greater process consistency
- Increased revenue through reduced churn, improved cross-sell opportunities and the ability to attract new customers
- Culture change by driving customer-centricity and cross-functional change.
With the right program in place, the VoC can directly correlate to your business top and bottom-line revenue and overall brand success.
What else is good about a Voice of the Customer Program?
Certainly, it is time and effort well spent to engage with your customers across the customer journey. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Understanding loyalty and gathering feedback at key points in the customer journey have helped numerous organizations become industry leaders in their field.
At the end of the day, what really matters is how your customer perceives your organization. If your customers think that your products and services aren’t good enough, they will switch to a different product, vendor, supplier or store.
If you would like to learn more about how OpenText™ can help you capture the Voice of your Customer, please visit our website.
