Understanding and Empathy – Leveraging Voice of the Customer for Better Business

It has never been easier to gather customer feedback than it is right now and businesses all over the world are discovering new ways to find out what their customers think of their company and products.

Customer feedback is a powerful tool as well, able to increase upselling and cross-selling success rates by 15-20% and reduce customer retention costs by as much as a quarter. Companies which invest in customer feedback also experience higher customer retention, greater employee engagement, and reduced customer service costs.

However, there is more to gathering customer feedback than simple product reviews and surveys. If you want to truly create a full picture of your clients, you need to be leveraging the voice of the customer (VoC) for your business.

What Next?

On its own, this VoC data means little and it’s only by applying it to real world business practices will you begin to see the true benefits of this kind of research.

Written articles and blogs are still a powerful tool for marketing and it’s here where VoC data can potentially have the biggest impact. With such rich and deep information about your customers’ wants and needs at your fingertips you can craft written material which specifically addresses them.

Break the answers down into sections such as wants/needs, pain points, hesitations/anxieties, and likes/loves/obsessions. This way you can craft content which will trigger those feelings or, in the case of negative stimuli, reassure that your brand is the one best suited to address those issues. It can also help with keyword strategies as, because you know what customers are feeling, you can second-guess what they are likely to be searching for online.

It’s not all about written content, however. You can also use VoC data to streamline other parts of your customer-facing operation as well. For example, if you have a mobile app and you’ve noticed that customers aren’t engaging with it, or even just parts of it, you can use VoC data to discover which factors are preventing engagement and pass that information to your app development team to make changes and create a more user-friendly tool.

Your social media strategy can also benefit from VoC data. Much in the same way you can use these insights to create written content which directly addresses the wants and needs of customers, you can use the same information to help you decide what to post on social media. Think about promotions as well. If you know which products are likely to resonate more with customers at certain times of year, or during geopolitical events, you can put those items front and center in your marketing and promotional campaigns.

Take the good old-fashioned sales call and think about how much more personal and resonating you can make your pitch with the rich data provided by VoC research backing you up. Customers want to feel like the companies they do business with understand them and they are far more likely to engage with your brand if you are able to convince them you do.

Cybersecurity continues to be a major concern for businesses and customers alike and VoC data can help you figure out what your audience expects from you and position your IT teams accordingly.

However, perhaps the biggest impact VoC data can have on your business is it can help you allocate your customer experience budget more efficiently. Because it gives you such a deep and intricate understanding of the customer you can avoid wasting money on features which won’t address their wants and needs in the best possible way. With so much customer experience technology out there to draw from – IoT, robots/automation, chatbots, AI, etc. – it’s easy to get carried away and waste money and time on innovations which won’t serve your customers in the best way possible.

Amazon

As we must so often do with these things, attention turns to that ecommerce juggernaut, Amazon for examples on how to do VoC right. As Jeff Bezos himself said, “If there’s one reason we have done better than our peers in the Internet space, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience.”

Thanks to its incredible digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence capabilities, Amazon can mine feedback in real time and rapidly incorporate it into its business model.

It’s through this intense focus on customer experience Amazon has evolved from one guy selling books out of his garage, to one of only a handful of brands to survive the 90s dotcom crash, to becoming the global behemoth it is today. It is by listening to customers and prioritizing VoC data that Amazon has fine-tuned its rapid and efficient returns policy; created Amazon Lockers to tackle the frustration of missed deliveries; moved into the world of physical retail with automated Amazon Go! convenience stores; packaged next day delivery service with a video and music streaming package with Amazon Prime, and so much more.

Now, obviously not every business has the resources and means of Amazon (or rather no business has the resources and means of Amazon) but it illustrates the kinds of innovations which become possible when you start putting VoC data at the forefront of your customer experience strategy. Your brand may not be installing delivery lockers in your local supermarkets or opening your own chain of cashierless convenience stores anytime soon but, if you start listening to customers now, the sky is the limit when it comes to predicting which heights your brand can reach.

Final Thoughts

VoC research is like regular customer feedback on steroids and can truly help your business take its understanding of its audience to a new level. However, it’s not something which just works automatically and requires a team of knowledgeable and data driven people to think outside of the box and discover new ways to, not just gather the data, but to intelligently apply it as well.

Uwe Gutschow of MediaCom put it best when he said, “If we understand the behaviors, but more importantly, the underlying emotions — then we can architect the right opportunities for our client’s brand to be an authentic part of people’s lives.”