“Whoever understands the customer best wins” – Mike Gospel
Companies must continually innovate in this VUCA environment of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. They must find newer ways to adapt to the changing customer needs. One of the major challenges faced by businesses these days is that they are unfamiliar with their customers’ priorities. This is where the voice of customer analytics comes into the picture, enabling companies to know exactly how consumers perceive their products, brands, and services. Voice of customer analytics, abbreviated as VoC analytics, helps companies increase customer life-cycle value and provides practical data & insights through customer feedback.
What is Voice of Customer Data Analytics?
According to Six Sigma, the Voice of the Customer is “the customer’s expectations, voice and comments, preferences, of a product or service.” The voice of the customer process includes collection of feedback, analysis of data, and strategy planning. Data analysts utilize VoC data for several purposes, including data mining, statistical analysis of the feedback collected through surveys, and analysis of computable data rendered from customer care. Analytics provides organizations with the proof they require, i.e., the quantifiable metrics that help them calculate their ROI on customer investments. Voice of customer analytics is usually used along with customer journey analytics to assess customer experience.
VoC has become one of the core business strategies for businesses, working fabulously for brands as it helps in precise capturing and acting upon customers’ feedback, providing valuable insights about the prospect’s complex decision-making process. Research by Bain & Co. states that companies grew their revenue 4-8% above their competitors just because they were excelling at customer experience.
Read Also: Things to Consider Before Buying a ‘Voice of Customer’ Software
What Are the Benefits of Voice of Customer Analytics
1| Customer-Centric Decisions
Customer data will empower organizations to categorize their products, marketing campaigns, and customer care components based on effectiveness. If a campaign generates fewer sales conversions, you can revise or discontinue it. Likewise, there is no need to support product features that customers rarely use. Voice of customer programs will provide corporate clients the required insights to embrace a customer-centric product development strategy.
2| Innovation
VoC data will comprise customers’ creative suggestions that enterprises might use to improve current product offerings. Since this innovation-centric approach will leverage high-quality survey data, leaders can be confident about launching new products and services.
After all, the voice of customer analytics helps in precise sales forecasting using primary and secondary sources. So, managers can report on product improvements most likely to attract target customer personas.
3| Reputation Monitoring
What do the customers discuss about your products and services? VoC customer analysts will employ social listening techniques and track news coverage to answer this question. Their findings will assist you in brand reputation monitoring.
Today, each consumer significantly influences friend circles and online communities. Therefore, user-generated content (UGC) posts can nudge others into buying or boycotting a brand’s offerings. As a result, studying how customers and journalistic platforms associate positive or negative values with your brand is crucial.
Related: 5 Commonly Made Mistakes While Designing the ‘Voice of Customer’ Framework
Why You Should Use Voice of Customer Analytics
VoC has become one of the core business strategies for businesses, working fabulously for brands as it helps in precise capturing and acting upon customers’ feedback, providing valuable insights about the prospect’s complex decision-making process. Research by Bain & Co. states that companies grew their revenue 4-8% above their competitors just because they excelled at customer experience.
If a company understands that building long-term stakeholder relationships is essential, it will be more likely to utilize the voice of customer data analytics and personalize its offerings. Since VoC enables brands to focus on customers’ priorities, they can mitigate the risk of products remaining in the inventory due to poor sales. Therefore, you must implement reliable VoC data analytics for efficient and customer-centric business development.
Types of Voice of Customer Analytics
Interviews and online surveys offer fresh data through direct interaction between companies’ representatives and consumers. These methods are well-recognized among the voice of customer analytics providers.
Social media listening involves automated data gathering and validation for customer insights research. So, VoC consultants can increase their data acquisition scope without burnout risks. Simultaneously, ethical artificial intelligence (AI) will help prevent misinformation to ensure data quality.
Website navigation tracking assists in identifying potential reasons for cart abandonment and less customer engagement. Later, companies can test several design changes to finalize the most appealing website features and layouts. Periodic website updates can increase engagement metrics and conversions by focusing on a readable and user-friendly experience.
Live chat and call recording will generate unstructured data. However, AI and natural language processing can analyze it to discover customer pain points. You can also integrate AI-powered chatbots to streamline and automate these tasks.
Focus groups allow companies to test an ad, product idea, or pricing strategy with the help of a few customers and volunteers. So, a brand can gather a focus group’s responses for the voice of customer data analytics. Later, it will modify its strategies for the broader consumer bases using the reported insights.
Read Also: Trends 2023: Top Customer Experience (CX) Trends You Don't Want to Miss
How to Build a Voice of Customer Program & Strategy
The process of the voice of the customer starts with collecting customer feedback. Surveys are one of the best ways to collect VoC data. The best data analytics companies, equipped with the apt resources, are able to make this process of data collection, data analysis, and evaluation of key insights seamless for businesses. Another incredible way of collecting the voice of customer data is through social media. Consumers send nearly 350,000 tweets per minute and almost 5 billion Facebook comments monthly. This data, when combined with surveys and other data collection sources, can prove to be a gold mine for brands.
The human mind cannot analyze such a huge amount of data. Therefore, you require AI and machine learning. The market research and data analytics companies are equipped with the precisive voice of customer analytics programs that analyze and churn out valuable insights & information.
Conclusion
Businesses must recognize that the voice of customer analytics is a game-changer. Collecting valuable data through surveys, focus groups, interviews, and social listening can help companies uncover unexplored growth opportunities by exactly knowing what didn’t work out. Key areas where companies fail to deliver according to the customers’ expectations are highlighted by the VoC analysts’ reports. Data analytics in the voice of the customer (VoC) helps improve customer retention rates, increasing year-on-year revenue.
SG Analytics, recognized by the Financial Times as one of APAC’s fastest-growing firms, is a prominent insights and analytics company specializing in data-centric research and contextual analytics. Operating globally across the US, UK, Poland, Switzerland, and India, we expertly guide data from inception to transform it into invaluable insights using our knowledge-driven ecosystem, results-focused solutions, and advanced technology platform. Our distinguished clientele, including Fortune 500 giants, attests to our mastery of harnessing data with purpose, merging content and context to overcome business challenges. With our Brand Promise of “Life’s Possible,” we consistently deliver enduring value, ensuring the utmost client delight.
