Voice of Customer Feedback: What It Is and How to Use It for Customer Service

Who is the number one person you should turn to if you want to grow your business? If your answer is anything but “my customers,” you should reconsider it.

In an age where discovering your competitor is one Google search away, your customers are the most precious asset to your business and, at the same time, the best source of information to improve it.

And if you’re interested in acquiring more customers as well as making the existing ones happier, you have to collect voice of customer feedback.

Today, we’ll explain what VoC feedback is, how to collect it, and, most importantly, how to use it.

What is Voice of the Customer feedback?

Voice of the Customer feedback is any type of feedback you can collect by actively listening to your customers and their needs. It can be gathered across different platforms and touchpoints by various departments in your company.

You may think that this is just your regular customer feedback and wonder what the difference is. What makes Voice of the Customer feedback different is that it focuses on the individual customer rather than trying to lump all responses together in aggregated data sets.

One of the most important aspects of this type of feedback lies in the increased focus on closing the feedback loop. In other words, once a customer leaves their feedback and you make changes based on their input, you let them know about this. 

As a result, all of your customer experience metrics improve on global and more granular levels. 

Now, let’s look at some practical examples of collecting this specific type of feedback.

How to capture the Voice of the Customer feedback

Just like any other type of feedback, this one isn’t too difficult to collect. With the right system in place, you can automate much of the collection process so you have more time to focus on communicating with your customers and acting on their feedback.

1. Run online surveys

Using a tool such as Survicate, you can run online surveys in different formats. NPS, CSAT, CES, customer health score surveys, Likert scale surveys, and many others are at your fingertips. As Survicate offers more than 300 expertly designed survey templates, you can implement any of them without the need for extensive edits. 

Distribution is another important part you want to think about—and this is where Survicate shines again. It allows you to send surveys through various channels, including email, website, mobile app, and live chat.

2. Capture customer reviews and testimonials

Although customer reviews and testimonials are fantastic ways to get customer insights, you may have to do some digging on review websites. For software development companies, that’s usually platforms such as G2 and Capterra. For other types of businesses, this could be Google and Facebook reviews, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.

However, most people don’t leave reviews unless they have something to complain about. Positive reviews rarely appear out of the blue, so if you want to collect more of them, run a campaign, perhaps with your promoters from an NPS survey. 

3. Keep track of your NPS score

We already talked about surveys, but there’s one particular survey type that makes all the difference. The Net Promoter Score is crucial because it’s a standardized customer satisfaction metric across industries. It’s super easy to measure using Survicate’s NPS survey template—you can start learning about your customers’ attitudes toward your brand within minutes.

There are two significant benefits to NPS. Firstly, NPS benchmarks for different industries are readily available online, so you can compare and see how you stack up against major players in your industry.

Secondly, you get a quick overview of your audience, which is split up into three groups: promoters, passives, and detractors. For each of these, there are specific actions you can take and detailed strategies to make each of these segments happier and turn the latter two into promoters.

4. Listen in on your social media

How often do you track what your customers write about you on their social media profiles? Their mentions of your brand often go far beyond interacting with your official channels. There are groups, public accounts, competitor accounts, and so much more to monitor.

Social media interactions often reveal the most honest feedback, as it’s not sought or called for. But this also makes it difficult to collect manually.

Luckily, there are plenty of social media listening tools that you can use for this purpose. Notable examples include Brand24, Mention, and Mediatoolkit. Simply load up your most important terms and watch as new mentions roll in. And the best thing about them is that most come with sentiment analysis, so you can easily spot angry customers and handle the situation more quickly.

Perhaps even more importantly, these tools don’t just sweep social media—they also listen in on all other websites online. So if someone gives you a poor review on a forum or a blog, you’ll be on it in no time.

5. Listen to customer calls

Whether customers call you to show interest in your product or to resolve an issue, this is a prime opportunity to get their feedback about your product. And thanks to modern business phone and VoIP solutions, you can easily record these calls and even get transcripts afterward. 

Using your favorite CRM, you can store the customer call recording along with their survey score and purchase history to get a super clear idea about who they are, without even asking them a thing.

6. Interview your customer service and sales teams

We can all make the mistake of assuming how our customers feel about our product, service, or brand. No one knows better what these opinions really are than the people who actually talk to customers, which is sales and customer support.

One of the best practices for any growing business is to align these two teams with your marketing team to ensure that you send the right messages to the right audiences.

What to do with Voice of the Customer feedback

If your data is in, but you have no idea what to do with it, worry not. Here are some ideas on how to best use the voice of customer feedback.

1. Close the feedback loop

The ultimate way to improve your customers’ experience is to let them know you have implemented their feedback. Thanks to modern feedback tools combined with CRMs and help desk apps, you can easily create a system where each customer who leaves feedback gets a notification when it’s implemented.

This lets your customers know that you’re actively listening to them and taking action on their feedback. At the same time, it gives a more personalized experience, even though you can automate the entire operation with a few apps. 

2. Measure for improvements

One of the beautiful things about collecting quantitative feedback is that it gives you a good basis for comparison. For example, measuring your CSAT score in the first and fourth quarters of the year can give you good insights into how your customer satisfaction has improved over time.

However, it’s easy to make the mistake of running NPS, CSAT, or CES surveys only once in a while because you need a quick catch-up with customers’ sentiments.

To get accurate, meaningful results, you need to ensure that you’re surveying for the right metrics with the right customers. And not just once but throughout the year and at different customer touchpoints.

Tools such as Survicate allow you to do this as all of the feedback is stored in a central hub. Each of your customers is assigned their own data set, and you can easily compare their customer experience metrics over time, be it NPS, CSAT, CES, or some other type of qualitative survey.

3. Assign stakeholders

With the right feedback, you’ll know whether something in your customer experience journey needs improvement. Once you have the VoC feedback handy, it’s time to assign each piece to a relevant person or team in your company so they can start working on it.

For example, if customers require a new feature, create a task for your product and development team and then put the improvement on your roadmap. You can follow a similar process if a bug needs fixing. If your customer support needs improvement (such as a better first response time), you can start by finding the bottleneck and assigning it to the right person.

Conclusion

Collecting customer feedback is getting more important each year. As brands have a harder time differentiating themselves with features, competing based on fantastic customer experience will become one of the key ways to stand out against tough competitors.

To start collecting feedback quickly and effectively, why not try Survicate? With hundreds of survey templates and different platforms you can use to distribute them, Survicate has something for any business looking to collect VoC feedback. Sign up for your free trial today! Also, you can foster your decision-making by checking our newest ranking of best website satisfaction tools.

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