A business needs feedback to find out how effective its strategies have been performed and to adjust its directions accordingly. There are numerous different inputs it receives every day, either negative or positive, and from every side one can imagine. But in an ocean of voices, which voice should a business listen to?
There definitely are hot debates and various opinions regarding the answer to this question, but no one can deny the importance of one voice above the others: The Voice of the Customer. It is one of the most vital pieces of feedback that can make or break the future of a company.
Listening to VoC can be a local store owner listening to its regular customers talking about how good the new product he brought to the shop is or a team from an international firm running an NPS campaign to find out how effective their new branches are performing. It can also be as easy as reading the comments your company receives in social media. Different companies from all sectors use their own methods to gather, process and listen to the voice of the customer and believe all the time and efforts used in this path is nothing but a successful investment.
In this article from Pisano Academy, we will talk about the voice of the customer and why is it considered so important for a business.
What is the Voice of the Customer?
Voice of the Customer, which is also widely known as Voice of Customer or its short form VoC, is a common term in experience management as well as some other fields such as marketing. In a simple and straightforward way, Voice of Customer can be defined as what a customer says about his or her experience with a business.
To be more detailed, VoC is the comments, opinions, praises, critics, compliments and complaints a customer of your business has about the services and products you have provided to them. As the definition indicates, the voice of the customer can be either positive, neutral or negative. Still, the most important thing about it is that the feedback is an honest and frank one received from someone who actually uses the outcome of your business’ efforts.
Voice of Customer, most of the time, can show a business how distant its expectations and the experience it is creating are from each other. On the other hand, VoC can show where there are rooms for improvements and the direction the company should walk towards.
Why is the Voice of Customer Important?
Voice of the customer can help a business be enlightened about the value it is creating. Whether positive or negative, it shows what path the company should walk through to satisfy its most important stakeholder: the customer.
Most of the time, there is a massive gap between what a business think about the experience they are providing and the actual experience of their customers. There are numerous stories of companies insisting on a strategy that they thought was the best, while the customers preferred something in the exact opposite way. Therefore, the importance of the voice of the customer is remarkably based on the fact that it helps the business face detailed and frank feedback. Listening to VoC can not only prevent huge losses, but it also can offer significant opportunities and potential to your business.
The Voice of the customer is also considered vital as it helps reduce risks in making the decisions. When the community you are creating value for is verbally indicating interest in a product and service, you can simply go all in for it and vice versa.
For a lot of market research conductions, whether qualitative or quantitative, collecting the voice of the customer is the most crucial step. It is due to the fact that nothing is more important than listening to its own actual or potential customers. They are those who the whole research is being conducted for.
How VoC Impacts the Company
The feedback provided by VoC, if used properly, can ease the process of product and service optimization to create an even better experience for the customers in terms of the quality of the products and services.
Also, improving the experience a customer has got when dealing with the business is another outcome achievable using the voice of the customer. Most of the time, the customer remarks on the way the company staff have behaved towards them or the pain points in the procedures. Paying special attention to these points can efficiently improve the customer experience of your business which will lead to both more loyal customers and better word of mouth.
On the other hand, there are times in which a business is running different campaigns or tests to determine what is the best decision to be made, and the VoC is the only way it can ensure the success or the failure of it. As an example, when running an A/B test, no statistics can show you the outcome better than the data provided by the customers themselves.
In this article from Pisano Academy, we talked about one of the most important concepts in the experience management field, the voice of the customer, which is the comments, opinions, praises, critics, compliments and complaints customers of a business has about the services and products provided to them We also discussed why it is considered very important and how it can help a business in the path to growth and creating value.
