The plethora of reviews across different sites and the increasing adoption of Voice of Customer (VoC) have helped many organizations leverage the VoC program in establishing a solid CX function.
In recent times, VoC programs have been employed as one of the most radical instruments to develop an incredible customer journey for businesses. Organizations investing in VoC programs see higher client retention, improved employee engagement, better brand visibility, and reduced customer retention cost.
VoC is comprehensive qualitative research undertaken by companies to understand customer behavior, expectations, requirements, and perception of your product or business. However, designing, planning, implementing, and communicating an effective VoC strategy isn't always an easy task. As a result, most brands fail to extract value because they fail to identify small yet critical flaws while drafting a proper VoC framework.
Here is a list of the five most common mistakes that VOC practitioners make and the ways to avoid them.
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Asking the right questions to the right audience
Before drafting any question, it is vital to understand your target audience. A VoC program provides insight into your customers' expectations, preferences, and desires. Customers with the same demographic and psychographic profile may have different needs and perceptions of the same product. Collecting contextual data about the customers' pain points/touch points and personas will help brands provide superior customer experience orchestration and optimization.
Another imperative thing to keep in mind is the timing of feedback that affects the quality of your VoC framework. Feedback should be collected at the right time and place, from the right person, and through the right channels. Asking for customer feedback in a setting where people feel uncomfortable sharing their thoughts freely may result in people not speaking openly or not saying anything at all.
Similarly, asking customers about some aspects of the experience sets an expectation among the audience that the management will do something about it. However, it is best to refrain from asking questions that promise resolution that you cannot see through.
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Poor survey design
Survey design is one of the most crucial components of a strong and successful VoC program. Asking directly for data, endlessly long and boring surveys, navigation and UI issues, and poor grammar will do nothing except frustrate and annoy your audience and will lead to friction in relationships.
Before starting any program, initiative, or journey, always try to outline your goals, objectives, outcomes, and metrics. Poor survey design can lead to low response rates, poor quality responses, and low re-engagement from the audience. The size of survey questions, word choice, intuitiveness, and flow can directly affect how your customers perceive your business and their willingness to complete your survey.
Survey design is massively impacted by the channel you choose to survey your customers. A strong VoC program may have different touch points for different channels. While the live chat option on your website is excellent for collecting real-time customer feedback, social media platforms let you tap into relevant ongoing conversations, connect with participants, and/or listen quietly. Many companies rely on one or two channels to measure and optimize their interactions, limiting the coverage and depth of insights assimilated. Brands should ideally collect customer feedback from everywhere possible to create a more seamless customer experience.
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Failing to act on feedback
Most organizations mistake VoC for a market research study. One of the most certain ways to annoy the respondents is to ask them questions and not put them into action. Customers will most certainly stop giving feedback in the future if they notice their feedback is not taken seriously.
VoC is not just about asking; you must listen, plan and implement the right course of action. The difference between ‘ask’ and ‘listen’ is of paramount importance when it comes to VoC. Be sure to keep an eye on social media, online reviews, and customer advisory boards.
Most organizations fail to share feedback with their respective departments to learn and act upon it. Your VoC program helps you make changes to operations, marketing, and strategy to improve the customer experience (CX). Completing a VoC and not using its insights will not help your organization and, more importantly, your customers.
Fear of negative feedback can also slow down the VoC data collection process. It is important to note that you may risk losing out to competitors who listen and act swiftly on negative feedback.
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Focusing on the metrics, not the factors
Most of the companies' surveys rely too much on the metrics and not enough on factors that may influence that outcome. CX metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) are all insightful, but each score measures a unique and different aspect of customer's behavior. No doubt, VoC is best understood with text, predictive, and sentiment analysis technology, but focusing too much just on metrics will result in yielding wrong customer psychology or behavior.
While measuring the results of the VoC program, it is prudent to understand why customers gave these ratings. This will help analyze and identify customers' pain points behind the negative rating or touchpoints for positive rating. The proper amalgamation of pain points and positive attributes would help the organization access the qualitative data needed to formulate proactive CX initiatives.
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Viewing it as a one-time process
Most brands conduct VOC programs annually or quarterly to be viewed solely by senior team members. This siloed approach to act on VOC data would result in missed opportunities and ideas. The strategic intent of any VoC program should be a continuous improvement to identify sudden casualties. It is very important to revisit your customer listening efforts to ensure that they meet today's respondent preferences, new features and product enhancements, competitors' offerings, and the industry's rapidly changing landscape.
The customers' needs are continuously evolving, and so are technological advancements. Therefore, what delights a customer today may turn out to be an expected or indifferent product feature tomorrow.
Your VoC must be updated frequently to ensure that you are working on improving based on the feedback previously heard. Creating a process-based VoC will assist in listening to the customers' evolving needs and acting accordingly to provide maximum satisfaction.
Conclusion
We have highlighted the most common mistakes companies make while drafting VoC programs. How many of them are you guilty of? A good VoC program requires immense commitment. Always keep an eye on pitfalls. Frequently audit your program to note if you are moving to the wrong territory. A powerful VoC program is always a resource and time-consuming investment but would reap infinite returns.
All you need to do is set it in such a way as to get the right feedback to design and deliver a solid customer experience.
Are you still not sure how to renew your VoC program? Still pondering where you went wrong? Let one of our team members help you. Get in touch with the iNava team.
Visit us at: iNava.io
