8 Voice of the Customer Best Practices for Your Next Program

You're probably aware of the importance of collecting customer feedback, but chances are you're doing it wrong.

Most companies focus on direct feedback in the form of online reviews and comments, forgetting to analyze those more subtle signals that customers send us every day.

Voice of the Customer goes beyond traditional feedback, combining both direct and indirect data, such as customer behavior, to discover the patterns and figure out what your customers really want, even when they can't express it with words.

In this article, we've gathered Voice of the Customer best practices that will help you organize your next VoC program from start to finish.

8 Voice of the Customer best practices to implement in 2024

Here are eight practices that are must-haves for your next VoC strategy.

Identify measurable goals

Collecting and analyzing customer feedback should start with well-defined, measurable goals or the outcome you want to achieve. Your goals will mostly depend on the current phase of your product or business, whether you want to launch a new product or improve an existing one.

Some of the common goals include:

• Exploring new product opportunities
• Improving user satisfaction
• Boosting engagement
• Reducing customer churn
• Prioritizing new features

You can use the following frameworks to decide which goals to pursue:

1. RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort): Assess your goals based on potential reach, impact on customers, confidence in success, and the effort required to implement the change, and then decide which goal to prioritize.
2. JTBD (Jobs-to-be-Done): Identify what customers want to achieve with your product and create the goals around the core "jobs" your product can help them accomplish based on their feedback.

Use multiple VoC channels

Voice of the Customer can be captured in many shapes and forms, it doesn't necessarily have to be traditional written feedback. Here are the most common types of user feedback:

1. Surveys: Online customer surveys are one of the most popular and accessible ways to reach many potential users. To increase the response rate, you should keep them concise, with a maximum of 20 questions. Here are some product feedback survey questions to get you inspired.
2. Customer interviews: Conducting one-on-one interviews with your key customers is a great way to understand their expectations even better. If your time and resources are limited, check out the next section about segmentation to discover which customer groups to prioritize.
3. In-app feedback: This is one of the quickest ways to get real-time customer feedback from people while they're using your product. If you want to improve the response rate, make sure to pick the right timing and make it strategic and contextual instead of interrupting users while they're doing something important.
4. Support tickets: Your customer service team can be the key to discovering valuable insights. Check whether there are any patterns in customer support tickets to identify recurring issues and areas for improvement.
5. Social media: You should monitor mentions of your brand on social media platforms to better understand customer sentiment. Trying to respond to every comment is great for boosting customer engagement and improving customer relationship management.
6. Reviews and forums: Checking out the comments about your company on third-party websites will help you discover customers' honest opinions and potential shortcomings you may have missed.
7. Behavioral analytics: The Voice of the Customer doesn't always have to be explicit. Tracking user interaction with your website or product and understanding usage patterns can provide you with many useful insights.

If you're getting overwhelmed by multiple channels, we've got you covered. Our customer feedback platform allows you to store and analyze VoC data from different channels in one place, helping you discover patterns and customer preferences.

Segment your customers

Segmenting your customers allows you to gain deeper insights into their preferences, needs and pain points, and as such, it is an essential step for effectively capturing the Voice of the Customer.  

There are various ways to segment customers, from demographic factors such as age, gender and location to their preferences, user behavior and income level.

However, here are some groups you should prioritize:

1. High-value customers: Discovering what your high-value customers truly want and catering to their needs can help you maximize revenue and ensure long-term profitability. 
2. Loyal customers: Getting insight from this group can help you increase customer loyalty in other segments and increase customer lifetime value.
3. Dissatisfied customers: The customers who churned could be the key to retaining existing customers. You should conduct exit surveys with the customers who leave to understand why they left and how to prevent customer churn in the future.

Analyze customers’ feedback

If you want to dig deeper into VoC feedback, you'll need a customer analytics platform that can help you automate and speed up this process. That's where Zeda.io steps in.

Our platform helps you not only meet customer expectations but also exceed them by proactively addressing their needs and desires.

Here's what Zeda.io can do for you:

• Holistic product insights: We merge both qualitative and quantitative VoC data from all channels, providing you with a comprehensive view of your users' behavior, needs and desires. Our platform turns customer data into categories such as Pain points (problems, frustrations and bugs we discovered while analyzing negative feedback) and Opportunities (new features and products to build).
• AI-driven analysis: Our AI features can not only summarize and organize large volumes of feedback, but they can also suggest feature ideas based on customer feedback and even generate action steps based on the feature/product you want to build.
• Predictive insights: Our customer feedback analysis goes beyond spotting current patterns and trends as we also use VoC data to predict potential churn risks and help you improve customer retention rates.
• Sentiment analysis: Our platform goes beyond words by analyzing customer sentiment that lies behind both positive and negative feedback and helping you understand how your customers feel. This can be essential if you want to engage customers and build lasting customer relationships.

To sum it up, Zeda.io is everything you need to turn the Voice of the Customer into new products and features that will improve customer experience and bring you well-deserved revenue.

Sign up to try it out today!

Share insights with the other departments

If you want to improve customer experience, you need to collaborate with all departments and work toward your common goal. Sharing insights across the organization helps create a customer-centric culture, which leads to increased customer satisfaction.

Everyone can benefit from listening to the Voice of the Customer: 

• The product department can use feedback to prioritize product features
• The marketing department can refine messaging and targeting
• The customer support team will be better prepared to address recurring issues etc.

Prioritize action items and act on them

Now, when you have all these insights, the only question is: Where do you start?

It's time to prioritize actions and tasks based on their impact and feasibility, making sure they align with your overall business goals.

Here are some of the product prioritization frameworks you can use:

• Kano prioritization: This method helps you classify the actions into five categories based on how significant the problem they're solving for a customer is.
• MoSCoW prioritization: This framework is excellent for digital products, helping you classify features and feature requests into four categories – must-have, should-have, could-have and those that your product won't have.
• ICE scoring: This scoring method helps you assess your actions based on three metrics – their potential impact, your confidence that it'll work and how easily you can implement them.

If you're not an expert in analytics, don't worry. Zeda.io has a built-in framework that helps you decide which products or features to focus on first based on the potential impact and revenue.

Our platform can also break down complex strategies into actionable steps, allowing you to start building your product now.

Make it an ongoing process

You should collect and analyze feedback regularly throughout the entire customer journey. Tools can help you automate the process, such as scheduling email surveys regularly, adding quick in-app check-ins, and monitoring customer behaviors while using your product.

This builds on the concept of continuous product discovery, which means that your products will never be fully finished; there's always something you can improve.

Previously, product discovery was associated with the early stages of validating ideas and building a product. Today, we know that product discovery is not one-and-done; instead, it should become an integral part of your business processes.

Also read: Neglecting Product Discovery? You Should Read This

Use positive feedback for marketing

Finally, all that positive feedback you've gathered can also serve as social proof to attract even more customers and build trust.

Here are some creative ways to share it:

• Add testimonials to your website
• Share customer success stories on social media
• Share ratings and reviews from third-party platforms
• Turn customer stories into case studies to publish on your blog
• Ask people for video testimonials

Suppose you want to get more positive feedback. In that case, some of the best ways to incentivize it (apart from providing excellent service and going above and beyond, obviously) are giving your customers some unexpected bonus, such as a small gift or creating loyalty programs and discounts for those who leave you a review.

And those bonuses don't even have to cost you money. It's enough to not forget about your existing customers and nurture them post-purchase by sending useful resources or simply wishing them happy holidays.

Conclusion

Collecting data about your customers is great, but it doesn't mean a lot if you don't know how to analyze it and implement the feedback. You should first set measurable goals and adopt a multichannel approach to gather diverse insights. Segment your customers, identify action items, share insights with other departments, prioritize and act on them – this should be a regular process.

Sounds overwhelming? Zeda.io can strengthen your VoC efforts by spotting patterns, opportunities and risks that emerge in your customer feedback.

We provide you with actionable insights, ideas, and steps to help you build features and products your customers will love.

Sign up today and turn your Voice of the Customer program into a gold mine.