Every business leader knows if they want to compete in today’s landscape, they need to deliver phenomenal customer experiences. It’s the experience companies give their consumers across various channels and platforms that defines whether they’ll earn the loyalty of their target audience.
Unfortunately, understanding the needs, expectations, and pain points of an evolving customer base can be complex in today’s world. The only way to truly understand what customers need, and develop the right CX strategy as a result, is by listening to the voice of the customer.
Voice of the customer, or “VOC” strategies revolve around collecting essential information about customer experiences, from surveys, feedback, and analytical tools. The more data a business can collect about common customer issues, concerns, and challenges, the more effectively they can optimize their CX strategy, and increase ROI.
Here are the core reasons why every company should be investing in VOC tech this year.
Strengthening Brand Reputation
As customer spending decreases in today’s complex economic environment, businesses are under more pressure than ever to form powerful relationships with their audience. Developing an effective brand reputation is a crucial part of this process. Around 94% of customers say they’re more likely to buy from a company with good feedback from existing customers.
However, now that customers have more way to share their insights about businesses than ever before, from social media to forums, it can be difficult for business leaders to preserve a clear view of their brand reputation. VOC tools, capable of combining survey insights, with analytics, social listening software, and artificial intelligence can help here.
The right tools will unify insights from across a range of different channels, to provide a comprehensive view of the overall perspective customers have of a specific brand. These tools can even provide useful insights into specific customer segments and groups and the common complaints or issues they tend to share.
Unlocking Opportunities for Innovation
For many companies, the main purpose of leveraging VOC technology is to find ways of improving the customer experience, enhancing NPS and CSAT scores. However, listening to the voice of the customer can also provide businesses with other insights and guidance too. The more customers pay attention to trends and customer requests, the more they can learn about the features and products that will generate the most sales opportunities going forward.
Voice of the customer technology can provide business leaders with useful guidance on the types of products and solutions that drive the highest levels of customer retention and engagement. They can assist businesses in coming up with new products and service offerings, based on their customers needs, and their position within a competitive marketplace.
For instance, by listening to customers, Apple discovered users wanted a more convenient way to interact with their tools, which spawned the creation of the Siri voice assistant – a tool which inspired countless other brands to invest in conversational AI.
Enhanced Customer Journey Orchestration
As mentioned above, a major advantage of using VOC tools in the business landscape is that it provides companies with insights they can use to improve customer service, and understand the customer journey. The right VOC tools don’t just offer an insight into the things that customers like and dislike about a brand. They can also track what kinds of channels customers use to engage with customers, and how they research and choose products.
Paying attention to the insights derived from VOC technologies can help businesses to determine where they should be focusing their resources to increase revenue and retention. Companies can learn which channels customers use when they’re looking for fast support, and what they appreciate most when interacting with human agents.
VOC solutions can even help to make marketing strategies more effective by providing behind-the-scenes views into the campaigns that drive sales and new opportunities. Plus, these resources give businesses access to direct insights from customers they can use for social proof. With VOC solutions, organizations can more effectively map, orchestrate, and optimize the customer journey.
Increased Customer Retention and Revenue
Perhaps more than anything else, VOC technologies help businesses to understand their customers and their unique needs and requirements. These insights ensure organizations can develop customer experience strategies that are attuned to their specific target audience.
VOC tools provide a complete view into the factors that affect customer sentiment, both positively and negatively, so businesses can provide agents with the right training and guidance to retain clients. Additionally, they ensure companies can demonstrate their commitment to their target audience, by responding to common concerns and issues quickly.
Voice of the customer tools enable brands to update their strategies quickly and effectively, based on real insights from their target audience. This is crucial at a time when customer trust is waning, and 71% of customers say they would abandon a business that appears to put profit over customer experience. VOC tools pave the way for more personalized, relevant, and engaging experiences across all channels, driven by valuable data.
Enhanced Business Efficiency
Finally, in today’s complex economy, business leaders striving to compete on the basis of excellent customer service need to do a lot more, with a lot less. This means companies are increasingly relying on data to make intelligent decisions about where to use resources to get the best return on investment. Unfortunately, many companies still struggle to determine how different CX strategies influence their bottom line.
By converting customer sentiment and testimonials into hard data, enhanced with voice analytics, AI-driven text analytics, and more, VOC reveals clear opportunities for business growth. VOC tools provide companies with the resources they need to make intelligent decisions about how to organize teams, utilize new technology, and create marketing and sales strategies.
VOC solutions combined with AI bots and analytical tools can even provide real-time insights, guidance, and next-best-action coaching to agents in the modern contact center. These tools can help businesses quickly respond to issues with customer sentiment, based on historical insights and customer profiles. The result is a more efficient, productive, and successful CX team.
