How to drive actionable insights from voice of customers

Here are some stats that should coerce you to make a hard stop and shift focus to your brand’s moments of truth.

- According to a study by Aberdeen Group, companies that build and focus continuously on voice of customer strategies generate a 10X increase in annual company revenue year-over-year.

- According to the same report, the year-on-year cost of customer service goes down by 23%.

• - It take 5 to 25X more resources to attract new customer than it does to retain old ones.

• - There is a 60-70% probability of selling to an existing customer, while this probability is only 5-20% for a new customer

• The above facts are motivators enough to drop everything and focus on improving the customer experience of your brand. Here is some support on how to go about it.

• First things first, focus on the moments of truth. Moments of truth are every interaction that a customer has with your brand, creating an opportunity to form an opinion about your business, this spans across channels - physical and virtual. What is important to keep in mind here is that you unify all your communication channels, lest you record same interactions with a customer on different channels differently. A good Omni channel solution therefore is the first thing that businesses need to invest in today. By application, a good Omni channel solution will be one that binds all your channels like telephony, email, social media, chat, SMS, feedback etc. together to give you a single stream of interaction with each customer, records them for analysis and integrates with your Helpdesk CRM so your customer information stays updated. An Omni channel strategy also empowers your customer service representatives to take prompt and informed actions.

• Second most important factor in becoming customer oriented is analysis. Once all the data is captured and recorded, it should be analysed on the following fronts:

  • Intent – Analyse words and phrases that point towards the intent of customers or their impression of the brand.

  • Uniformity – After identifying the intent, it should be analysed if the interaction happened across multiple channels and if it was uniform all across.

  • Mapping – The intent, if uniform across channels, should be mapped to position in the customer’s journey

  • Response – You also need to analyse the response that the customer received from the agent. There are multiple subsets to this like response time, relevance, response platform, accurateness etc.

  • Feedback – Lastly, you should analyse the feedback received from the customer, both good and bad, followed by respective actions. While a customer with positive feedback would become a good prospect for up-sell, the customer with negative feedback would require corrective actions.

• Most companies follow these first two steps with great vigor but fail to tie them with revenue. That leads us to the title of this article and the question – How to drive actionable insights from the voice of customers?

• The answer comes partially from the first two steps, in the form of customer journey map and their attitude towards the brand. Both of this information can be stitched together to measure the lifetime value of a customer based on their previous spending pattern. Businesses can also do a sentiment analysis on the VoC data received from various channels. The sentiment reports when mapped with customer journey can create heat maps that can bring out critical issues across customer journeys and give actionable insights on the following grounds:

1.Product development

• The voice of customer data tells a lot about the product or service. It can tell us about improvements that the product/service needs. The features that can help differentiate a business from its competitors. VoC data also gives suggestions on the complimentary services/features a business can provide.

2.    Marketing

• The VoC data gives many insights to the perceived value of your brand in the market and can point out important elements like customer sentiments, the group of customers needing immediate attention, the right mix of promotional offers customized for each customer or group. It can also give an insight into the channels that should get a greater share of the marketing budget. Businesses have also used VoC data to improve their marketing copy, as sending offers to customers in their own words makes the offer more relevant to the target market.

3.    Customer experience

• The voice of customer data collected from various sources, gives you a deep insight into your customer facing team’s performance. You can discover the areas hurting you the most and how can you fix them to reduce the number of complaints both online and offline. One of the most important things that business can derive from VoC data is to identify at-risk customers and pre-empt problems.

Over time businesses realize their revenue grows multi-fold if the three steps above are executed correctly, as every loyal customer created in this process would have a higher lifetime value. The Aberdeen Group report summarizes it well with the fact that businesses focused on improving customer experience enjoy 55% greater customer retention rate and increase up-selling and cross-selling success rates by 15% to 20%.