How well do you listen to the voice of your customer (VoC)? Where do you hear them talking? And why should you care?
You care because it means increased revenue for your company. Look at these numbers!
The Value of Listening to VoC
An Aberdeen Group report, titled “The Business Value of Building a Best-in-Class VoC Program” (download with free registration) showed best-in-class VoC users—the top 20% of respondents, based on performance—enjoy an almost 10-times-greater year-over-year increase in annual company revenue compared to all others.
Ten times! Can you hear them now?
And if that wasn’t enough, the same best-in-class VoC users:
- Report 55% greater customer retention rates
- Have an average 23% decrease in year-over-year customer service costs
- Show 292% greater employee engagement rates
Monitoring your customer’s journey – and gathering their feedback – will provide you with critical data.
Interacting at every touchpoint with your customer– web, phone, in person, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – anywhere your customer interacts with you, is where you need to be to collect the data.
Data which you can use to take action, to make decisions to improve your product and processes and data which can be used to increase your revenue!
Getting Your Customer to Give You Feedback
But let’s talk about the collection part and listening to the voice of your customer. How do you get your customer to give you the valuable data?
- Be Authentic. Ask permission to have them participate in a customer satisfaction or survey program. Tell the purchaser of your product or service why you need them to participate and share what you will do with the results. Provide feedback to them of how their shared experiences made a difference. Do not, however, make their participation in filling out a survey seem like it’s a check to mark off on your list of to-dos’, make it feel as though they are making a contribution to their future interactions with your company.
- Be Relevant. If your customer conducts their business with you on line – ask for their response on line. In an email or a screen that shows up after an order is placed. If they conduct business by phone – do your data collection the same way. Relate your request for feedback to their interaction with your business. Or give options. Make your feedback process relevant to each customer along every step of their journey.
- Be Timely. Your customer is busy with a whole lot of other stuff going on in their lives. If you want accurate feedback – ask sooner rather than later.
The Key to Listening to the Voice of Your Customer
The key to listening to the voice of your customer is to work very hard to keep the process simple for them to talk with you. Know the right questions to ask. And be sure your team is focused on the data and working together to create value – and increase revenue – from the results.
If you aren’t sure where to start – give us a call. We can start off with a small pilot program for customer satisfaction surveys or mystery shops. This might work best as you plan your budget for the new year Contact us today to schedule a free market research consultation.
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