How to build a successful Voice of the Customer programme

When was the last time you avoided a brand because of something you had heard or stopped purchasing from a company that had disappointed you?

How often did you get in touch with those businesses to tell them why you won’t be buying from them again?

As someone tasked with improving the customer experience (CX), you can’t expect consumers to seek you out. Instead, you must start the conversation by championing, implementing and maintaining your organisation’s Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme.

Voice of the Customer definition: Voice of the Customer is the systematic collection, analysis and monitoring of customer interactions with your product, service or brand. 

A VoC programme is important to your overall customer experience (CX). It’s essentially a commitment to acting upon customer feedback. Your initial goal is to close gaps between customer expectations and your organisation’s performance. When you maintain an effective VoC programme, you’re empowering your employees to exceed customer expectations, too.

Many organisations ask customers for feedback via surveys, feedback forms and focus groups. However, there is more to a Voice of the Customer programme than simply collecting feedback. When you build a VoC programme for your business, you’re making customer engagement, loyalty and satisfaction a core part of your business strategy. A good VoC programme includes:

Most importantly, a good VoC programme is actionable. Companies make it a priority to close the customer feedback loop by identifying pain points, resolving issues and communicating these changes to both employees and customers.

Keep reading to learn how to build your own Voice of the Customer programme, from planning to implementation and maintenance. You’ll get tips, key VoC metrics and resources like these Voice of the Customer survey templates to help you get started.

Setting up a VoC programme, or even refreshing one you already have, takes time and resources. Before you launch into a full plan, gather the following information and approach leadership to make sure everyone is on board:

Once you have leadership on board, collaborate with different teams across the company. Each stakeholder will have a unique perspective on the customer experience and the various methods you can use to improve it.

Each of these teams might have different goals or ideas of success. To start, you could choose one company-wide goal (e.g. “improve our customer satisfaction rating by 10%”) and encourage each team to set their own goal. 

Just remember that this is a customer-centric effort. A product team might want to improve an onboarding experience in order to increase sign-ups. But in the context of a Voice of the Customer programme, it would be better for your product and customer service teams to connect. Customer service could point out key pain points with an onboarding experience and the product team could address these with the goal of reducing the number of customer service tickets.

Sit down with key stakeholders to think about how a customer or potential customer interacts with your brand before, during and after their purchase from you. This is called customer journey mapping, and it can help you highlight opportunities to collect feedback, learn more about a particular touchpoint or fill in any gaps in the customer experience. Common customer touchpoints take place before, during and after a purchase. Some examples include:

When creating your customer journey map, you should also note when, where and how often you ask for customer feedback. This will help you refine your surveys and plan and track them more effectively.

When you listen to customers, you’re collecting structured and unstructured (quantitative and qualitative) Voice of the Customer feedback.

Structured data is quantifiable or measurable. For example, let’s suppose you send a survey that asks customers to rate the likelihood of them purchasing from you again. Because you’re asking them to choose from a set of options, the results have a numeric value: 76% of customers say that they would buy your product again.

Unstructured data is qualifiable or immeasurable. For example, in your purchase experience survey, you ask someone to explain why it’s “very likely” that they will buy from you again. You provide a text box so they can tell you more. The text responses that you receive will help you understand the “why” behind the numbers.

To get the full picture of your customer experience, it’s a good idea to collect both data types. Here are some methods you can use to listen to customers regularly as part of an effective Voice of the Customer programme:

There are a few industry-standard VoC metrics that companies use in order to understand the customer experience. Here are three of the most popular VoC metrics:

How likely is it that someone would recommend your company to a friend or colleague? The Net Promoter Score® (NPS)  survey gives you a quantifiable, easily trackable answer to this question. Here’s an overview of the NPS survey.

While NPS shows you customer loyalty over time, the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) helps you understand how a customer feels after a specific interaction with your brand. Here’s what you need to know about a CSAT survey:

How difficult or easy is it for customers to accomplish certain tasks when interacting with your company? The Customer Effort Score (CES) helps you pinpoint major customer friction points, such as when they’re using your software or trying to solve a specific problem. Here’s why you should use CES surveys to enhance your VoC programme.

Once you start collecting customer feedback across touchpoints, you must examine each dataset and compare your findings.

Once you’ve devised your customer listening strategy, you’ll need to pay attention to – and deal with – any immediate issues, such as a declining NPS or poor customer satisfaction score.

In the long term, you need to create a framework for maintaining a solid VoC programme for your organisation. Here are some ideas.

When your customers are happy, it’s more likely that they will remain loyal to your brand and recommend you to others. But there are other benefits of Voice of the Customer programme that might not be as obvious.

When you create a Voice of the Customer programme, you’re empowering employees to have a direct impact on the customer experience. You can even encourage teams to set customer-centric goals and reward them for their achievements.

A lot of feedback collection is reactive, meaning you’re only able to understand how customers feel after their interaction with your brand. A VoC programme accounts for proactive feedback collection as well. Your findings from focus groups, customer interviews, social media listening and user research can spark opportunities to develop new product ideas, solve consumer pain points and more.

You can use positive customer feedback and interactions to tell powerful stories about your brand across channels, from marketing collateral to your website and social media platforms.

Market research, user insights, customer service feedback, social media interactions, survey results: the data work together to provide a full picture of your customer experience. But if the data live in silos, it’s difficult to pick up on trends and highlight important opportunities for action by teams across your organisation.

Make each stakeholder or team responsible for reporting on their findings or sharing it all in one place. You can simplify feedback collection and management with survey integrations for Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Zendesk, Zoom and more.

Are you sending out surveys but not receiving enough responses to ensure statistically significant results? As part of your Voice of the Customer programme, consider a survey audit, whereby you run each survey through a survey best practices checklist.

Customers might be ignoring your surveys if they’re too long or confusing. It’s a good idea to use expert-written survey templates and customer satisfaction survey questions as these will help generate a reliable number of responses.

Still not sure why your surveys aren’t performing well? If so, check out these tips for increasing CSAT response rates and CSAT survey question best practices.

If the idea of keeping customers happy isn’t enough to get teams to prioritise resolving customer issues, you need to tie customer satisfaction to revenue. For example, you can showcase the ROI of improving customer satisfaction by tying the lifetime value of a retained customer to the number of people who say that they would buy from you again.

Build your case by sharing compelling research with reluctant teams. Our research shows that 75% of customers lose trust in a business after a poor in-product experience, among other important findings.

Design a VoC programme that captures the pulse of your customer sentiment. Use the following best practices to engage your customers in a dialogue, align your company’s stakeholders and create impactful change.

Send a survey in minutes using one of these expert-written Voice of the Customer survey templates. If you’re looking for a little more help, learn how SurveyMonkey can power your VoC programme.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.