In today’s era, customers are highly demanding than ever before. Voice of Customer (VoC) is evolving as a measure to keep up with customer expectations. Companies have realised that listening to customers and rolling out actions based on the VoC is the first essential step towards Customer satisfaction. Voice of the Customer plays a critical role in driving company-wide efforts to deliver value and happiness to customers.
This blog includes what is Voice of Customer? Why do we need voice of customers? What are the different methods to collect voice of customers? And finally what are the benefits of voice of customers. Why it’s so important in the fashion world.
What is Voice of Customers (VoC):
Voice of the Customer (VoC) refers to customer’s feedback about their experience of dealing with a business and the kind of expectations they have from a product. VoC is the market response to your offerings. It focuses on customer needs, expectations, understandings, and product improvement. VoC is a strong communication platform to tell the brand if their product needs improvement.
VoC is a process used by organisations to capture and collect customer requirements/feedback through different sources social media, online forums, customer care tickets, websites, etc. This data is collected to further analyse and take actions based on the expectations of the customers to maximise the sales.
Why voice of customers:
There are different ways how businesses can manage their reputation, but the one that has proven to be successful is to listen to the Voice of Customers (VoC). Voice of the customer gives businesses the opportunity to learn and improve. This technique makes businesses customer-centric by making them prioritise customer expectations and offer a better customer experience. Improvements in this area do not only focus on customer satisfaction with regards to products or services, but also enable organisations to make customer based decisions.
Based on these insights, brands can proactively serve customers with the desired quality. This is the reason that approximately, 36% of businesses have deployed Voice of Customer programs to connect and engage with customers at key points in the customers shopping journey.
VoC delivers clear guidance on which products will perform best in the marketplace. Actionable product decision guidance ensures that retailers and manufacturers can make investment decisions with confidence. Brands and retailers can leverage customer preferences on new products to reduce the risk in determining new assortments.
What are the methods of collecting the Voice of Customer?
Every business has multiple touch points throughout product development, marketing, sales and customer support. As and when customers move across these, businesses need to gather their opinions and use the information in a well-timed way.
- Voice Capturing:
- Although online surveys and customer feedback forms are easiest and common ways to garner customer feedback – sales, marketing and customer service representatives are the best resource to dig into the customers’ minds.
- Not every customer might fill the online survey form, the voice capturing is more interactive and helpful for the brands to get a valuable feedback.
- Surveys:
- Surveys can be conducted online or offline depending on the network connectivity of the respondents.
- You can use a free ready-made survey template to save on time and effort or create your questionnaire.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a score calculated based on how likely are the customers to refer your business to their friends or family.
- Interviews:
- The voice of customer interviews are done in person, however, they can also be done through one-on-one calls and emails.
- The interviewer asks a set of questions to the customer and notes down the responses.
- Focus-groups:
- In this voice of the customer method, 8 to 10 customers are selected to form a group.
- Apart from their answers, qualitative data such as their expressions, feelings, body language, and emotions are also noted.
- Emails:
- Emails can be used to gather feedback when the sample audience is small.
- The benefit of this voice of customer method is people can respond to an email as per their convenience.
What are the benefits of Voice of Customer?
Regular interaction with the customers will empower the product development team to be better at their job. For instance, product developers can focus more on factors like ease of use and flexibility to enhance customer experience. On the other hand, customers too can develop a greater empathy towards the brand, after looking at its effort to serve better.
- Helps improve your service:
- Customer feedback is a very important tool in not only improving the product but also the services provided by the brand.
- An impeccable customer service ensures, your customers are going to return to you for the way you have treated them.
- Not only will they be a returning customer they are most likely to refer your brand to their friends and family.
- With voice of your customer you can be sure the new products you bring to market are winners and improve Product Success Rates by up to 80%.
- Improves Customer satisfaction:
- Improves customer satisfaction by having access on the opinion of customers and improve the products in accordance with their expectations.
- Having satisfied customer’s leads to retention of current customers and acquisition of new ones.
- Get real-time insight into customer preference on product and price long before your products reach production to get actionable results in 24-48 hours.
- Stay ahead with development and innovation:
- Hearing the voice of customer will help you keep pace with the latest development and innovation and will help you stay a step ahead in understanding what your consumers want and what are they willing to pay for these developments.
- Customer feedback can be used to understand new trends and use the information to produce new and innovative products.
- Actionable results from VoC available within days help you get new products to market up to 4-5 months faster.
- Market Fit:
- Listening to the voice of the customer will help you know perceptions in the adopter stages itself.
- Launching a new feature or a totally new product in the market first to the beta consumer will help you understand your target audience and also if you fit the bill or not.
- Voice of customer is an efficient tool in hitting the market at the right time with the right product!
- Helps to enhance your reputation:
- Enhance reputation by learning about your brand, and manage any issue before it spreads into online networks and media.
- Enhancing the reputation leads to an increase in revenue, market share and customer loyalty
- Brands and retailers can reduce product markdowns through optimised selection decisions, pricing strategies, and buy depth.
Conclusion:
A good voice of customer program helps to better understand customers’ choices, concerns, and preferences. What make the difference is how the survey data is analysed and more importantly, how businesses use the insights generated by a voice of customer program.
Once you have the insights ready, it’s time to put them in action! Respond to the concerns of the customers and take steps to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. It is time brands start taking actions on VoC in order to increase sales and ROI.
Customer is God said a Director of a major fashion house, and it is important that all the brands start believing the same for a successful and growing business.
