7 inspirational voice of the customer (VoC) examples

In today's market, customers are more demanding than ever. If your business is to succeed, you must prioritize your customers’ demands and preferences.

Voice of the customer (VoC) gives you valuable insight into what your customers want. When a business understands its customers, it can meet their needs and expectations.

VoC describes the process of collecting, from multiple sources, a customer's feedback about their experience with your business, product, or service. Understanding the voice of your customer is essential for delivering a better user experience.

In this article, we’ll look at how you can use VoC to improve your products or services and some VoC examples to inspire you.

Here are some ways to effectively use VoC:

Protecting brand reputation

In this age of social media, your customers can easily publicize their experience with your product, whether positive or negative. Dissatisfied customers won’t hesitate to write a negative review on online platforms.

Listening to the voice of the customer allows you to react quickly to your customers’ pain points before your brand image is damaged any further. It also helps you discover areas where you excel and where improvements could be made.

What’s more, when a business makes positive changes, it boosts its brand image and shows it cares about its customers.

Delivering value to customers

You can use VoC to hone your products or services into something potential customers need, prompting them to make a purchase. Using customer feedback, you can make customer-centric products that resonate with people.

Listening to your customers and taking the necessary steps to solve their pain points is the first step to delivering value. If a business does not incorporate VoC during product design, the end product will be incompatible with customer needs and expectations, and won’t deliver value to customers.

Improve customer experience

The key objective of VoC is to improve customer experience. When you know your customers' needs and preferences, you’re better positioned to address their frustrations, and they’re likely to become repeat customers and even brand promoters.

Insights from VoC help you understand how satisfied your customers are at each touchpoint. With this data, you can make adjustments to better cater to their needs across the board, improving customer experience.

Enhance internal processes

With a unified VoC program in place, cross-departmental teams receive reliable data that can be used to reduce customer onboarding costs and eliminate poor marketing campaigns.

VoC also enables teams to agree on how to collect customer feedback and use those insights to refine the customer experience. As a result, teams will be focused on achieving the same goal, and internal processes will be simplified.

Gain a competitive advantage

VoC has become a crucial tool to maintain a competitive advantage in the market. VoC data will give you detailed insights that your competitors may not have. These insights will help your business become more targeted and efficient in-market campaigns, attracting more customers. In short, your business will be more in tune with the needs of your customers.

When your product or service meets customer expectations, they will likely purchase from you rather than your competition.

Businesses are integrating VoC programs as a core strategy to keep up with the expectations of their customers.

Let’s look at some best practices for integrating VoC:

Collect customer feedback from all touchpoints

Every piece of customer feedback is valuable, so capturing their interaction across the entire customer journey is important. Relying only on a single channel will limit your comprehensive knowledge of customers’ views.

To effectively integrate VoC, gather customer feedback from all touchpoints, including:

• Emails

• Websites

• Social media

• Customer service calls

Perform customer segmentation

Customer segmentation allows you to tailor products to address the diverse needs of your customer base. It enables a business to serve all of its audience and ensures the right customers are being targeted.

If you don’t do this, you will end up ignoring some customer segments. Therefore, segmenting customers based on preferences, demographics, or purchase behavior is important.

Share VoC data with the rest of the organization

The entire enterprise must be onboard for a business to fully integrate a customer-centric culture. A successful VoC program needs buy-in from every department because company employees interact with customers at various touchpoints.

Sharing customer feedback with the whole company is pivotal. It helps raise awareness across the business of the customers’ needs and expectations. Other departments could also suggest ways to improve customer experience and drive customer-centric initiatives.

Make the customer feel heard

Customer feedback has no value if it isn’t put into action. The voice of the customer strategy only works when they feel valued. It communicates the business's commitment to making changes.

As a business, you are responsible for immediately responding to their feedback. Develop actions centered on improving customer experience, for instance:

• Prioritizing product roadmaps

• Launching new products or services

• Adjusting your brand message

• Solving recurrent issues

• Making improvements to customer support

Prioritize personalization

Personalized customer experience immensely improves satisfaction rates. It builds customer trust and loyalty to your brand. Tailor products or services that will appeal most to each customer according to their feedback.

Pay special attention to customers who reported negative experiences with your brand. You could ask them how their experience could be improved or include a personalized gift as an extra incentive the next time they make a purchase. 

Ask the right questions

Making sure you’re asking the right questions is key to getting valuable customer feedback. Remember to keep the questions simple and specific. Customers are more likely to give responses when surveys target their particular experience.

Keep the questions short. Shorter surveys attract more responses. Short surveys also show your customers that you respect their time.

Monitor success and make improvements

Once the VoC program has been established, follow up with customers and gauge their response to the changes made. Ask your customers if they like the changes.

Continuous monitoring helps you track results over time. It will also uncover patterns that would otherwise have been overlooked.

Periodically making changes ensures that customers are satisfied with your brand offerings. It also helps you to stay ahead of your competition.

Voice of the customer data is gathered from various sources and classified into three types:

• Direct

• Indirect

• Inferred

Direct data

This data is collected when the customer directly interacts with the business. It is the most common way to get customer feedback and simply asks them what they think about your business, service, or product.

Some ways to collect direct data include:

• Customer interviews

• Focus groups

• Emails

• Live chats

• Surveys

Indirect data

Customers provide indirect data on third-party review sites or forums, i.e., sources outside your control. Indirect data can be collected from sources such as:

• Call center recordings

• Social media comments

• Web chat transcripts

• Product reviews

This form of data gives business access to uncompromising and honest feedback. This is because customers tend to be more honest when talking to friends or family rather than directly to the business.

Inferred data

This is data that is neither collected directly nor indirectly from customers. Inferred data is collected by observing customer behavior, such as website use or purchase history. It is collected from customer activities without speaking to them directly.

Some common sources of inferred data are web chat and live chat behavior analytics.

Many companies have seen significant improvements when they adopt VoC. Here are some real-world examples of companies that have incorporated a VoC strategy:

Upserve POS (Lightspeed Restaurant)

Upserve, which was created in 2006 as Swipely, is a hospitality firm that offers services to restaurant owners. It is customer-oriented and provides various channels like email and phone for its customers to reach it.

It regularly updates its Lightspeed applications for restaurant owners to keep their businesses running smoothly.

ZeroNorth

ZeroNorth was founded to lead the green transition of global trade in the shipping industry. It is recognized for driving maritime sustainability by helping shipowners to reduce their environmental footprint. It partners with its customers to ensure a smooth transition toward decarbonization. ZeroNorth helps its customers (shipowners) reduce carbon emissions using real-time data.

It gives customers access to its software, Optimise, to provide insights on fuel efficiency and voyage optimization. The customers sign up with the company and are alerted of any parameter changes.

Also, its BunkerAction tool gives ship operators recommendations about where and what to bunker for vessels across their fleet.

Content Allies

Content Allies helps B2B tech firms to build and run revenue-focused podcasts. The firm offers advertising services and has integrated VoC to market, promote, publish, and manage content for its clients. It empathizes with customers who struggle to share their expertise through content creation.

Using personalization, Content Allies tailors solutions that solve customers’ unique pain points. It uses VoC to set customers up with prospective partners in the market.

Bitdam

Bitdam is a privately held cybersecurity firm that protects its client businesses from malware attacks.

The company is working to make customer support and collaboration a self-service operation. This will enhance the customer's visibility of the security status of their businesses.

Explainify

Explainify helps businesses communicate complex messages in simplified terms. The company uses videos to help businesses simplify and explain their story.

The team at Explainify works with their customers to understand complex concepts and suggests visual elements that align with their objectives.

Darwin Apps

Darwin Apps is a digital experience agency that helps businesses create websites and user-friendly mobile solutions. They have incorporated a voice bot called Darwin to make customer interactions more intuitive and conversational.

Starbucks

The firm uses its VoC strategy to deliver on its promises. Using in-store suggestion boxes, the company continuously gathers customer feedback. These insights have been pivotal in introducing new menu items and beverage flavors.

A VoC template is a tool used to capture customer feedback in an organized and efficient manner. It is a checklist of VoC-related questions to ask your customers, making it easier for you to ask the right questions.

The size of your business is irrelevant. A VoC template can give you valuable insight into what your customers want.

VoC templates vary depending on the business goals and customer needs. However, each template has four key elements:

• Direct feedback

• Customer requests

• Solution identification

• Request prioritization

An example of a readily available template used to collect customer feedback is Dovetail's VoC template. By using this template, you can:

• Identify areas that need improvement

• Discover your customers' preferences

• Gather feedback from various mediums

• Track customer sentiments

• Make better decisions concerning product or service improvement

• Improve brand reputation

• Increase customer retention

• Measure customer satisfaction

It is usually a one-on-one conversation with members of your target audience to directly learn about their experience with your product or service.

VoC in new product development allows businesses to create customer-centric products. It captures their needs and preferences so the business can create a product that is more likely to appeal to customers.

In retail, VoC can be used to gain a detailed understanding of consumer demand and expectations. When VoC insights are leveraged in retail, retailers can increase revenue and save time on logistical processes.

Brand voice is a distinct image a company communicates to its target audience across all mediums. Product voice, on the other hand, expresses a product's personality.