Having your feedback in one place is important to any successful business. But before we focus on why organizing your feedback can give you a better understanding of the Voice of the Customer, let’s first understand what the Voice of the Customer is by providing some context.
What is the Voice of the Customer and why is it important?
Voice of the Customer is a term used to describe the process by which customer insights are collected, organized and analyzed by organizations.
In the past, companies relied on surveys and market research to understand their customers’ needs, but the inherent limitations of this method led to its removal.
Today, the focus has shifted to Voice of the Customer and the intelligent experience softwares that make it possible for companies to have actionable and real-time insights.
By focusing on the Voice of the Customer, it is quite possible to prioritize customer needs and expectations, evaluate new concepts, and determine future developments.
VoC provides an intuitive understanding of your overall customer experience. By using an intelligent customer feedback solution, you can tip the scales in your favor.
Why you are listening to your customers the wrong way
Silos are everywhere in your organization
When a company operates in silos, each department works on its own tasks and projects without worrying about their impact on the other departments.
There is no sharing of information or data, and no cross-functional communication. Departments communicate little or not at all with each other.
This type of organization generally results in duplication of tasks, wasted time and often financial losses.
It is an outdated way of working that can be harmful to the overall performance of the company and is not adapted to the digital transformation that we are currently experiencing.
Today, companies that aim to be more efficient and productive must completely rethink their work methods and promote collaboration between departments.
Without context and structure, your feedback data is ineffective
Companies are always dealing with feedback data, whether it comes from their employees, customers, or end-users.
This data comes in different forms and not all of them can be easily analyzed.
In fact, unstructured feedback data which comes in the form of emails, social media, reviews etc represent a real source of opportunity for businesses.
Due to its format though, it is difficult to uncover insights using traditional tools.
So much data created today is unstructured, companies need to be able to understand what’s behind the data.
Otherwise, they risk missing out on significant amounts of digital intelligence that would make it possible to bring context to the feedback and to look at the bigger picture.
You can’t get a holistic view of the experience if you don’t listen throughout the entire customer journey
Companies often measure their performance by focussing on individual touchpoints or metrics.
These indicators can be easily tracked and implemented into operations and are preferred due to traditionally being easier to analyze compared to multiple indicators.
However, when adopting this approach, businesses miss the most important aspect of a customer journey: the holistic view.
It is only by looking at the bigger picture that organizations can improve their performance and identify what should be improved.
How to organize your feedback data to improve the overall experience
Connect the dots and unify your data
Data is after human resources, the company’s most valuable asset. It is therefore important that the entire functioning of the organization must be rethought with this in mind.
Prioritizing the interactions within an extended ecosystem composed of customers, suppliers, partners, etc., can lead to a more simplified approach to the way business is conducted.
Cloud solutions like CRM, ERP, HR planning, IT systems, frontend applications, and so on, represent a double opportunity for your team to collect more meaningful feedback and improve the overall experience.
However, no matter how much feedback you collect and how much data you gather, if it’s not unified and leveraged, it won’t help you in improving your customer experience.
Indeed, in order to understand your customers’ needs exactly, it is essential to connect the dots and organize the feedback data received through different channels.
This will give you a clear and accurate overview of your customer experience and allow you to manage feedback much more easily and quickly.
Bring context to your feedback
Your feedback is the most valuable thing that you can collect from your customers.
So make sure you optimize the entire collection process to the point where you will be able to get very important details when customers fill out your forms.
You’ve certainly heard of metadata (city, country, gender, etc.).
This contextual data brings at least 2 times more value to the feedback.
Imagine now that this data is collected automatically, it would be an unimaginable saving of time as well as an intuitive access to insights which is, usually, not available to everyone.
At Feedier, we call them context attributes. ( Learn more here)
Knowing details about your respondents becomes a simple task since the configuration is done at the time of creating your form.
Simply choose a contextual question and decide what you want to know about your customers.
Once you start collecting responses, you will be able to filter your results according to the attributes that are the most useful to you.
But to get a holistic view, you need to go a little further.
Listen throughout the entire customer journey
Collecting feedback from different touch points, organizing that data in one place and giving it context to better understand your customers is definitely a good start, but you can’t stop there!
Now it’s time to start listening and understanding your customers, users, or employees, at every key moment of their journey.
We were talking about context attributes earlier. They are very useful when it comes to having an overview and to help you reach your KPI targets.
Mapping out your customer journey allows you to see at a glance when there is a feeling of dissatisfaction or discontent.
Then by attaching the context it allows you to detect the slightest problems that your customers encounter and helps you to segment your audience based on these attributes.
To give you a clearer idea of the usefulness of having a global view of the journey, let’s take the example of a construction company.
Imagine that this company is working on a renovation of several houses within the same building.
Surveys are sent to the residents at different times during the entire process to find out their satisfaction with the work.
By creating a survey for every step of the renovation process ‘before construction’ / ‘during construction’ / ‘after construction’ and by adding contextual questions (door number, street name, etc.), you will be able to have a global and at the same time very precise vision on the experience of the residents.
At Feedier, we call this Live Journeys.
This means creating User Stories that are groups of data sets (example: residents of street {street_name} at the time {end_of_renovation}) and placing them on a mapped live journey to have a global view of your feedback saving you a lot of time.
Wrap up
Collecting massive amounts of feedback data may seem like a benefit to you.
But we’ve seen that if that data isn’t being leveraged and isn’t being collected in different moments, then you’re not going to be much further ahead on your Customer Experience.
Yet, having organized feedback, giving it context and having a holistic view at different touch points, allows you to understand the Voice of the Customer much more effectively.
This allows you to take action by engaging your customers more and reducing your friction points to increase satisfaction, retention and improve the overall experience.
If you want to know more about how Feedier collects and organizes your feedback data, you can visit our website or the demo page.
Originally published at https://feedier.com on May 20, 2021.
