A VoC strategy helps you understand your data and your users by giving you a plan of action: harness it to create great products and foster a loyal and happy customer base.
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To create products people want to use, you can’t just gather data—you’ve got to understand it.
According to Gartner, 95% of orgs collect user data, but only 10% actually use it to improve CX. The best way to put your data to use? Build a voice of customer (VoC) strategy.
By creating a VoC strategy, you’ll understand your data and your users. Instead of capturing VoC data only to forget about it, you’ll have a plan of action: harness it to create great products and foster a loyal and happy customer base. Our guide to building a voice of customer strategy will help you do just that.
A VoC strategy involves the processes of gathering and acting on feedback from your users. It helps you understand what your users want, what's important to them, and what they need to do their best work. Armed with this information, you can develop your best products—ones that are truly useful to your customers and solve their greatest frustrations.
We’ve all been there before: the way a customer uses your product doesn’t exactly align with your expectations. In fact, it may be totally off-base. Even if you’re an industry expert, there’s often a difference between the way you expect users to interact with your product and the way they actually do. A VoC program will help you bridge this knowledge gap. The program also provides a few extra benefits, like:
To implement an effective user feedback strategy, we recommend following four steps.
Even if your VoC program mainly involves product development and customer support teams, it's crucial to rally all key stakeholders behind your strategy. Why? User feedback has a trickle-down effect. For example:
User feedback impacts every team in your organization. The more people who have access to it (and the more who understand your VoC strategy), the better. When every team is aware of your goals and challenges, they can tackle them collaboratively.
Taking time to make sure every team is aligned will also help you keep user interactions consistent across all customer-facing departments. If everyone knows what users think of your product, they can work together with a customer-centric focus.
While it feels like there are infinite customer feedback options out there, they all boil down to three basic categories: direct, indirect, and inferred feedback. Keep in mind, there isn’t one “perfect” methodology for collecting feedback. Each feedback source comes with its own strengths and limitations.
That's why we recommend keeping your feedback channels diverse. By looking at user feedback and the customer journey from multiple angles, you’ll capture the voice of the customer and get a balanced, big-picture perspective.
Direct feedback is given when you ask your users questions. It requires the most up-front work and serves as a useful feedback source when you need straightforward answers from customers. Popular sources of direct feedback include:
Customer surveys: Customer surveys are ideal for quantitative feedback and routine check-ins on customer satisfaction. Try including feedback forms or net promoter score (NPS) surveys throughout your customer’s journey—like after onboarding or closing a support ticket. at the end of emails. Or, consider using in-app feedback to capture user thoughts as they work with your product. Other helpful surveys include customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and customer effort scores (CES).
Customer advisory boards: Customer advisory boards are optimal when you need expert feedback. Think of these boards like your A-Team—call on power users who use your product often and are well-versed in the industry you serve. Bonus: advisory board members are usually great candidates for beta testers.
Beta tests: Beta tests are the perfect choice when you want feedback on your latest product ideas and iterations during your product development cycle. We find that including customer feedback at every phase of the development process is crucial to building tools users love. Use beta testing to learn what works before you launch.
Focus groups: Focus groups are the way to go when you need to collect candid, unpolished feedback. A group conversation enables users to build off of other users' experiences, so you can easily get a sense of what works and what doesn’t.
1:1 Customer interviews: 1:1 Customer interviews are helpful when you need in-depth, granular feedback. This type of feedback is excellent for helping you optimize customer tools and features and seeing how users work. During the interview, ask your user to walk you through workflows to see how they use your product in real time. Stuck trying to figure out the right questions to ask? Check out our favorite open-ended questions.
Indirect feedback is unsolicited. Sometimes it’s given straight to your organization (via comments on a customer service phone call, for example), and other times it’s shared elsewhere, like on social media. Indirect sources of feedback are excellent at shedding light on the bigger context behind user experiences.
Examples of indirect feedback include:
Indirect feedback sources like voice and text interactions are growing in popularity—so don’t skip out on them. In fact, a recent study by Gartner predicts that 60% of orgs with voice of customer programs will include indirect feedback in their voice of customer strategy by 2025.
Inferred feedback blends product data and customer behavior to help you learn about user needs. It's unique in that it reveals what customers actually do, versus what they say.
For example, you might start with a product metric, like:
Then, combine your chosen metric with user information, such as:
When you blend these different data sources, you can look beyond the numbers and uncover the story behind your users’ experiences.
Let’s say you want to investigate which features are most valuable to your users. If you pull up feature usage data and compare it to data from customer support tickets, you might learn that users abandoned a feature after consistently hitting technical snags. From there, you can survey users or opt to update or remove the feature.
Turn scattered user data into meaningful customer intelligence, guiding smarter decisions and creating a better product.
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