Leveraging customer feedback is critical for ongoing business success. It’s the smartest way to get insight into customer satisfaction, enhance the customer experience, and ensure your brand continues to move in a positive direction. Whether you’re using a customer survey, social media live chat, or a customer service line; it’s important to listen to the voice of the customer.
If you’re unsure how to address customer needs or ask the right questions, you’re not alone. Many brands stumble when it comes to this aspect of the customer experience. Here’s what you need to know for a smarter way to meet customer expectations and hit brand metrics.
Follow best practices.
Think of the last online survey you took. Were the survey questions meaningful? Did it seem like the brand wanted actual insight from the customer? Or did the survey seem like it followed a standardized template? If you aren’t using some best practices, you’ll have a hard time acquiring valuable feedback from respondents. While surveys are a great way to gain knowledge from focus groups, you need to find the best way to ask smart questions and encourage adequate feedback. If you want actionable insights from these customer interviews, you need to ask the right type of question. For instance, a yes-or-no question might speed up a survey but it won’t provide you with critical feedback or customer insights.
If you’re struggling to leverage all the potential best practices, you can consider voice of the customer surveys. Voice of the customer, also known as VOC, is a great way to garner in-depth responses, preferences, and expectations from your customers. Using a voice of the customer program or VOC survey is a smarter way to enhance product development, reach potential customers in real-time, raise your customer effort score, and cater to customer preferences. The dashboards for a VOC platform are streamlined. You can easily access VOC surveys, check customer loyalty metrics, compile a reservoir of voice of customer data, and identify weaknesses.
Tailor your questions.
While a VOC program can do a fair amount of the heavy lifting for you, you need to be able to collect useful VOC data from surveys and online reviews. Say, for example, you run a vape shop. You sell pods, mouthpieces, stainless steel pens, and more. You want to know if it would be beneficial to order a vape cartridge filler from your supplier. Before you decide to spend a good chunk of change on a filling machine, you can use a VOC program to ask probing questions about whether or not this is a service your customers would appreciate. While you can also turn to sites like Yelp or your Google reviews page, they may not provide specific answers.
A VOC program allows you to tap into larger focus groups for product development, automation, and new offerings. It’s more insightful than social media and can leverage automation in a way that live chat can’t. If you want to be able to make smarter, more informed decisions, it’s important that you ask relevant, probing questions. Make your questions as specific as possible but still leave room for a customer to add their own opinions, feedback, and requests. You want to ensure that your survey and feedback processes are as efficient as possible. Otherwise, you run the right of expending the effort and resources without garnering any actionable insights.
By using a voice of customer survey and improving your net promoter score (NPS), you can better address needs, preferences, and overall expectations. It’s a better way to address consumer feedback and grow your business in an effective way.
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