Wouldn’t it be great to know what was actually on your customer’s minds? Like what they liked and didn’t like about your product or service? And more importantly, what they’d want you to do about it so you can retain their business?
That’s a mystery that can be solved through a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.
In this article, we’ll delve into what a VoC program is and why you should create one for your eCommerce business — regardless of its size.
VoC is a market research method that helps you measure how your customers feel about your products and services. It’s a combination of customers’ feedback, overall sentiment, and expectations toward your brand.
By listening to Voice of the Customers, you can find areas of improvement in your business and create strong customer experiences that enhance your bottom line and earn more repeat business.
Earlier brands employed VoC studies only when they wanted to launch a new product or evaluate a new customer service process; now the research from VoC programs help brands at every stage of the customer journey.
For instance, take Shark Ninja, the famous makers of Ninja small kitchen appliances and Shark cleaning products. They introduced a VoC program through social listening, which helped gather deep insights on customer concerns from social media posts and surveys. They learned customers were unhappy with the runarounds for refunds and getting their parts serviced. Once they realized this underlying concern, they worked towards implementing a solution that helped them reduce their average handle time by 15%. It also decreased their operational costs since they spent less time on customer grievances.
Although many companies implement VoC programs to replicate similar results for their companies, most of them fail because brands rush into the setup without understanding how it can help them build a customer-centric experience.
Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before creating and implementing a VoC program.
Take a look at your current metrics, trends, and customer behaviors to see what areas can be improved. If your CSAT score is low or you have high customer churn for example, you can make improving them your business objective. Most teams start a VoC program to improve customer retention rates and increase revenue and loyalty.
There are many VoC techniques for capturing information, but here are the most common and cost-effective methods for your eCommerce business:
There are dozens of online surveys and Voice of the Customer tools, but they aren’t cost-efficient for small eCommerce businesses and take a lot of time to gather information. The other limitation is that many only provide quantitative data. Quantitative data can tell you what someone feels, but it won’t give you insight into why someone is feeling that way.
ChatDesk offers the best VoC solution for eCommerce businesses. You simply need to connect your social accounts and within minutes you can see all your customer feedback in one place. Try it for free for 2 weeks. No credit card required to sign up.
ChatDesk consolidates conversations across email, social media, and other customer support channels and then uses automatic industry tagging to give you a summary of customer feedback. This can save you 1000+ hours of manual labor. Adding custom tags to your dashboard is also possible.
For instance, the pet brand Fable boosted its customer satisfaction score to 100 after using ChatDesk to tag their queries and identify customer sentiments.
If you want to see the difference for yourself and transform customers into loyal fans, sign up for a free account and get started.
