The Essential Guide to

Voice of the Customer

The information gathered in this stage will determine the success of your entire VoC program, so while it sounds like we’re exaggerating when we say, “This step is super important,” we mean it. Gathering useful, actionable feedback depends on three things: asking the right person the right question at the right time.

Finding the right person

Before you go sending out surveys left and right, VoC best practices suggest creating customer personas. Building standard personas help to easily define who is involved with your product and the level of their interaction. This will take the guesswork out of finding the right person to answer your questions. You wouldn’t ask a project manager how the sales cycle was, just as you wouldn’t ask a CEO about the ease of use of a product they don’t frequently interact with.

Asking the right question

Once you’ve built your personas, it makes asking the right questions a lot simpler. A good rule to keep in mind is to only ask a question that you’re ready and willing to take the initiative to solve. There are two main types of feedback we’ll be focusing on:

Combining direct and indirect feedback gives you a holistic look at an individual’s perception of your product. They work together to fill in the blanks that would be left if you only relied on one type of feedback. For example, someone could send indirect feedback in the form of a negative NPS score, but not give any other feedback explaining why they chose that answer. Taking a look at their indirect feedback, you notice that they have multiple support tickets that concern a particular aspect of your product. You can infer that their unhappiness is a result of the trouble they’ve had with that part of your product and start a dialog based on that.

Finding the right time to ask

When you reach out for feedback is just as important as who you reach out to. Your timing can directly affect the answers you receive. Align your surveys with important milestones along the customer journey. This also ensures you don’t let an unhappy customer stay that way for too long. For example, a critical juncture in a customer’s lifecycle is right after they’ve completed implementation. Send out a survey within a few days of the end of their implementation to get their current sentiments about the process and how comfortable they are now that they are on their own. Another common practice is following every support ticket with a one-question survey to close the loop. Asking if they’re satisfied with the support they received lets you know whether or not you need to reach out and offer additional help.

You’ve created personas, decided what feedback you want, and identified ways to ask for it. Before we send you off to the next step, there’s one last thing to keep in mind: the bane of VoC—survey fatigue. This can happen when you send too many surveys in succession or fail to set accurate expectations for the amount of time your survey will take. Using your personas, establish a cadence for your surveys so you can be confident that you’re reaching out to the right people at appropriate intervals. If a survey is longer than one question, write out how long it’ll take so people know what they’re getting into. Fail to follow both of these best practices and your customers may ignore your surveys, leaving you with nothing to show for it.

Step number two focuses on providing value for your customers. Value doesn’t need to be a three-year long process that has to go through multiple approvals and plopped onto an annual plan. When it comes to Voice of Customer, value happens immediately and at a grassroots level. It requires a quick response, strong tactics, and a shared company mindset to truly show customers that you are listening and adapting.

Act on feedback immediately

Voice of Customer best practices stress a “closed-loop” form of communication, meaning that all customer input should be addressed and resolved ASAP. Don’t wait until Step 3 to close the loop! Respond quickly to make the most of the situation, whether it’s positive or negative. An unanswered positive response is just as wasteful as its negative equivalent. In NPS terms, these Promoters are valuable advocates for your product. The longer you wait to thank them and stoke the fire that is their advocacy, the greater chance they may slip into becoming Passives or worse, Detractors.

Using a high-touch/low-touch model can make customer outreach more digestible. This blog post by Lincoln Murphy does a great job of explaining the difference between high-touch and low-touch and the benefits of this bilateral approach. High-touch customers, important accounts that require a high level of communication, tend to receive one-on-one attention. Low-touch customers, smaller contracts that may not require as much attention, can be effectively reached through one-to-many (1:Many) communications.

Provide resources that help close the loop at scale

Reading about VoC is one thing, carrying it out is another. And we get it—spending your whole day getting berated by unhappy customers is nobody’s idea of fun. Motivating team members to do that all day can be equally grueling. That’s why we suggest creating VoC playbooks, or a set of best practices that your team can use to streamline how they address customer feedback. This is a highly effective way of standardizing customer outreaches that can grow with your company.

Strengthen your playbooks and outreach strategies by providing team members with as many resources as possible. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a valuable tool with myriad capabilities. For your outreach team, it reveals insights about a customer’s health which can then be used as talking points. Instead of having to rely on their own instincts when mediating situations, pre-populated emails give team members confidence and save them time. Keeping support documents organized and easily accessible enables team members to quickly share them with customers in need.

Create a culture that values feedback

In order for feedback to become reality, your entire company, from sales to services to product development, needs to view VoC as a priority. This can be a challenge for established companies, but it’s necessary. Encouragement from management is key for this mindset shift to happen. Departments need to realize the importance of feedback and feel the motivation to act on it. Once this realization occurs, standards can be set and feedback can flow smoothly.

Now that your feedback loop is closed, you should have a good bit of data to work with. To simplify things, we’ve divided this step into three buckets: business analytics, outreach analytics, and program insights.

Business analytics includes all the metrics you want to track and benchmark against. It’s for internal use and will give your teams something to report on and be held accountable to. Data in this bucket can include NPS trends and follow-up response time. For example, track your NPS score to see how it trends quarter over quarter.

Outreach analytics reflect the performance of your customer outreach attempts. You can take these metrics and use them to optimize your outreaches against industry benchmarks. Examples include the performance of surveys, the number of recipients, the number of emails sent/bounced/clicked, and unsubscribes. Combine direct and indirect feedback to create a holistic health score across subjective and objective measures. This health score will give you a high-level view of customer health and enable you to easily identify at-risk customers.

An important metric to keep an eye on is the number of people who didn’t respond to your survey. Unless this number is jarringly low, it’s sometimes overlooked. Don’t ignore it. Instead, dig deeper. Maybe you need to change your messaging, or perhaps certain people aren’t interacting with your product at all and you need to find a way to engage them. Outreach analytic data is powerful and tells a story, all you need to do is look at it at different angles to glean a wealth of insights.

Program insights are gleaned from both business and outreach analytics. Use these insights to identify strategic priorities to improve your overall strategy. For example, text-based answers can be extremely valuable but hard to analyze at scale. Some software, like Gainsight, have analytics tools baked in that help to extract tone and intent. Using this technology, identify themes in feedback to get a better overall view of your customer experience. Then, apply these learnings to your strategy and track your results.