It costs companies five times more to acquire new customers than to retain them. Keeping the customer front and center of every decision helps product managers ensure that the product they build matches user needs and expectations.
A great way to do that is by leveraging VoC solutions, which allow you to capture feedback and understand customer wants and needs. Think of it as your compass, guiding you towards features and enhancements that resonate deeply with your audience.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction drives business growth, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. It affects repeat purchase rates, customer loyalty, referrals, and word-of-mouth marketing. In addition, it is correlated with revenue metrics such as sales revenue growth and market share.
Your business must know which products or features are causing customers to be dissatisfied so that you can improve them. It would help if you collected feedback from your existing customers and website visitors to find out. You can do this through various methods, including direct feedback, surveys, interviews, and focus groups. When collecting feedback, make sure that you are asking thought-provoking questions that will motivate participants to provide insightful answers. Additionally, listen for the underlying emotional context of what is being said.
Alternatively, you can use VOC solutions to gather unstructured customer feedback through various sources such as social media, helpdesk tickets, and in-app feedback. The platform will then automatically process the collected data using video content analysis, text analysis, and image recognition to identify keywords and sentiment.
You can then turn this data into valuable insights by analyzing the results and creating reports and dashboards. You can also take this information to the next level by using advanced features such as emotion analysis and natural language processing to uncover customer pain points, prioritize them based on their impact, and create product development roadmaps to address those needs.
Innovation
Developing innovative products takes time and requires much work from the product development team. However, a good product development process can increase customer satisfaction and retention rates.
One of the critical factors in creating innovative products is understanding what customers want. This can be achieved using various research methods, such as customer interviews, focus groups, and behavioral analytics. In addition, companies should also look at their existing data, such as helpdesk tickets, social media comments, e-commerce feedback, and survey results, to find the insights they need.
For example, some could innovate their washing machine after observing that many consumers in rural areas complained of the washing machine’s hose being clogged. This allowed them to improve the product by adding an extra hose that could be used for sweet potatoes, an essential need for rural families.
A Voice of the Customer program allows teams to identify their weaknesses and take action to improve products, services, and processes. It can also help couples make more informed decisions and stay ahead of new market trends. In addition, it can improve team morale by ensuring that employees are focused on delivering high-quality experiences for their customers. As a result, it can lead to higher retention rates and an army of brand advocates. For more information on how a Voice of the Customer solution can help your business, read our Voice of the Customer guide.
Marketing
It is well-known that acquiring a new customer costs five times more than retaining one. Using a Voice of the Customer solution allows you to understand your existing customers better and create an ever-improving customer experience that will keep them coming back.
To achieve this, you need to identify what your customers care about. Your VoC solution needs to collect feedback from multiple channels and analyze it for you so that you can make the most informed decisions.
A good VoC platform will include features like sentiment analysis, text analysis, image recognition, and audio analytics. The software will also be able to interrogate data from different sources, including your helpdesk, social media, online reviews, discussion boards, NPS surveys, and in-product feedback. It can even be used to measure behavioral data such as usability testing of your knowledgebase and product, where you can see which search terms are most popular and whether or not customers are succeeding at finding the information they need.
To ensure your findings are representative, you should target a sample as close to your customer base as possible. This means choosing a set of characteristics, such as age or gender, that will likely impact the results and then surveying people with those characteristics.
Product Development
A successful product development program requires the collaboration of teams from customer success, operations, and even the company’s marketing and product development departments. The goal is understanding the product and its needs to deliver customer value. Voice of the Customer solutions are essential to this process and provide insight into areas needing improvement.
For example, a team can use VoC data to determine why customers are leaving a service and what changes they need to make. Incorporating Voice of the Customer into the design and engineering processes ensures the product delivers what customers need. The platform should also allow for collecting feedback in multiple languages to capture a global customer base.
The resulting insights will inform everything from the product’s design to customer support and the development of future products and features. The data can show the effectiveness of a company’s response to customer feedback and help it optimize its efforts as needed.
A VoC solution should collect solicited and unsolicited feedback through email surveys, chatbots, Voicee of the customer, and social media to ensure the results are actionable. It should also include an automated engine to process the gathered information quickly and accurately. In addition to survey data, analyzing usage behavior like search patterns in a knowledgebase can be helpful. Popular searches reveal where there may be gaps in a company’s support or product, while failed searches can indicate issues with the search functionality.
