Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a means to capture customer reviews, sentiments, preferences and aversions, and using them to the brand’s advantage. Taking customer expectations and turning them into a structured, prioritised format that can then be applied to your marketing strategy, is one way to ensure that you’re delivering a product or service that matches what your customers want.
But as with any strategy or technology, there are hurdles that need to be overcome in the implementation. Here are four Voice of the Customer challenges that you might encounter in your own business.
1. Employee Feedback
Often brands are receiving tangible insights into what their customers want, without even realising it. These nuggets of information can be received by various employees at a range of different levels, but without engaging in employee feedback and interaction sessions, a lot of this valuable information can be lost.
Call centre support agents will have a host of insightful information to share with their team on how to improve customer experience based on real-life engagement with the customer. If these insights are not tapped into, the brand could be missing out on priceless feedback that could have the power to shape a positive customer experience.
Solution: hold regular, internal, interactive sessions where all employees have the opportunity to communicate what they’ve learnt about the customer over the last few weeks or month.
2. Senior Input And Mentorship
When implementing Voice of the Customer technology, insights and processes, it’s important for the entire business to be behind it. Often what happens is the senior level staff give the approval for VoC to go ahead, but then they’re not present to offer their support and guidance throughout the implementation. When employees are unsure of the direction they should take or feel that they cannot make decisions that should be made on an executive level, the entire process becomes null and void.
Solution: get buy-in from the entire team and create a chain of command when dealing with queries or issues. Senior employees will also need to be on standby to support the teams implementing VoC, as well as to offer guidance and make important decisions.
3. Customer And Brand Communication
While VoC is positioned around the fact that companies want to get constructive feedback from their customers, often these customers don’t receive any form of communication from the brand. The customer is offering insight that can help the brand grow and expand, but the brand is putting up a wall. This could mean that the brand is missing out on deeper levels of customer insight that could only come out from further informal conversation.
Solution: by opening these channels of communication, customer feedback can go from insightful to other-worldly, and it can mean the difference between successful VoC implementation and a complete failure.
4. Failure To Involve Virtual Customer Assistants
Businesses with an online presence are operating in 24/7 environments because the customer’s interactions don’t stick to office hours. This makes the need for virtual customer assistants (VCAs) and the use of artificial intelligence and chatbots incredibly important, and a must for businesses wanting to thrive in the digital world. Often businesses don’t invest in these services in order to save resources, time and budget, but this can also be their downfall. Engaging using VCAs offers a space for customers to openly express their desires and needs, which if met, will result in less customer churn.
Solution: investigate VCA solutions that match your brand and request a few demos to really understand how they can benefit the business.
Implementing VoC can be a difficult and trying process, but the rewards for taking the time to get to know your customer are priceless. Contact Interact RDT today to set up a custom VoC plan for your brand.