Voice of the Customers
“Customer is King” is not an idle mantra. Business can grow only by keeping their customers happy. The first step to doing that is to listen to the customer – what they need, what are their expectations, what irks them most. This makes the Voice of the Customer (VoC) absolutely critical to factor in while devising the customer management strategy.
Direct and indirect VoC can be gained through surveys, questionnaires as well as processes that enable customers to express their views about their experiences with the organisation and its services.
Benefits of Customer Connect
Customer feedback is one of the key drivers of business success. This can help businesses in many ways:
• Innovate and value-add to improve customer experience
• Prioritise developments based on customer needs
• Engage with customers better, improving customer relations
• Improve customer loyalty
• Increase the company’s profitability
It is highly critical to have an effective solution to capture and analyse the customer’s feedback.
Effective Customer Connect
To understand the voice of the customer, businesses must be engaged with the customers on an ongoing basis to gather and use timely insights. This is possible only by having multiple touch points, be it through sales, customer support or online interactions.
To build your VoC program, the four key stages are:
- Capture: To listen to the customer, identify the means through which internal and external customers try to communicate. Businesses can initiate surveys across the different customer touch points to gather focused and relevant information.
- Analyse: The insights thus gathered needs to be analysed on key parameters that can then be converted into actionable intelligence. This should be communicated with the employees interacting with the customers.
- Act: Empower your team to take initiative and implement the strategies that are derived based on the VoC programs and take corrective action for better customer service.
- Monitor: Monitoring the implementation and the impact to assess if you are making improvements across the enterprise and if the customer satisfaction levels are rising.
This is not a one-time activity. Nor can it be implemented only through one channel. As customers enter and exit from multiple points, engaging them across channels, capturing and monitoring their behaviour across the channels is essential for the VoC program to be effective.
Employees must be trained to handle queries and respond quickly to customer concerns. Cut down waiting times by analysing traffic patterns so that customers do not get frustrated holding the line.
Analyse commonly voiced concerns and address the problem at root, and also educate the agents and employees on how to address it meaningfully.
Giving the customer feedback on how their inputs helped is another great way to engage with them and strengthen bonds. This will encourage them to take the surveys without the feeling of their feedback going unheard.
It is all about relationships. The business and consumer must be engaged in a two-way relationship. But while the customer has several options, negative feedback from the consumer about the business can cause great damage. Smart businesses need to be tuned to the voice of the customers for positive and negative feedback, building on the former and working to reduce the latter.
For additional information visit the FirstSource Website
