What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)? 

Users are spoilt for choice in today's world of immediate results. Brands are increasingly investing in closed-loop Voice of the Customer (VoC) measures to keep up with customer expectations. The term ‘Voice of the Customer’ refers to what your customers say about their experiences with and expectations for your products and services. It focuses on the requirements, expectations, and understandings of customers, as well as on product enhancement. Businesses may better understand and meet consumer wants and expectations – as well as improve the product and services they provide – by listening to the Voice of the Customer.

Few basic pointers for Voice of Customer programmes:

1. Listen

Get useful input from your consumers by offering them regular opportunities to voice their opinions around product and user experience.

2. Act

Keep in touch with consumers as soon as possible to let them know they've been heard. A bigger effect is achieved by responding faster to client input. 

3. Analyze

To keep the programme on track, evaluate progress against goals and track improvement.

Depending on your company's customer interaction strategy, the VoC may represent a variety of sources and forms of consumer input, such as customer complaints, customer wants, responses to customer feedback requests, and more. We advocate building a customer journey to help you organize all of these client encounters.

Making a habit of customer-centric decision making

To begin the process, consolidate all of the components of the customer's voice to which you have access before making judgments based on a customer journey. This includes information like:

1. Sales, marketing, product, and other divisions may perform customer surveys
2. Individual product manager's computers contain one-on-one data.
3. User feedback on the website
4. App reviews and ratings
5. Customer grievances
6. Customer service representatives on the phone

Once you have consolidated data from all your sources, you can now begin to leverage it in your decision-making process:

Step 1. Define the VoC

Each piece of data representing the VoC should correspond to a certain stage in the customer journey. If they don't match, the consumer is either dealing with the wrong organization or the customer journey needs to be modified.

The VoC will arise from the study of each component after the data has been aligned to the customer journey. Color-coding is used in Figure 4 to highlight how trends arise during the process. These patterns represent what the company excels at and where the client believes the company can improve. The customer's voice indicates that he or she requires assistance in determining the value of his or her stuff.

Step 2. Identify Product Opportunities on a Strategic and Operational Level

You'll be able to include your customer's voice into both strategic and operational product decisions once you've defined their voice. As previously said, the VoC identifies what the organization performs effectively and where it needs to improve. This information aids in the identification of product opportunities.

Product managers evaluate new and current consumers against new and existing products on a regular basis using a common strategic growth framework. The VoC will be used to identify growth opportunities during this assessment. It's usual to look at your organization's strengths during strategic planning exercises to see if they may be repurposed to create greater value by utilizing those strengths in a different market (or with new customers).

Step 3. Make prioritization decisions that take the VoC into account

Prioritization judgments are made on a variety of levels. As long as the list of priority things or opportunities is consistent, we can use the process we've described here. By evaluating each item's worth to the consumer, its value to the business, and the level of effort required to handle the opportunity, the corporation can prioritize items.

Consider both the value provided by the proposed solution and the scale of the impact on the client portfolio when evaluating the potential value of a new item to the customer. As needed, the entity evaluating the product will define its own definition of value.

Keep in mind that every business decides value based on different priorities when analyzing business value. These may require deeper analysis on the following two aspects:

Strength in competition

1. Market share
2. Market share growth
3. Relative brand strength
4. Customer loyalty is important.
5. Position in terms of relative cost
6. Profit margins (relative)
7. Distribution capacity and strength
8. Record of technical or other innovation
9. Quality
10. Availability of financial and other investing resources
11. Strength of management

Conclusion

Consider building a customer journey for your business or a certain product line. Create a repeatable method for receiving information for your customer journey to enable you to make decisions based on the approach mentioned in this article by identifying companies and teams with relevant information. Finally, make use of your existing project and product management processes to put the results into action. Your clients will be grateful!