As the Head of Customer Support, you have an instinctive understanding of what bothers your customers. You’re aware of the issues they face, their feelings, and the improvements they desire. But how do you prove these insights beyond doubt? And what might you be missing? This is where Voice of Customer (VoC) Analytics excels.
VoC Analytics transforms qualitative feedback from all your support channels into quantitative insights. This means you can identify root cause issues, quantify their impact on customer experience and your bottom line, build evidence-backed reports, and improve customer experience (CX), reducing churn and boosting revenue.
In this blog post, we will explore how Voice of Customer Analytics works, how leading global companies use it to enhance customer experience, and highlight the best VoC tools available.
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What Is Voice of Customer Analytics and Why Is It Important?
Voice of Customer (VoC) Analytics provides in-depth insights into customer feedback, helping you understand their needs, wants, and expectations. By gathering and analyzing raw feedback from support tickets, surveys, social media, and reviews, VoC Analytics organizes this data into actionable insights.
VoC Analytics acts like a crystal ball, revealing your customers’ true feelings. It tells you what customers think about your services or products, why they’re happy or unhappy, and what they want from their experience with you. As Erin Corrill, Head of Global User Community at Configura, says, VoC analysis allows you to sift through high-quality, direct feedback from individual customers at scale to identify broader trends.
Prioritizing customers’ feelings and desires, VoC Analytics helps you move away from assumptions, focusing on real data. This ensures that your strategies are based on what truly matters to your customers.
Different Types of Voice of Customer Channels
Each Voice of Customer channel offers an opportunity to understand your customers better and deliver a memorable brand experience. Here are four main channels crucial for capturing insights and fostering strong customer relationships:
1. Customer Surveys
Surveys, such as CSAT and NPS, offer a structured way to collect and analyze customer feelings about your brand. According to Forrester, 70% of today’s brands use surveys to gather customer feedback. While valuable, surveys sometimes miss the spontaneity and raw emotion of real-time interactions. They can also suffer from response bias, affecting the accuracy of your results.
To overcome these limitations, it’s essential to correlate survey scores with insights from support conversations. Modern analytics tools delve deeper into customer feedback, capturing the subtle sentiments expressed in their comments, as explained by Emily Balfour, VP of Technology Solutions at York Solutions.
2. Support Conversations
Support conversations, including emails, live chats, WhatsApp messages, and phone calls, provide direct pipelines to your customer’s unfiltered thoughts. These real-time interactions capture feedback at the moment, free from response bias common in surveys. By analyzing support conversations, you can identify friction points in the customer journey and improve customer experience.
3. Social Media
Social media platforms are bustling with opinions and offer a vast but noisy space for customer communications. Mining VoC data from these channels involves separating meaningful feedback from the general buzz. Tools like SentiSum integrate with social media accounts to extract useful data and monitor comments in real-time, creating support tickets for those needing a fast response.
4. Reviews
Online review platforms like G2 and TrustPilot offer detailed feedback from real customers, capturing their most passionate sentiments. Balancing these detailed accounts with real-time feedback from support tickets and social media provides a well-rounded understanding of customer sentiment.
How Does Voice of Customer Data Analysis Work?
VoC Analytics tools capture every compliment, complaint, and suggestion shared by customers. Here’s how these tools gather VoC data from various channels and make sense of it to benefit business decision-makers:
- Data Aggregation: VoC analytics solutions pull data from various sources, including support tickets, surveys, social media interactions, and online reviews, onto a unified, comprehensive dashboard. This centralization provides a complete picture of customer sentiment, helping identify broader patterns.
- Analysis: Instead of manually reading through each conversation, VoC tools automatically analyze feedback using machine learning-based artificial intelligence. These tools apply detailed tags, categorizing feedback by topics, sentiment, and urgency, free from human bias.
- Visualization: After analysis and tagging, VoC tools present key insights on user-friendly dashboards. These visualizations show trends in customer contact volume, main issues for contact, and changes in sentiment and volume over time.
- Automations: The best VoC Analytics solutions enable automated workflows based on customer feedback insights. For example, VoC tool allows you to build custom automations that push insights back to your help desk platforms and prioritize triage tickets based on urgency, risk, and sentiment.
5 Use Cases of Voice of Customer Analytics
Voice of Customer (VoC) Analytics is an invaluable tool for businesses looking to understand and improve customer experience. Here are five practical use cases demonstrating the power of VoC Analytics:
1. Identifying Friction Points in the Customer Journey
VoC Analytics can help businesses identify specific friction points in the customer journey. For example, Gousto, a meal kit subscription service, connected data from nine distinct feedback channels to get a comprehensive view. This allowed Gousto to categorize insights automatically, highlighting issues such as delivery problems and recipe quality concerns. Addressing these friction points helped Gousto improve customer retention and reduce overall customer contacts.
2. Improving CSAT and NPS Scores
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are crucial metrics for any business. VoC Analytics tools can provide deeper insights into these scores. Lakrids by Bülow, a gourmet licorice brand, transformed raw, unstructured feedback into actionable insights by integrating it with their support system. By addressing specific customer issues, such as complaints about product packaging, the company raised its 5/5 CSAT ratings by 9% within a year.
3. Boosting Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
VoC Analytics helps companies enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty by aligning product strategies with customer needs. For instance, Butternut Box, a fresh dog food subscription company, analyzed feedback trends to gain detailed insights into customer issues. This enabled them to make timely improvements. The company’s Customer Love team monitors emerging issues in real-time, ensuring they can quickly resolve them and keep customers happy.
4. Identifying Areas for Product Improvement
Data from VoC Analytics can bridge the gap between customer support insights and product improvements. Hotjar, a digital behavior analytics solution, analyzed support tickets to identify core issues driving customer inquiries. This detailed feedback offered a richer understanding of how to enhance Hotjar’s product. By prioritizing updates that directly addressed user feedback, Hotjar was able to make meaningful product improvements.
5. Using Quantitative Data to Create Organizational Change
Support leaders and CEOs often have hunches about customer issues and sentiment. However, without hard data, it’s challenging to push for improvements. VoC Analytics turns qualitative feedback into quantitative data, making it easier to lead improvement projects across the organization. For example, Scandinavian Biolabs, a haircare D2C brand, gained an objective view of their data and identified consistent pain points. This empowered them to reprioritize their product roadmap and implement a new customer platform earlier than anticipated, reducing top customer issues by 50% in three months.
What to Look for in a Voice of Customer Analytics Software
Not all VoC analytics software is created equal. To get granular, holistic insights, choose a tool that offers the following features:
- Comprehensive Data Collection Through Integrations: Your software should collect data from multiple feedback channels into a unified dashboard, providing a 360-degree view of all customer touchpoints.
- Insightful Reporting: Look for VoC analytics software that provides detailed reports, dashboards, and visualizations about its findings. Features like sentiment analysis and text analytics uncover key trends and patterns.
- Advanced AI-Powered Capabilities: AI-powered tools speed up the process of deciphering customer interactions. By analyzing real-time conversations from multiple channels, your solution can quickly categorize and tag sentiments, reasons for contact, and more on a large scale.
- Automated Workflows: Ensure your VoC Analytics software integrates with your existing CRM, marketing automation, and customer service platforms. Look for features like alerts, workflows, and follow-up action triggers that facilitate data-driven customer experience improvement.
Best Voice of Customer Analytics Solutions
After researching numerous platforms, we’ve identified the top three VoC solutions available today:
1. SentiSum – Best for Improving Customer Experience
SentiSum is a comprehensive VoC analytics platform that covers every customer feedback channel. It uses machine learning and natural language processing to analyze and tag feedback, providing clarity across all customer touchpoints. SentiSum’s AI capabilities and customizable dashboard make it ideal for global D2C and B2C brands.
2. CustomerGauge – Best for B2B Voice of Customer Programs
CustomerGauge focuses on helping B2B organizations develop and enhance their Net Promoter Score programs. It connects NPS scores to the financial value of client accounts, uncovering upselling opportunities and reducing client churn. This makes it an excellent choice for B2B enterprises and major CPG firms.
3. Medallia – Best for Basic Experience Management for Large Enterprises
Medallia offers a comprehensive experience management platform with advanced AI-powered insights. It captures both solicited and unsolicited feedback, providing actionable insights that guide decisions across the organization. Medallia is tailored for large enterprises seeking to manage and improve the customer journey.
Closing Thoughts
Voice of Customer Analytics is a powerful tool for gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback. By integrating with all your support channels, offering intuitive visualization dashboards, and utilizing advanced AI tools, VoC Analytics software can significantly enhance customer experience.