Voice of Our Customer

Voice Of Customer

Voice of Our Customer (commonly shortened to VOC) is a term used to describe the process of capturing customer's likes, dislikes and expectations.

Through the use of free text fields in your survey, your Customer can provide you with a valuable insight into why your they gave the score they did, and what you need to do to improve it.

Some of your Customers will make the effort to provide you with written feedback, giving you a valuable insight into what your doing well and more importantly what you could be doing better; so it's important not to ignore it.

In my Close the Loop section, I mention that you should not only focus on Customers who gave you a NPS of Zero to Three, but also on those Customers who left feedback that require some sort of action. With a small amount of response it is possible to read all of your Customers messages and take action where needed, this however becomes impractical if you receive hundreds or thousands of responses.

Dealing with a large number of responses

If you are lucky enough to receive hundreds or thousands of survey responses you might want to rethink reviewing your Customers feedback manually. Luckily there are companies and tools which can help automate this task, not only cutting the number of labor hours, but also providing reporting and high level insights into your trending topics.

A word cloud can only provide a very high level overview and cannot be used to perform Close the Loop activities, however it does very clearly show you what your Customers are talking about.

In order to conduct Close the Loop activates we need a much more robust way of evaluating what each Customer has written. Text analytics (TA) can help with this, and the inclusion of Alert based TA can help further.

Text Analytics is the process of assessing not only what your Customers are saying but also how they are saying it, by applying a positive or negative sentiment to their comments.

Instantly you can reduce the number of Customers to be contacted by focusing only on the negative comments. Although there might still be value to be found in your positive comments from those Customers expressing an interest to buy further products.

A full functioning TA should not only split your Customers comments by sentiment but also by category. Some TA's will assign categories automatically, others will require you to specify categories and build key word rules in order to populate them.

TA Alerts go one step further and can automatically identify Customers who need to be followed up, irrelevant to their sentiment. allowing you to skip general feedback and focus on the positive and negative topics which you can do something about.

Companies such as Medallia and Gemseek can help with automating your Text Analytic solution and assit you with Closing the Loop.

There is a lot more to be covered in this section and I will be adding to it in coming months as well as writing blogs on Text Analytics and Closing the Loop. If you have any specific questions feel free to contact me via email, or on social media.