Price is no longer the first thing that a customer looks at in supermarkets. Listening to the Voice of the Customer to identify the strengths and weaknesses of any business is fundamental when applying efficient retention techniques.
Tag Archives: customer experience management
Voice of the Customer Analysis and Benefits
What is the Voice of the Customer?
Have you ever wondered why certain products or services undergo radical changes or even disappear from the market (and sometimes return with another trade name)? Does it depend only on the volume of sales or other factors come into play? To answer these questions, we should introduce the concept of “Voice of the Customer Analysis” and find out what it means. This term refers to all those practices which enable to understand what a (real or potential) customer thinks about a product or service. But it is not limited to a simple reading of comments or opinions written upon request -e.g. an online survey-, the issue is much more complex.
In recent years, the types of channels through which customers and users express their opinions, complaints, suggestions or congratulations (yes, these are also important, then we will see why) have multiplied exponentially. Only a decade ago, the channels that permitted the interaction with the business world were significantly fewer, among them we may recall the telephone or pre-compiled polls often sent by traditional mail. In addition, most of the exchanges between customer and company responded to a specific need of the second; in other words, they were requested.
How has it changed?
Today, the picture has radically changed.
The communication channels are numerous and also allow to interact in different ways through various media (images, audio, video, etc.). And what matters most to us is that this interaction
- is constant: 24 hours a day, 365 days a year;
- most of the times is multilingual;
- does not always follow predefined patterns (many times, it doesn’t even comply with the most basic spelling rules);
- is unstructured: it is not stored in a traditional database nor organized according to predefined criteria.
There is no doubt that, from a corporate perspective, this enormous amount of information can be highly beneficial!
Continue reading
Voice of the Customer in the banking industry
“The Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a market research technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives.“
The Voice of the Customer (VoC) is not a new concept. In one way or another, it’s been included in quality assurance processes for years, and yet, its full integration in the workflow is a pending tasks for many companies. The Voice of the Customer allows you to listen, interpret and react to what’s being said, and then monitor the impact your actions have over time.
The current challenge companies are facing comes from the volume of data available. In this digital age, feedback is ever-growing and not just limited to the periodic surveys sent to clients. Word-of-mouth has gone digital and has become more relevant than ever: everyone with a Twitter or a Facebook account has an opinion, and more often than not, it’s about the products and services they consume.
A client
As so many other sectors, banking needs to figure out how to translate this first-hand source of knowledge their clients are providing into something useful, something that can be used in the company’s decision-making process.
Voice of the Customer combines two key aspects of information extraction: the need to know in detail what the customer is talking about and to interpret correctly his feelings about it. The former gives a quantitative view of the feedback obtained while the latter gives a more qualitative analysis, measuring what clients think a company is doing right or wrong.
The banking domain has the added difficulty of providing an extremely wide array of products and services, each one of them with very specific subcategories and received through completely different channels.
