How voice of customer insights can transform customer experience and retention

Building products for a target audience without listening to that audience will bring about as much success as building nothing in the first place. At worst, it’ll damage your reputation and existing client base.

So how do you tap into those conversations customers are having?

Step one is establishing a voice of the customer (VoC) program to inform your product decisions and design solutions that address your users’ actual wants and needs.

Voice of customer (VoC), also known as voice of the customer, is the process of systematically listening to and acting upon customer feedback.

VoC research helps you understand your customers’ perceptions, needs, desires, fears, and expectations. These valuable customer insights enable you to build or update products in line with what customers actually want.

However, this process isn’t just about reading what users say online. It’s also about proactively creating spaces for them to share opinions, so you can analyze the feedback and turn it into action.

Investing in a voice of the customer program allows you to build better products—both new and existing—based on user feedback. This improves the customer experience, increases brand loyalty, and supports customer retention—and the revenue that comes with it.

Let’s look at these VOC benefits more closely, and the statistics to back them up:

You’re building products for a target audience, so it’s crucial you guarantee these products are actually useful to said demographic. Understanding users and their needs is the first step in building for them.

The feedback you collect through a VoC program can identify areas for improvement in your product or service, inspire new features, and help prevent avoidable churn. By acting on input from customers, you can enhance your offering to better meet customer expectations and create a user-centered design.

A VoC program helps you dig into customer needs, preferences, and pain points, helping you offer better and more personalized user experiences. And with 50% of brands that invest in personalization experiencing increased satisfaction and engagement, it’s safe to say the results are worth pursuing.

Actively listening to and addressing customer feedback helps build stronger and more personal connections with your users. Research from Salesforce shows that 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs, so kickstarting your VoC strategy is a no-brainer.

With these needs met, getting to know your users and showing you value their feedback additionally drive customer loyalty and advocacy. In fact, Microsoft’s research reveals 77% of customers view brands favorably if they seek out and apply customer feedback.

This feedback cycle has a direct impact on metrics like customer satisfaction, engagement, retention, and revenue—with 61.% of teams reporting their VoC program increased customer satisfaction or NPS, and another 37.9% recording increased retention.

A VoC program can also help you spot potential problems before they escalate. For instance, imagine you send a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) survey and see that the results are trending down from six months ago. By contrasting this with other customer experience metrics, and content of customer service complaints, you identify there’s a latency issue with your tool.

A VoC program enables you to proactively address problems before they become major issues. Listening to what customers say—especially when it’s not directed at you specifically—can help keep an eye on the waters, and spot friction before it develops into a full-blown issue.

Last but not least, a good VoC program allows you to stay ahead of your competitors. According to Gartner, identifying customer feedback leads to increasing upsell and cross-sell success rates by 15-20%, but upselling existing opportunities isn’t the only perk.

Imagine you identify that 80% of customers combine your project planner with a whiteboarding tool—a natural feature progression would be to consider incorporating a whiteboard functionality.

By actively listening to users and nurturing strong customer relationships, you can identify new opportunities from feedback and market gaps, long before your competitors catch wind of the concept.

The benefits of a VoC program can’t be overstated—and it’s not hard to introduce in your organization. Voice of the customer strategies vary from business to business, but there’s four main steps to implement for a solid VoC process: listen, analyze, report, and act.

Step one is to establish a systematic approach to collecting and organizing customer feedback. At this stage, work to find and create opportunities for customers to share indirect and direct feedback:

Indirect feedback forums should be accessible to users at all times, and monitored by your team—consider weekly or even daily. They represent all the places your customers go to voice their (sometimes brutal) honest, in-the-moment opinions.

You can integrate data mining tools with your feedback collection tool to gather this feedback in real-time—which avoids the hassle of individually checking each platform.

When it comes to direct feedback, you’ll need to map and understand your customer’s journey to identify the exact touchpoints where you want to gather feedback. While user research can be sporadic, it’s always more effective done regularly. With voice of customer research, you want to be checking in frequently and consistently.

For instance, you might add an in-app survey after a user completes onboarding or receives support. Be intentional with touchpoints to avoid overwhelming customers and causing survey fatigue.

Another opportunity is to automate conditional follow-up questions in customer surveys to ensure you don’t miss any key information. For example, if a user gives you a three (ouch) on your net promoter score (NPS) survey, trigger probing follow-up questions to learn how you can improve their experience.

Make sure to establish a process for collecting and organizing this information. Store all results in one central dashboard, such as a user research repository, to simplify analysis later on.

Once you’ve got your feedback, conduct user research analysis to gauge product and customer insights.

There are two types of data to track and analyze:
Quantitative data: This groups all numerical data, including product metrics, such as NPS, customer effort score (CES), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and feature usage rate.

It also includes how your customers respond to your outreach initiatives. For instance, survey recipients vs. respondents, click-through rates (CTR) on feedback emails, number of weekly customer support calls, and monthly positive/negative online reviews. Benchmark these metrics against previous periods to track progress and identify trends.

Qualitative data: This includes detailed feedback on how customers think and feel about your product, gathered from qualitative research methods like customer interviews or open-ended questions in surveys.

Use AI-powered text analytics tools to quickly summarize and identify trends and customer sentiments without reviewing each entry manually. If you’re handling a small sample, you can conduct thematic analysis and organize the information by assigning tags to each comment then grouping them by topic.

Like any UX reporting and analysis, the goal is to interpret customer data to identify common themes, areas of opportunity, and ideas for future product development.

You’ve now got a stronger idea of what your customers expect and need from your product. It’s time to share this information with other stakeholders via a UX research report.

Reporting your findings to the organization starts by preparing a document with the results of the VoC analysis. The goal is to translate all of those insights into formal functional requirements and business recommendations.

For example, if 65/100 mentioned that they’d like to be able to customize chart colors, you can make this a recommendation in the report. If you got an average CSAT of 40%, you can include customer quotes from interviews, and actionable recommendations to improve the score.

This stage is about creating a culture of feedback, where everyone understands how valuable the customers’ voice and opinion is. A solid VoC report is responsible for getting stakeholder buy-in to move forward and act on those insights, so take your time, and go in confident.

Finally, it’s time to take action and improve the customer experience. It’s each department’s responsibility to address the relevant feedback promptly—while your report should include clear actions and recommendations, departments have the freedom to research and choose solutions.

For example, if your report shows that the onboarding is long and tedious, it’s the product team’s responsibility to work on improving this. This may be a quick fix, or it could involve more research, such as usability testing.

Lastly, you’ll need to close the feedback loop by communicating updates to customers. It can be easy to miss this and move on to the next project, but following up with customers is a critical part in boosting your relationship. It shows you value their feedback, can be trusted to make changes, and encourages them to keep sharing their opinions.

Establishing a VoC program is necessary for all kinds of businesses, from tech to travel. To kick off your customer listening program, here’s three examples of companies with great VoC research plans.

Subbly is an all-in-one ecosystem for subscription-based e-commerce platforms. As part of their voice of customer program, Subbly created a transparent feedback page for users to make feature requests and upvote the options they want the most.

On the feedback page, users can see a Kanban board of all product updates that are either under review, planned, or in progress.

While some companies would shy away at having their cards laid out on the table so transparently, Subbly see this as an opportunity to build trust with their user base and work efficiently in partnership.

“It works well for us. We’re extremely customer-centric, and between all these methods for collecting the voice of the customer, we can harness their [opinions] on the best way to run Subbly, to shape our product roadmap and the features we roll out.” says Stefan Pretty, CEO at Subbly.

These efforts have certainly paid off for Subbly—it has glowing user reviews and a 4.9/5 score on Capterra.

Famous fashion brand Calvin Klein periodically collects customer feedback and uses the results to validate ideas and make data-informed decisions. Like other B2C and retail businesses, it utilizes in-product prompts and pop-ups to capture real-time feedback from users browning their website.

Additionally, Calvin Klein embrace indirect feedback by allowing customers to rate items and leave public reviews on their official website.

The Calvin Klein team uses the collective customer’s voice to make product decisions. “In order to come up with valid ideas that move the site forward, I believe 80% of the effort is simply to listen to your customers. They talk to you through their actions, interactions, engagements, and other data they leave behind,” shares Davy Schuyt, former CRO Manager at Calvin Klein.

This global logistics and courier service company is a powerful example of a VoC program embedded into company culture. One of the main values of DHL is to become customers’ provider of choice. To turn into that first choice, the company has learned that it needs to listen to customers’ feedback.

As mentioned in the On a New Level presentation by John Pearson, CEO at DHL Express, the company established a customer-centric approach across its nine customer journeys. DHL did so by defining the ‘Moments of Truth’—instances where a customer interacts with your product. DHL also has a systematic process for collecting feedback across channels, and uses artificial intelligence to conduct text and sentiment analysis on the data.

By listening to customer feedback, DHL now offers two user-requested features: 360° visibility of where a package is and multi-channel support.

Whatever your industry or product, customers value having their voices year. And by systematically gathering and analyzing customer feedback, you can build products that truly meet user needs and expectations.

To make this happen, you need to create opportunities for your customers to share direct and indirect feedback.

Maze helps you do this and more. With ample user research methods to choose from—including Interview Studies, Feedback Surveys, Live Website Testing, and more—Maze is an intuitive solution for joining the customer conversation and getting to the bottom of what users want and need.

Plus, analyzing data on Maze is easy. The solution automatically generates a ready-to-share report that details all the main study findings. This way, you can save time analyzing and reporting on the data to make product improvements that optimize the user experience much faster.