Running a successful business requires more than just intuition. You also need to listen to your customers. Capturing the Voice of the Customer (VoC) helps you understand what customers truly think and feel about your business. This way, you can drive more sales, build stronger relationships, retain customers, and stay ahead of the competition.
In this guide, we’ll explain what VoC is as well as why it matters and how to capture it. We’ll also show you how to use those insights to improve your business.
What Is VoC?
VoC is a research methodology that involves gathering and analyzing feedback from multiple sources to uncover valuable insights about customer experiences, needs, and expectations.
Unlike traditional customer feedback, VoC takes a more holistic approach to understanding customer opinions, frustrations, and desires regarding your products, services, and brand.
This means that you’re not just looking at direct channels like phone, social media, customer interviews, and focus groups. You’re also considering indirect (or implicit) feedback by analyzing customer behavior and sentiment as well as predictive insights.
Why VoC matters for businesses
According to a recent Forrester study, customer-centric brands report revenue growth that is 2.4 times higher than brands with no alignment across customer-facing functions. Part of being customer-focused is listening intently to the VoC and sharing those insights across all departments — from marketing to sales to customer success.
VoC programs help you pinpoint exactly what your business is doing right, where there might be a need for improvement, and how to align your business’ offerings with changing customer demands.
This means you’ll be able to:
- Improve your products and services to better meet customer needs
- Identify and mitigate potential risks before they turn into crises
- Safely experiment with new ideas, innovations, and campaigns
- Provide exceptional customer service across various touchpoints
All of this allows you to improve the customer experience at every stage of the customer journey, leading to increased customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.
More importantly, leveraging VoC improves your bottom line and keeps your business competitive in the long run. For example, an HR software company might use VoC to learn that customers are struggling with the company’s current onboarding process.
To tackle this problem, the business could create better onboarding materials like video tutorials and step-by-step guides with screenshots. It could also introduce features like in-app tool tips and train its employees to provide better customer support to new users. This could lead to happier customers who are more likely to keep using the product and recommend it to others.
Gathering VoC With Your Contact Center
The first step in leveraging VoC for your business is to get your hands on the right customer data. This means looking at all the touchpoints where customers interact with your business.
A good place to start with data collection is your contact center. This is where your reps are answering phone calls, chats, and emails, solving problems, and getting feedback on their performance.
Here are the key areas to focus on when gathering VoC data through your contact center.
Speech analytics
Call recordings are one of the best data sources for your VoC programs because they capture the authentic emotions and nuances in the human voice — something that’s often missing in text-based feedback.
However, manually reviewing each recorded call can be time-consuming, especially if you don’t have a large, dedicated team for this task. It’s also impractical for bigger businesses that have reps talking to hundreds of customers every day.
This is where speech analytics software can help. These tools can automatically analyze call recordings to quickly identify keywords or common pain points.
For example, you might find that many customers are confused about a newly launched feature or discover that a particular product is generating a lot of positive feedback.
AI-powered speech analytics software can also detect a customer’s tone of voice in conversations and classify sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral. This gives you a deeper understanding of how customers feel about your brand, products, and services.
Real-time feedback
If you ask someone how their meal was right after they’ve finished eating, they’ll be more likely to give you an accurate answer than if you were to ask them a week later. Collecting customer feedback in real-time works the same way. It lets you capture the VoC when it’s most authentic and relevant. It’s also an excellent way to understand customer experiences at specific touchpoints like chats and calls and lets people know you actually care about what they think.
Embed short customer surveys within or after a conversation to get immediate feedback on a client’s experience with an agent like whether they were able to find a solution or had any specific issues with the call or chat. You can also make it easy for customers to leave feedback by using simple rating scales or emoji buttons. Here’s how Calendly collects post-chat feedback:
If a disgruntled customer happens to tap the thumbs-down button, Calendly immediately follows up with an apologetic message and options to leave additional feedback or talk to an expert.
Social media integration
Social media is where your customers freely voice their opinions, concerns, and experiences, so you can utilize it to get unfiltered feedback, capturing the true VoC. Integrating social media channels, like LinkedIn, Instagram, and X, into your contact center allows your agents to monitor customer comments in real time.
Agents can also respond directly through the platform, which lets them tackle any queries, engage in conversations, or address negative feedback as quickly as possible. In fact, responding quickly is expected of them. Sprout Social’s research shows that nearly 70% of customers expect brands to respond on social media within 24 hours, and almost 40% expect a response within 1–2 hours.
Social media conversations also offer a window into what truly matters to your customers and what they think about your competitors. For example, a user might tweet about their frustration with your competitor’s clunky product interface. This shows you how important a smooth in-app experience is for your customers.
You can also spot industry trends, emerging customer needs, or product development ideas and then leverage those insights to delight customers and stay competitive.
Agent feedback
Your contact center agents are at the front lines of customer experience every day. Training them to actively solicit feedback during interactions could allow your business to tap into a wealth of VoC data.
You can teach reps to pick up on subtle cues and read between the lines during customer conversations. For example, frequent sighs or long pauses might suggest the customer is frustrated, and a passive comment like “I guess it works fine” could indicate that the customer is not fully satisfied with the product.
Additionally, encourage agents to ask open-ended questions like:
- “How could we improve our service?”
- “How well does our product/service meet your needs?”
- “What features would you like to see in our product?”
- “How does our product/service compare to others you’ve used?”
Having a system to document that feedback and summarize key customer insights will also be very useful. For example, agents could fill out a quick form after each conversation and add notes to customer profiles in your CRM platform, like direct quotes from customers.
They could also add relevant tags to calls and chats in your contact center software, like #feature-request or #billing-issue, and flag conversations that require follow-ups or further investigation.
Call routing & interactive voice response
Call routing directs customers to the right agent or department, while interactive voice response (IVR) is the automated system that greets callers and offers self-service options.
These systems generate valuable data about customer interactions like what customers tend to need support with, whether your agents can solve customers’ issues, and if your IVR menu could use better self-service options.
Here are some ways to analyze this information and capture the VoC:
- Identify areas with high call volume: Which departments are receiving the most calls? What topics are most of your support calls about? This data could highlight common customer problems or areas of confusion.
- Analyze hold times: Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report 2020 shows that nearly 60% of customers find long wait times the most frustrating part of a bad customer support experience. If you find that some customer issues have long hold times, this could be a sign that your agents require more training to solve problems and address queries quickly.
- Evaluate self-service usage: Which of your IVR self-service options are customers using the most? Which ones lead to the most agent transfers? These insights could help you improve your IVR menu by adding more relevant options.
- Monitor call abandonment: Customers dropping off at certain points in the IVR process might indicate that it’s too lengthy or has confusing self-service options.
Customer effort score
The customer effort score (CES) measures how easy it is for your customers to get help on a scale of 1–7. It’s typically a single-question survey-based metric that goes something like this:
To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
“The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.”
Implementing a CES survey provides direct insight into the customer experience, especially when it comes to seeking support and resolving issues. You could use it to help pinpoint areas in your contact center processes that need to be streamlined, such as a shorter IVR menu or faster live responses. And you can end the survey with an optional, open-ended question to collect qualitative, in-depth data on customers’ feelings about your company’s support.
Here’s an example of how Hotjar prompts users to share more general feedback after rating their experience on a scale of 0–5:
Sentiment analysis in chats
Sentiment analysis tools rely on AI to interpret the emotional tone behind voice or text-based customer interactions. For example, you can analyze chat transcripts in your contact center and categorize each conversation by customer sentiment: positive, negative, or neutral.
Sentiment analysis lets you read between the lines and understand the VoC, even if it’s not expressed directly. This emotional intelligence helps you craft more empathetic responses and proactively solve issues before they escalate.
What to Do With VoC Feedback
Capturing the VoC is just one piece of the puzzle. Next, you must use the data you’ve gathered to inform your customer experience strategy.
If that sounds like an overwhelming task, below is a step-by-step process to analyze, interpret, and apply VoC feedback to improve your business.
1. Analyze and categorize feedback
First, you need to structure and organize all the raw VoC feedback you have on hand. This will make it easier to analyze the data, identify relationships, and implement changes.
There are different ways to sort your feedback, such as by theme or sentiment. Your approach will depend on your business goals and the questions you’re trying to answer. For example, thematic categories of VoC feedback could include product quality, customer service, and website user experience. Sentiment categories could include positive, negative, and neutral.
As you dive deeper into the analysis, consider the following factors to add more depth to the feedback you’ve collected:
- Effort: Analyze metrics like CESs to understand how much work customers had to put in to achieve their goals or resolve their issues. High-effort experiences often indicate areas that need the most improvement.
- Intent: Explore the customer’s intent to help you move from reactive solutions (fixing what customers say is wrong) to proactive solutions (addressing the underlying needs that drive their actions). Incorporate questions like “What were you trying to achieve when you [insert specific interaction]?” in your surveys to understand customer goals.
- Emotions: Interpret the feelings expressed in the feedback. Was it frustration? Joy? Disappointment? Strong emotions can highlight particularly impactful experiences. Use voice and text analytics to pick up on specific emotions in feedback.
These factors provide valuable context for interpreting customer feedback. You’re not just trying to understand what happened but also why it matters to the customer.
Finally, determine the analysis methods or tools you’re going to use. While simple spreadsheets might be okay for small data sets, you might need AI-powered tools and advanced data visualization software for large-scale, enterprise-level analyses.
2. Identify trends
Here, you move from simply describing the data to understanding underlying patterns, drawing conclusions, and making predictions. This lets you shift your focus to where it matters and make targeted improvements to enhance overall customer experience and satisfaction.
For example, a CRM software company analyzing VoC feedback might find frequent mentions of data sync issues like “delays” and “inaccuracies.” This could point to problems with the software’s integration features.
The company could then use these insights to improve its integration API and protocols and even establish a dedicated support team to assist customers with integration setup and troubleshooting.
At this stage, you could also run a regression analysis to identify relationships between different variables in your VoC data. This helps you answer questions like:
- How does customer effort correlate with overall satisfaction?
- What factors most strongly predict customer loyalty or churn?
- Which aspects of the customer experience have the greatest impact on the Net Promoter Score?
3. Prioritize issues
It’s tempting to address all the issues you find in your analysis at once. But this approach can quickly drain your resources and dilute your focus. For example, you might end up spending too much time on “superficial fixes” that have no lasting impact on your business rather than addressing the root cause of customer frustrations.
Start by ranking your issues based on their:
- Frequency
- Impact on business goals
- Relationship to important KPIs like customer satisfaction
For instance, you could prioritize fixing a buggy checkout process causing cart abandonment over updating the product homepage banner.
That said, “quick fixes” are not always a bad idea. They can be cost-effective and deliver high impact in less time. But it’s important to implement them alongside long-term solutions that may require more resources and time.
4. Take action
Next, turn insights into tangible steps by developing a plan to address VoC feedback. This could involve initiatives like:
- Introducing new product features
- Fixing bugs
- Tweaking pricing
- Improving customer service
- Training employees
- Changing communication strategies
For example, you could refine the messaging on your website or improve your technical documentation to help users better understand how your product works. You could also introduce regular product update sessions to get agents up to speed with new feature releases.
Your action plan should be clear and detailed so that you can share it with employees and stakeholders. And don’t forget to outline goals for each action item, assign responsibilities to specific teams or individuals, and lay out realistic timelines and milestones.
Another thing you’d want to address is how you’ll measure the success or progress of your implementation plan. Answer questions like:
- What does “success” mean to your business?
- Which KPIs and metrics are you going to track? (e.g., CSAT or CES)
- What customer experience tools will you use?
- How will you know your business has succeeded?
5. Close the loop
Finally, inform your customers about the actions you’re taking based on their feedback. This shows you’re listening to their opinions and genuinely value customer input. Here are some ways to close the VoC feedback loop:
- Send personalized emails or make phone calls to customers who provided significant feedback.
- Share updates via social media or newsletters about changes inspired by customer feedback.
- Incorporate in-app messages to highlight new features or improvements.
- Launch a “What’s New” page on your site where you regularly share information about new features, releases, and updates.
Here’s an email from Notion that does something similar:
It’s also a good idea to be transparent about when customers can expect to see changes based on the feedback they’ve provided. For example, you could send an email update with a realistic timeline for implementation.
Similarly, if your company can’t meet certain customer expectations within a given timeframe (or at all), let your customers know and explain why. They’ll appreciate you being upfront and honest instead of leading them on.
Gather Customer Intel With Nextiva
Successful VoC programs capture both indirect and direct feedback. This helps you proactively improve your products and services, deliver amazing customer experiences, and boost your company’s bottom line in the long run.
Nextiva makes the process of collecting VoC data simple and easy. Our AI-powered contact center lets you manage all customer conversations from a single dashboard.
Use Nextiva to access granular voice and text analytics, understand sentiment, integrate social media platforms to quickly view and respond to comments in real time, share short surveys to collect feedback during interactions, and more.
