Think you know your customers? Think again. The real insights lie in what they’re saying right now. Collecting Voice of Customer (VoC) data is key, but most companies struggle to make the most of it.
Whether it's choosing the right methods, knowing what to collect, or turning feedback into actionable insights, there are problems to overcome. This is what will be exploring in this post for brands who want to get it right.
7 Techniques to Capture the Voice of Customer Data
1. Customer Interviews
Customer interviews come right on top because of their personalized nature. Moreover, customers are willing to give interviews with 55% of customers filling in the study form within a week. Also, you can get qualitative data which wouldn’t be possible otherwise(more granular).
Here are some proven tips to make the most out of customer interviews:
- Specify interview goals—tell them the purpose of the meeting before beginning, for instance, Understanding the pain points of customers while using the X feature
- Lead with open-ended questions and avoid leading questions to avoid confirmation bias
- Recruit 6-10 customers as sample size; continue interviewing till you hear repetitive things
- Ask questions that narrate the before and after experience of using your product
- Ask them to be descriptive—how has the product made their life easier
- Enquire instances where your product helped them solve a problem
- Understand the repercussions of a problem—What happens if X is not solved?
- Debrief in the end with the customer interviewees to explore takeaways and opportunities
2. Surveys
The next best thing after customer interviews are surveys helping you collect qualitative and quantitative data. In-app surveys and web surveys help you capture feedback right after interaction.
Try these tips for better survey results:
- The ideal sample size is 200 resulting in a 90% confidence interval
- Use a mix of different questions—Yes/No, Open-ended questions, rating scale, and MCQs for higher response rates
- For more granular insights, segment users based on cohorts for better focus
- Limit it to 3 or 4 questions—more questions mean low response rates
- Launch surveys within a minute after the interaction—this is the average immediate recall time
- Use simple language, no jargon, and the regional language where everyone can respond
- Don’t over-survey the same users—use a guardrail of 7 days to do it again
3. Live chat (support chat)
Live chat or support chat—whatever you choose to call it provides qualitative feedback while having higher engagement. It has an 86% satisfaction rating with 34% of customers preferring it thanks to short wait times.
You might want to try some of these pointers to extract Voice of Customer data:
- Analyze chat transcripts to identify the sentiments using an AI sentiment analysis tool—delight or frustration
- Identify the common problems—number of times mentioned, average time taken to resolve, the severity of a problem
- Study the behavior of satisfied and unsatisfied customers—look at the chat scripts, words they use, and behavior after solving the problem
- Speak to support agents—recognize recurring problems in customer feedback and what has been done to solve it
- Ask what problems are resolved on first contact and those who require multiple interactions
- Group problems, issues, and requests by topics via labels and tags
- Dig through the FAQs to identify primary problems
4. Call Recordings (sales & support)
Call recordings, either sales & support are artifacts that can help you at any time. Whether to train sales reps or support agents, it has its use in helping product management teams.
Here’s how you can extract the required data from call recordings. Including but not limited to:
- What are the problems that prospects or customers are looking to solve?
- How does our product fit in this scheme of things? Does it cut down the efforts, make it faster, or help you do it efficiently?
- What are the current or previous tools you use? Is it economical?
- What are the customers trying to achieve from this product?
- In an ideal scenario, what are the must-haves and nice-to-haves the solution should include?
- Any specific metrics or goals you aim to achieve with this new solution?
When it comes to support calls, here are the insights you’d want to know:
- What are the specific issues you are facing with the product? Is it a feature, bug, or something else?
- What are the steps you take before facing the problem?
- What features are missing that could be added or improved?
- How do you rate our product? What could make it better?
- What are the problems faced while using the product?
- What is the frequency of usage?
5. Online reviews (+ social media)
22% of customers use social media for initial research. This means it’s an untapped resource for you to gain valuable insights that might not have come up before.
This is not limited to reviews but extends to unboxing videos, reels, or shorts.
Gain relevant insights by using these tips:
- Identify likes and dislikes—identify the transactional relationship between users based on the comments and reviews
- Recognize any mentions of friction points—it could be emotional, cognitive, or frictional, for instance, no visual cues to move to the next steps after signing up
- Look for instances of feature requests—identify why it is important and how it's hurting a customer’s progress
- Determine if the feature requests are coming from the target audience—reach out to them and enquire
- Isolate the reviews that talk about friction points more than others—calculate the churn rate for this segment for the users churned during a particular period
- Look for community groups or forums like Quora, Reddit, or other anonymous social networks—understand the context, the reactions(if positive)
6. NPS
The Net Promoter Score is a popular metric to measure long-term loyalty with 66% of Fortune 1000 companies using this metric to measure the same.
However, it's more than just a percentage, here’s how you can leverage this metric:
- Ensure you add qualitative questions—know what Detractors and Promoters have to tell you
- Use a 0-10 scale and measure NPS at the end of each quarter or the end of a major purchase cycle
- Allow a cooling time to ensure the customer has had the chance to use the product—send NPS surveys after the end of the median usage time
- High or Low NPS scores must not be a mere percentage—take a look at profitability, revenue, and CAC to measure the actual difference
- Combine NPS with CSAT and CES to measure better business outcomes—draw parallels between high CSAT-high NPS, low CSAT-High NPS, low NPS-high CSAT, and low CSAT-low NPS
- For customers with low NPS or CSAT, ask follow-up questions about how difficult or easy did they find it
- Compare your past NPS and benchmark against it—increase in revenue, reduction in churn, improved retention, and higher LTV
- Take a look at referral rates to see if your NPS reflects an increase in recommendations, better product sign-ups, or brand awareness
- For products with replenishment cycles, measure the NPS and see what makes them stick with you
7. CSAT
With 80% of organizations using CSAT to measure short-term customer satisfaction, it's popular because it's easy to measure, and understand, and has high stakeholder approval.
Here are a couple of points to help drive more change with CSAT:
- Use similes 😊 to create a better perception—sometimes numbers are known to cause a bias
- Compare CSAT from a previous period to the current period—check for an increase or decrease
- What is the result—find out the average increase or decrease in profits
- Find out how CSAT has brought in a change in approach—for eg. a better onboarding process, timely emails, or educational videos
- Club your CSAT and DSAT scores and identify common attributes that need requirement
- Perform cluster analysis to create personalized experiences for customers
- Identify fluctuations in CSAT and DSAT using moving averages—makes things easier to spot
- Spot long-term changes over a particular period—is it due a pricing changes, low or high feature adoption
Wrapping up
Out of these VoC techniques, determining which to use is going to be crucial in terms of cost, time, and effectiveness. Not to forget, the willingness of customers to participate and the ease of collection and turning it into actionable insights cannot be underestimated.
Ultimately, whatever Voice of Customer techniques should help you create a feedback loop that brings value from time to time.
