Obtaining and understanding Voice of Customer in SaaS
Obtaining and understanding Voice of Customer in SaaS

Obtaining and understanding Voice of Customer in SaaS

What is the Voice of Customer?

Voice of Customer (VoC) is a process that involves collecting and analyzing customer feedback. It provides a direct opportunity to enhance the customer experience, which ultimately leads to customer loyalty. In today's consumer-driven market, retaining customers is crucial. By understanding VoC and utilizing this information, you can gain a competitive advantage over companies that do not prioritize customer feedback.

There are two elements to successfully leveraging Voice of Customer (VoC) information.

The first is to listen to what is being said.

The second is to act on it.

There is no point doing the first part if you can’t follow through with the second. After all, the challenge of VoC is to balance a high volume of information with a personalized response.

Why is Voice of the Customer important?

Voice of Customer helps businesses hone their product or service into something that customers truly want and will continue to invest time and money into. Instead of just collecting data, VoC focuses on understanding it. Why? Because if you know customers are having problems, it should be your goal to get to the root of it. On the flip side, if you know where customers are finding enjoyment in your product, you should want to find out why so you can expand on it.

By capturing VoC, you can connect and engage with customers at every touchpoint in the customer journey and programmatically improve their experience with your company. This technique helps you:

  • Spot early warning and potential brand crisis
  • Evaluate new concepts, ideas, and solutions
  • Customize your products, services, add-ons, and features to meet the needs and wants of your customers
  • Increase customer retention
  • Serve your customers the solutions they need


What is Voice of the Customer’s role in Customer Success?

If your VoC program isn’t tied to Customer Success, you’re doing it all wrong. Customer Success is meant to help your customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product. The customer feedback generated through VoC programs dictates these desired outcomes, making it a crucial component in the Customer Success strategy. 

A Voice of the Customer program can also greatly enhance the effectiveness of your Customer Success team. The individual approach to gathering customer feedback garners valuable information that helps Customer Success Managers (CSM) perform their job more efficiently. Ask questions like:

  • Is our product easy to consume?
  • Are we truly creating value?
  • How do you define success?
  • Are we helping you achieve that definition?

The answers to these questions can help you (CSM person) set priorities on an individual, prescriptive basis and establish a dialogue. You get a clear definition of what success means to each customer and can strategize ways to help them achieve it. Customer Success is a company-wide initiative and VoC fits into the same narrative. All departments must understand the importance of both Customer Success and VoC. It takes an entire company, from sales to marketing to product development, to give customers a satisfactory journey from start to finish.

Voice of the customer methodologies (Ways to collect VoC)

1. Customer Interviews

Customer interviews are one of the traditional methods of collecting VoC data. It is commonly used to understand a particular customer’s point of view regarding product or service issues, attributes, and performance measures.

You can perform this for either a particular customer or a group of customers with some common attributes. This is usually executed in person, on the phone, or through email. 

While the cost of in-person interviews is the highest among all forms of interviews, it is still considered the most useful form for building trusting customer relationships. This is because customers perceive this type of interaction as more personal.

2. Online Customer Surveys

Another great way to capture VoC is by conducting online customer surveys. These surveys help you understand your customers and address the issues they face.

However, if you don't ask the right questions with the help of the right platform, you may never get reliable answers. That's why you need to put in a lot of thought while designing your surveys. 

3. Live Chat

Having a live chat option on your website is an incredible method for collecting real-time customer feedback. It also reduces the possibility of your customers feeling unsatisfied with your customer service efforts.

The use of live chat is not limited to listening to customer complaints and resolving them. It's also a good tool to capture Voice of the Customer data. For this, you can schedule a follow-up survey of all the customers connecting with you through a chat. 

4. Social Media

Social media is a potent ingredient of the feedback cocktail, as it allows you to have two-way communication with your customers. 

On any of the most commonly used social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, you can tap into relevant ongoing conversations, connect with those customers by actively participating, or quietly listen (while taking notes).

The core strength of social media is that it allows you to have a more direct and real-time conversation with the people using your products or services.

While this is a good way to gather feedback, look for trends, and create stories, it may be more challenging to turn this into hard data. But the upside to this is that you're hearing unfiltered feedback directly from customers.

5. Website Behavior

Your website is a great place for you to capture Voice of Customer data. Besides chat and online surveys, another way to collect this data is by analyzing your customer behavior on the website. You can do it by leveraging tools like heat maps.

6. Online Customer Reviews

Your online reputation isn't just the result of what you generate at your end — it includes all instances in which your business appears online, including online reviews.

While online reviews may feel intimidating, they’re a goldmine of Voice of the Customer data. On online review sites like G2 Crowd, Finances Online, TrustRadius, TrustPilot, and Capterra, you can begin collecting VoC data without needing to reach out to individual customers first.

It's also essential to understand the impact these sites have on your business and how you can use reviews to enhance your online reputation. 86% of visitors hesitate to purchase from a business that has online negative reviews. With such statistics, it becomes crucial to not just ensure positive reviews, but also handle negative reviews.

7. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that is used to measure the loyalty of a company's customers. 

NPS gives you quick and reliable feedback from customers. The way the system works is easy. Customers need to answer this simple question on a scale of 0–10:

"How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or a colleague?"

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that is used to measure the loyalty of a company's customers. 

8. Focus Groups

In a focus group, eight to twelve customers meet in a room and are asked to share their perceptions, beliefs, and opinions about your product or service. The group participants are free to openly talk with one another.

This data collection method is used to gain insights into customers' prioritization of needs or to test concepts and get feedback. Focus groups are sometimes used in addition to interviews and surveys as the last step to further investigate and understand the Voice of the Customer for each of the company's touchpoints.

9. Emails

This method can be as informal or as formal as you want it to be. You can send highly personalized emails to particular customers or create a template that can be used for the entire target. You also have the option to either ask for feedback as a response to your email (which might be unstructured and time-consuming) or add a link in the email body to one of your surveys.

Data correlation 

Raw data makes no sense. You will have a lot of random data from customers, meaning god knows what. In every data analysis process, the raw data is useful only when the information is drawn from them. The same goes for the voice of customer analysis. 

Draw conclusions 

After you have labeled and segregated your data, it is time to make information out of it that will help you get to certain conclusions and insights to work on. 

In this phase, you will have a clear understanding of how relevant your data, information, and conclusions are concerning your targeted voice of customer goals. 

Initiate improvements

Just getting to conclusions isn’t enough right? The way you act upon the analysis and make improvements in your branding weighs a lot on the customers’ perception of you. Customers know they have given their feedback, and now they will wait for the corresponding changes in the brand. 

As a brand, it is your responsibility to prove to your customers that you consider their opinions valuable and are willing to improve for them. This is the act that contributes most to the voice of customer analysis. 


🎧✨ Absolutely spot on, Chloé! As Steve Jobs wisely said, "Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves." 🌟 Engaging deeply and listening actively are key. At ManyMangoes, we've seen the power of truly understanding and anticipating customer needs. Keep shining the light on customer-centric strategies! 🥭💡 #CustomerFirst #ManyMangoesMagic #ListenToLead Follow us!

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👂 You've highlighted a key aspect of customer success—active listening is indeed pivotal for a customer-centric approach, especially in the dynamic SaaS environment. 🤖 Generative AI can revolutionize this process by not only aggregating customer feedback but also providing actionable insights, allowing you to understand and respond to customer needs more efficiently. 📅 I'd love to show you how generative AI can enhance your customer listening strategies and help you achieve better quality results in less time. Let's book a call to explore the possibilities! Christine 🌟

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Lloyd Yip

Helping B2B Organizations Put Their Lead Gen On Autopilot By Building Systems | CEO @ Attract & Scale

11mo

Couldn't agree more! Listening and understanding your customers' needs is the key to a successful customer-centric strategy.

Couldn't agree more! Active listening is key to achieving customer satisfaction and driving business success. 🙌

Yassine Fatihi 🟪

Crafting Audits, Process, Automations that Generate ⏳+💸| FULL REMOTE Only | Founder & Tech Creative | 30+ Companies Guided

11mo

Absolutely agree! Effective listening is key to understanding customers' needs and driving customer-centric strategies. 🔑

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