4 Cornerstones of an Effective VoC Platform

A Voice of the Customer (VoC) platform is an important step in becoming a customer-obsessed organization. Only 50% of organizations say their voice of customer data is entirely captured to drive innovation opportunities, so doing so already puts you ahead of the competition. 

When evaluating VoC platforms, there will be a lot of different features to choose from across various vendors. But, there are certain must-have features that every effective VoC platform has. 

What is a VoC Platform?

A VoC platform is software that helps you collect, manage, and analyze voice of the customer data. Having all of your customer data in one place makes it easier to uncover insights, share reports and insights with the appropriate stakeholders, and make better-informed decisions to improve your business. 

Why is a VoC Platform Important?

A VoC platform is important because it helps you make better connections with your customers. With a VoC platform, you can see all the different ways customers interact with your business in one place, as opposed to having siloed customer data in different parts of your organization. 

What Are the Benefits of a VoC Platform?

Utilizing a VoC platform can lead to many benefits. The biggest advantage of having a VoC platform is an increase in whatever customer experience metrics you track within your business. Whether you are tracking ease of use or overall customer satisfaction, being able to understand what your customers are saying in different points through the customer journey will help you work to achieve these goals. Not only that – those increases in customer experience metrics can actually lead to an increase in your organization’s bottom line – as in revenue growth and ROI! Check out our handy VoC calculator below to see just how much your business can benefit from utilizing a VoC platform.

Calculate your business’ ROI using Pearl-Plaza’s VoC tools.

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So what elements should be foundational for an effective VoC platform? Here are four features that should come standard in any software promising to collect and analyze data that improves the customer experience:

Omnichannel Engagement

One of the most important use cases of a VoC platform is to host all of your customer data in one place. Consumers are increasingly wanting to have an omnichannel customer experience with their favorite brands, which means you need a platform that can monitor the different touchpoints they have across different channels. 

Case Management

Case management refers to a system that utilizes intelligent alerts to highlight top-priority customers either to increase customer acquisition or reduce customer churn. 

This is an important feature for VoC platforms to have because it will not only help you quantify the customer experience ROI you are getting from your VoC efforts but also help you improve business operations. 

For example, after having a negative experience at a retail location, a customer might express their displeasure through an online review. However, case management software can detect that this customer is likely to churn and create an alert so that this customer’s issue becomes a top priority for the business. With swift action, the business can resolve the issue and keep the customer. 

Text Analytics

Text analytics is a key feature of VoC platforms because those platforms deal with so much unstructured data. Whether it’s an open question on a post-transactional survey, a social media comment, or an online review, your customers share so much feedback that is hard to measure by traditional standards. 

Text analysis in VoC platforms helps you uncover customer sentiment, which is crucial to understand when making customer experience improvements. Customer sentiment will help you accurately deduce what matters most to your customers.   

Dashboards and Reporting

Effective VoC platforms should be equipped with various customer experience dashboards that you can leverage. The main dashboard in a VoC platform will most likely be a high-level view at the state of your voice of customer efforts, but you should also have the ability to dive deeper into certain metrics. 

With the different dashboards you use, it is also important to choose a VoC platform that makes easily accessible and shareable reports. Reports such as these are important to champion your VoC efforts and show the impact they are making on your business. 

Other Features to Look for in a VoC Platform

The four cornerstones of a VoC platform represent the table stakes for being able to run a viable voice of the customer program. However, other features will take your program to the next level and help you seamlessly improve the customer experience. 

Review Management

Being able to track and respond to online reviews can be a frustrating process if done manually. With so many platforms such as Google, Bing, Yelp, Glassdoor, etc, going to each of those individual platforms to see what customers are saying and responding to them can be extremely time-consuming. 

Review management is one of the most important features in exceptional VoC platforms because it gives you the ability to track every review, on every platform, all in one place while also being able to respond to reviews within the VoC platform itself. This is not only a time-saving process but also makes it much easier to analyze unstructured feedback.  

Social Media Monitoring 

In today’s business environment, the importance of social media marketing cannot be overstated. 68% of consumers use social media to stay informed about new products or services. Your customers also want to interact with you via social media with 59% of customers expecting a social response within two business days. 

Social media monitoring helps you track all of the ways customers interact with your social media posts. You can monitor likes, shares, comments, and more. Regardless of the industry you are in, social media is one of the best ways to connect with your customers which makes social media monitoring a key tool for VoC platforms. 

Call Center Recordings

Call recordings are some of the most underutilized pieces of customer feedback, simply because it is too time-consuming to listen back to recordings and extract insights from them. However, with conversation intelligence, you can easily get actionable insights from customer conversations. This can be useful to implement into your customer experience improvement efforts, and can also be used to train employees on common issues. 

Choose Pearl-Plaza for Your VoC Platform

By arming yourself with tools that allow for omnichannel engagement, case management, text analytics, and dashboards and reporting, and more, you are setting your organization up for the best voice of customer understanding possible.

If you are interested in seeing how much ROI Pearl-Plaza can deliver for you with voice of the customer surveys, check out our ROI calculator!

If you want to learn more about Pearl-Plaza’s VoC platform and how it can be customized to fit the needs of your organization, schedule a demo today!

Mike Henry

CX Writer

Mike is a passionate professional dedicated to uncovering and reporting on the latest trends and best practices in the Customer Experience (CX) and Reputation Management industries. With a keen eye for innovation and a commitment to excellence, Mike strives to deliver insightful content that empowers CX practitioners to enhance their businesses. His work is driven by a genuine interest in exploring the dynamic landscape of CX and reputation management and providing valuable insights to help businesses thrive in the ever-evolving market.