In the customer experience industry, we call capturing customer feedback a “voice of customer” program, and at Pearl-Plaza—we know that it’s not enough to capture feedback, you need to capture it, understand it, take action, and make sure customers know their feedback is being heard. We call this “experience improvement.”

Listening to the Voice of Customer Examples

Here are some specific voice of customer examples that can help you listen to customers and gather their valuable feedback.

Direct Feedback Methods

Direct feedback methods involve obtaining explicit and immediate insights directly from customers. By directly engaging with customers, businesses gain valuable, unfiltered feedback that helps them understand specific needs, address concerns, and make targeted improvements to enhance overall satisfaction. Direct feedback methods serve as a proactive approach to understanding and meeting customer expectations in real-time, fostering a more responsive and customer-centric business strategy.

Email Surveys

Email surveys offer a non-intrusive and convenient way to gather valuable insights from customers. By seamlessly integrating a survey link into email communication, you allow customers to share their thoughts at their own pace. This method not only ensures a broad reach but also provides a comfortable environment for customers to express their opinions, resulting in a diverse range of feedback that can uncover both positive experiences and areas for improvement.

Website Surveys

Strategically placed on webpages, these surveys enable organizations to capture real-time insights from visitors navigating their online platforms. By seamlessly integrating survey prompts within the website interface, businesses create an unobtrusive channel for users to share their experiences and preferences. 

Furthermore, incorporating net promoter score metrics (NPS) into website surveys provides businesses with a quantitative and standardized way to assess overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. By asking the ultimate question – “How likely are you to recommend our website to a friend or colleague?” – organizations can distill complex customer sentiments into a single, actionable metric.

SMS Surveys

Engaging customers through SMS surveys taps into the immediacy and ubiquity of text messaging. This method leverages the personal nature of text messages, prompting quick responses and enabling businesses to capture real-time feedback. The concise format encourages customers to share their opinions on the go, providing a snapshot of their sentiments. Incorporating SMS surveys into your strategy allows for a direct and immediate channel to connect with customers, fostering a more dynamic understanding of their experiences.

Customer Interviews

Conducting one-on-one quantitative interviews with targeted customers allows for a deeper exploration of individual experiences. By tailoring questions to specific demographics or usage patterns, businesses can gain nuanced insights into the factors influencing customer satisfaction. These interviews provide a qualitative depth to quantitative data, offering a more comprehensive understanding of customer needs, preferences, and pain points. This personalized approach enables businesses to address individual concerns while identifying overarching themes that may impact a broader customer base.

Live Chat 

Leveraging live chat for capturing customer commentary in real-time is a powerful way to uncover recurring themes and immediate concerns. Chatbots facilitate instant interactions, allowing businesses to identify emerging issues, challenges, or opportunities. Monitoring these conversations provides a valuable window into customer sentiment, enabling timely interventions and improvements. By analyzing the patterns in live chat interactions, businesses can proactively address common pain points, enhance customer experiences, and showcase a commitment to responsiveness.

Focus Groups

Engaging specific customer segments in focus groups goes beyond surface-level feedback, offering a rich source of qualitative insights. By inviting targeted groups to share their experiences, businesses can delve into the intricacies of individual journeys and preferences. This method provides a platform for customers to express nuanced opinions, uncovering aspects of their interactions that may not be apparent through broader surveys. The in-depth nature of focus groups enables businesses to tailor strategies to meet the unique needs of distinct customer segments, fostering a more personalized and customer-centric approach.

Indirect Feedback Methods 

Indirect feedback methods involve gathering insights from various sources that may not involve direct interaction with customers. These methods offer a more observational and nuanced understanding of customer sentiments, preferences, and challenges. Indirect feedback provides valuable context, uncovering trends, patterns, and public perceptions that may not be immediately apparent through direct channels.

Call center recordings 

Analyzing call center recordings provides a direct window into customer interactions, allowing businesses to gauge call frequency and identify pain points experienced by customers. These recordings not only reveal the volume of inquiries but also shed light on common challenges faced by customers. By understanding the nature of customer concerns and the frequency with which they arise, businesses can optimize call center processes, allocate resources efficiently, and implement targeted improvements to enhance overall customer satisfaction.

Social media commentary 

Utilizing review management to mine social media commentary unveils unfiltered opinions about your brand’s reputation and customer advocacy. Publicly available comments on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram serve as a rich source of insights into customer sentiments, recommendations, and criticisms. By understanding how customers express their opinions in the public domain, businesses can tailor strategies to amplify positive sentiment, address concerns, and cultivate a positive brand image.

Product or location reviews 

Monitoring product or location reviews provide a valuable indirect feedback channel, offering insights into the comparative standing of your offerings in the market. Reviews not only reveal customer satisfaction levels but also highlight areas where your product or location excels or falls short compared to competitors. 

Web chat transcripts 

Examining web chat transcripts provides a detailed record of customer inquiries, offering valuable insights into the topics that matter most to your audience. From queries about product details to inquiries about stock levels or product quality, these transcripts reveal customer priorities and concerns. By analyzing the frequency and nature of these interactions, businesses can tailor their communication strategies, optimize website content, and address common customer queries proactively. This method not only enhances customer satisfaction but also contributes to a more informed and responsive customer support system.

Employee Experience

Employees, often on the frontline of customer interactions, possess a unique perspective that can indirectly reveal common issues and roadblocks customers encounter. Focusing on employee experience not only fosters a positive workplace culture but also unveils critical information about the challenges employees face in providing optimal customer support.

Inferred Feedback Methods

Customer behaviors on your website

Use this data to see behaviors such as if customers are abandoning items in their cart, or perhaps there are web pages that are visited less often than others and have room for optimization. 

CRM data

Whether your brand uses Salesforce or another brand, it can be helpful to overlay operational feedback with CRM elements like purchase history, a loyalty program, or a customer’s store account, which will show an important operational and segmentation piece of the puzzle.

Common Examples of Voice of Customer Questions

When crafting a Voice of Customer (VoC) survey, the customer survey questions you ask play a pivotal role in unveiling valuable insights. Here are three common questions to consider incorporating into your survey to capture a comprehensive understanding of customer experiences:

1. “On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product/service?”

This Net Promoter Score (NPS) question provides a quantitative measure of customer loyalty. It not only gauges overall satisfaction but also offers a clear indication of the likelihood that customers will advocate for your brand.

2. “What aspect of our product/service do you value the most, and why?”

This open-ended question encourages customers to articulate specific features or aspects that resonate with them. By understanding what customers find most valuable, you can focus on enhancing and promoting these key attributes.

3. “Can you share a recent experience with our customer support team? How would you rate the service received?”

This question delves into the customer’s interaction with your support team, providing insights into the effectiveness of your customer service. The combination of qualitative feedback and a quantitative rating allows for a comprehensive evaluation of customer support experiences.

These common VoC questions are designed to elicit specific, actionable feedback that can guide strategic decision-making and drive continuous improvement. You can tailor these customer survey questions to align with your business goals and the unique aspects of your customer journey for maximum impact.

What is the Voice of Customer Process?

At Pearl-Plaza, the VoC process is called “Continuous Improvement,” and can be broken down into five easy steps: design, listen, understand, transform, and realize. 

Step #1: Design Your Program

In this stage, you have the opportunity to set up a strong foundation for your program; a strategy that aligns with the overall business values, financial objectives, and brand promises. This is one of the most important stages that is often overlooked, as you have one shot upfront to invest the time, energy, and resources into getting your program right from the start. You will thank us later throughout the process!

Step #2: Listen To Your Customers

Over the years, listening to customers has dramatically evolved. What used to be limited to sending out surveys through direct feedback, the industry has evolved to include indirect and inferred customer data sources as well. This can include listening posts like customer support interactions, emails, live chats, direct surveys, online product reviews, social media comments, and more!

Step #3: Understand Your Customer Data

For any data to be useful, of course you need to take the time to dig in and understand what your customers are actually saying. Most brands with a VoC or experience improvement program will centralize the data streams and use advanced analytics and behavioral science experts to identify what customers are actually saying. In the modern experience landscape, we have AI machine learning tools that can take your data even further, enabling you to look into customer emotions, intent, and sentiment. This understanding of the customer data stage is critical, and will set you up for the next step.

Step #4: Transform Through Taking Action

In the transformation stage, this is where you’ll thank us that you took the time up front to design your program and identify what success looks like. Now, you have the opportunity to take action on customer data.

Here’s a voice of customer example in action: maybe you can see customers are purchasing lots of one specific product, but the repeat purchases are extremely low. This is an opportunity to figure out the drivers of repeat purchases for your specific brand and its products, and apply those across the board. Can you lower the price? Can you rebrand or repackage the product to match more successful ones?

Step #5: Realize Business Value

This is where voice of customer and experience improvement programs shine. After you pull the necessary triggers in the transformation process, you’ll get the opportunity to evaluate and demonstrate real and tangible results for your business. Whether it’s reducing costs, avoiding customer churn, acquiring new customers, or something else—voice of customer programs will help you get there.  

Bringing Voice of Customer Examples to Life

Pearl-Plaza clients who have strategically implemented the data collection strategies discussed earlier to enhance both customer and employee experiences have continuously realized success. Take a look at these customer experience case studies to see how they have improved their organizations through voice of customer programs.

Foot Locker

As you can imagine, Foot Locker had a ton of data points on their hands. The brand had loads of customer behavior intelligence, but this data was coming from so many sources that it was hard to see the big picture. Using the Pearl-Plaza XI Platform, this brand was able to consolidate all of its operational data sources and listening posts into one platform, giving it the intelligence needed to create a unique experience for every customer. The result? Foot Locker reduced customer listening costs, added new listening posts across video and social media, and experienced faster and more accurate resolution to its business challenges. 

Docusign

Signing a digital agreement is now table stakes for most companies. That’s in large part thanks to DocuSign, a brand where growth is driven by customers who share the easy, secure e-signature experience with colleagues and clients. To listen to its customer feedback, the DocuSign product team uses in-app NPS microsurvey feedback to continually optimize end user experience. This Net Promoter Score program, powered by Pearl-Plaza, also identifies brand enthusiasts who are the engine of a robust customer advocacy program.

Glassdoor 

This brand uses the Pearl-Plaza Platform to capture a unified view of employer experience, and now thousands of cross-industry employers across use the Glassdoor website to help them recruit and hire quality candidates.

Putting the five phases of continuous improvement to the ultimate test, Glassdoor monitors and improves the entire customer journey using microsurveys to capture sentiment at moments that matter for employees. Integration with Salesforce enables front line teams to close the loop with customers in real-time. Advanced text and sentiment analytics empower Glassdoor teams to analyze feedback, and customized dashboards ensure that each team can quickly see what is important to them and prioritize improvement efforts.

Elevating Your Business with Voice of Customer Examples

Voice of customer and experience improvement programs have dramatically evolved over the last few decades—what used to be limited to direct survey feedback has extended to include indirect and inferred feedback methods too. The power of a VoC program is in the five elements of achieving continuous improvement: design, listen, understand, transform, and finally, realize business value. We truly believe it’s improving experiences that turn customers into lifelong brand advocates, helping your business achieve its objectives at the same time. 

Pearl-Plaza has been a trusted partner for numerous businesses on their journey to harness the power of Voice of Customer (VoC). Through a proven track record of providing comprehensive VoC solutions, Pearl-Plaza has empowered organizations to gain deep insights into customer experiences, preferences, and expectations. 

We encourage you to take the next step in elevating your customer understanding. Schedule a live demo with Pearl-Plaza to witness real-time VoC examples in action and engage with a representative who can share tailored insights and case studies specific to your industry. By leveraging Pearl-Plaza’s expertise, businesses can not only listen to their customers but also transform these insights into strategic actions that drive meaningful improvements and long-term success.

Read on to learn more about voice of the customer surveys, why they’re so important, how to create them, and some sample questions that can get you started creating your VoC survey today. 

What Is a Voice of the Customer Survey?

At its core, a voice of the customer (VoC) surveys captures customers’ expectations, preferences, and aversions toward products, services, or your company in general. A VoC survey involves gathering both quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers about their various touchpoints with a company. Touchpoints could be anything from an interaction with your website, chatting with your customer service representatives, or actually using your products and services. By exploring customers’ experiences with these touchpoints, you’ll gain a holistic understanding of your customer’s journey and experience with your company. 

Why Are Voice of the Customer Surveys So Important?

A VoC is more than just another survey to worry about. The benefits of VoC surveys extend far beyond mere data collection. They provide invaluable insights that can shape product development, fine-tune marketing strategies, and enhance customer service. Hopefully with all of these pieces in place, you’ll experience improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, the power of VoC surveys lies not just in listening to what customers have to say but in using those insights to create a better, more personalized customer experience.

Let’s dive into three specific benefits from utilizing VoC surveys as the powerful they are: 

Understanding Customer Needs and Wants

At the heart of any successful business strategy lies a deep understanding of customer needs and wants. VoC surveys are literally the voice of your customers. They serve as a way to pull out real and salient insights into your customers’ needs and wants. These insights are the pulse of the market, reflecting real-time customer sentiment and demand. By tuning into the voice of the customer, you can identify what truly matters to your customers and adjust your strategies, products, and services appropriately. Your customers love it too.. VOC surveys provide customers with the opportunity to communicate their needs and wants directly to businesses.

Improving Customer Satisfaction

You created your business to solve a problem, and you want to make sure your products and services are actually doing that. The way to see if you’re reaching your customers the way you want is to evaluate your customer satisfaction. A VoC survey gives you the chance to do just that. Plus using these surveys can also help you boost your customer satisfaction on its own. Customers love the opportunity to be heard and understood, so when you’re actively working toward that, they’re going to notice and appreciate that. 

Improving the Business Overall

VoC surveys are not just about improving customer experience; they offer significant benefits for the overall health and growth of the business. These surveys help businesses pinpoint potential issues from the customer’s perspective, allowing them to proactively address these concerns before they escalate and cause significant damage. Whatever customers aren’t liking, with a VoC, you have a chance to stop that in its tracks. This proactive approach not only improves the customer experience but also strengthens the company’s reputation, enhances operational efficiency, and drives overall business success. 

Designing Your Voice of the Customer Survey

Voice of the customer surveys are powerful. How do you go about creating your own? Let’s dive into some of the basic steps for designing a highly effective VoC survey. 

Define Objectives

Before crafting your VoC survey, it’s crucial to define clear, specific objectives. What are you trying to do or understand? Are you looking for insights on a specific product or service you want to refine? Or are you looking to improve your customer satisfaction overall? Knowing what your objectives are will help you design a survey that gathers data to help with your goal. You can ensure the data you collect is actionable and relevant to your overall business goals. 

Choose the Right Types of Questions

Once you have clear objectives, you need questions that achieve your overall goals. The choice of questions in your VoC survey can significantly impact the quality and type of feedback you receive. To gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ experiences, it’s advisable to use a mix of multiple choice questions, scales (like the Likert scale), and open-ended questions. Multiple choice questions and scales are excellent for collecting quantitative data, offering clear, easily analyzable feedback. On the other hand, open-ended questions allow customers to express their opinions and experiences in their own words, providing rich qualitative data that can offer deeper, nuanced insights. A mix of question types will give you deeper insights overall. 

Keep It Simple

While it’s important to gather as much valuable feedback as possible, your customers won’t complete a long survey. It’s much better to have fewer questions and more complete surveys than the other way around. Aim to keep it simple and keep your surveys no longer than 10 minutes. The simpler and more streamlined your survey, the more likely customers are to complete it and provide honest, thoughtful responses.

Start Broad, Then Get Specific

When structuring your VoC survey, a useful approach is to start with general questions before delving into more specific ones. Starting broad helps your customers “warm up” to providing you with feedback. Broad, initial questions can pertain to overall satisfaction, general experiences, or perceptions of your brand. Essentially, your early questions should be easy to answer without too much extensive thought. You can narrow as you go to get more detailed feedback. 

Questions to Ask in a Voice of the Customer Survey

Those strategies can help you get started. To really take your VoC survey to the next level, we have some starter questions to help you write your own voice of the customer surveys. The questions we provide are broken up into general categories that you may want to consider on your surveys. 

Value-Based VoC Questions

• Did you find everything you were looking for today?
• Is there anything you were looking for that we didn’t have?
• On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the value of your purchase?
• What are the most important qualities you look for in a product or service? (This question is particularly poignant as a multiple choice question)
• Did our customer service help you resolve any issue you came across?

Brand Loyalty VoC Questions

• How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1–10? 
• When thinking about our brand, product, or service, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
• What might prevent you from doing business with us in the future?
• How likely are you to switch to a different brand, product, or service?

Customer Satisfaction Questions

• How would you describe your experience with us today?
• How satisfied are you with the product or service you received?
• Was your customer service agent able to handle any issue you had?
• What could we have done to improve your experience?

Final Thoughts

Overall, VoC surveys are powerful tools to better understand your customers and how they really perceive your company. Utilizing these surveys, you can further refine your products and services, enhance your customer satisfaction, and better meet the needs of your customers. 

Learn more about how a voice of the customer survey can help you build a better brand with Pearl-Plaza today!

However, even though they’re different, it’s important to point out that one isn’t necessarily better than the other—and brands need both if they want their customer experience (CX) programs to reach their potential.

So, with that in mind, let’s get into a quick primer!

Breaking Down the Difference Between Voice of Customer & Market Research

What Is the Definition of Voice of Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the process of gathering vital information regarding what customers think and feel about their experiences with a business.

How Does VoC Fit into Your CX Strategy

VoC programs are an essential part of any CX toolkit. They’re designed to fulfill many critical functions for your overall customer experience program, including, as their name implies, understanding customer needs. They’re also useful for understanding customer expectations, as well as what those individuals may want from you before even they know. This information can then be used to adjust operations, inform marketing efforts, and help your organization create both short- and long-term Experience Improvement (XI).

Not all VoC feedback comes from typical listening methods like surveys and focus groups, either. A lot of it comes from unsolicited feedback (website reviews, social media comments, etc). Unsolicited feedback is helpful because it gives customers a chance to express themselves entirely in their own terms, which may alert brands to problems and journey breakages that they weren’t aware of.

All of this boils down to the ability to not just capture individual and collective customer feedback, but act upon it. Taking action is crucial to Experience Improvement and building connective relationships.

What Is the Definition of Market Research?

Market research explores hidden relationships within industry data, collected by a market research firm, in order to predict and forecast future events and behavior within the market.

What Is the Role of Market Research in Your Business?

While Voice of Customer is all about feedback, market research takes a slightly wider lens by focusing on understanding the trends around your business.

Primary research is useful for testing new communications and services that your company wants to put out there, while secondary research looks at the dynamics and sizing of the marketplace around you. Conducting these types of research can help your company identify your target market, segment your customers, and identify growth opportunities.

Your company can supercharge its market research efforts by defining the population you want to target with a survey, then creating samples that ensure you’ll have a match. We’ve found that surveys like these are most effective when they’re blind, meaning that the customer or individual stays anonymous while taking them, and challenge you to do the same! This method is great for reducing response bias.

So, Why Do You Need Both?

VoC and market research aren’t the same, but your CX program and your organization need both in order to truly understand your customers as people. That fundamental, holistic understanding fuels unforgettable experiences that build loyalty while also creating additional revenue! So be bold in your strategy and use both VoC and market research. Your customers will feel heard, your C-suite will be impressed, and the experiences you provide will be meaningfully transformed.

Click here to read our full-length white paper on why your brand needs both VoC and market research. Our very own Eric Smuda has spent decades in both fields and provides an in-depth look not just at why these disciplines are important, but how your organization can wield them effectively.

Today, we’re going to run through three elements we’ve seen companies use to create amazing linkage analysis strategies, enabling practitioners like you to meaningfully improve customers’ experiences, create a strong bottom line, and point back to all of this when going back for more funding!

Three Elements of Successful Linkage Analysis Strategies

1. Business Insights
2. Customer-Specific Details
3. “What If” Scenarios

Key #1: Business Insights

Business insights are one of customer relationships’ biggest building blocks. Diving into this element of your CX program empowers your team to better understand the relationship between retention, loyalty, and profitability. Once you’ve got that intel handy, your program’s ties to overall business wins and drivers become clear as day! Such drivers might include how customer experience relates to loyalty, how business ops are affecting retention, and the financial impact that comes with Experience Improvement. That last one is especially important for proving ROI and making the case for the positive impact your program has on customer relationships!

Key #2: Customer-Specific Details

While on the subject of customers, let’s get into how linkage analysis can cover details unique to the people who keep your brand trucking. Specifically, you want to look at the mechanics of specific transactions and behaviors. How intuitive is your contact center menu? Can customers jump between channels en route to getting a single issue resolved? How effective does your customer service have to be for your organization to maintain its market position, and how far might you rise if that service was improved? Questions like these vary from brand to brand, but knowing the answers makes all the difference.

Key #3: “What If” Scenarios

Our third and final tip for making linkage analysis valuable to your company is integrating it into as many simulations as possible. Organizational success comes from future-proofing your experience, which means knowing about customer preferences and potential obstacles before they even fully form. This foresight is where linkage analysis can be very useful, because brands can use it to envision, say, the revenue that could be gained by shortening the claims process, or the retention boost from a more engaged workforce.

The Next Step

CX programs can get a big boost from applying linkage analysis toward these ends, but how else might linkage analysis boost Experience Improvement? Click here to read our full report on everything linkage analysis can do for your brand, your customer relationships, and your bottom line!