Understanding your customers' needs, preferences, and experiences is crucial for any business striving for success. This understanding is at the heart of Voice of Customer (VoC) market research.
VoC research involves capturing and analyzing customer feedback to inform and guide business decisions, helping companies improve products, services, and overall customer satisfaction.
In this ultimate guide to VoC market research, we'll delve into what VoC is, why it’s important, and how to effectively gather and utilize customer feedback.
Whether you're new to VoC research or looking to enhance your current strategies, this comprehensive guide will provide you with the insights and tools you need to leverage the voice of your customers to drive meaningful business improvements.
What is VoC?
Voice of Customer (VoC) is a form of market research where the survey, focus group, or interview is directed at learning about the needs, wants, and drivers to loyalty of your customers.
VoC is just as it sounds: listening to your customers, collecting feedback, tabulating feedback, running analysis, making recommendations, and taking action based on the VoC.
The education of VoC schools you to align your company's marketing, operations, and strategy with the needs of your customers. As a result, customers are happier because they get the experience they are paying for, and businesses are happier because of improved customer experiences, less pain points, and higher revenues.
Types of VoC Market Research
When it comes to VoC, you have several ways to collect customer feedback to choose from. The important part is that you are talking to your customers and learning from them. So any methodology you choose is better than doing nothing.
We'll cover 3 of the more common quantitative VoC methodologies here:
Option 1: Online Survey (or Email Survey)
The first option of customer surveys is often your best choice. This assumes you have a collection of email addresses for your customers or a heavy social media following on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
The cost advantage of VoC over other types of market research is the ability to utilize an in-house list to draw survey completes.
Any type of image and awareness, brand equity study, or competitive study will force you to find non-customer samples. This may include paid social media advertisements or online panel usage where you pay per complete.
The disadvantage of online surveys is its passive communication. You are at the mercy of how or much or how little a customer is willing to type. This engagement can be increased through a well-written survey script.
Option 2: Telephone Survey
Where online surveys rely on passive communication, telephone surveys rely on 2-way communication. An interviewer and an interviewee or respondent. The depth of feedback and open-ended comments are often greater with a telephone survey.
However, a telephone survey is more costly. With email surveys it takes 1 click to send out 10,000 survey invites. With a telephone survey it takes 10,000 calls to do the same. This can take multiple interviewers and often multiple weeks to complete.
Surveys are run through computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI). This is a system that programs surveys into a computer to assist interviewers with typing comments and helps them follow the right skip patterns. Virtually, it is an online survey to collect responses by phone.
Option 3: Mail Survey
Yes, even snail mail is still an option. In fact, many financial institutions take advantage of this methodology because of specific stipulations or regulations about not contacting customers or members through email.
With mail surveys, you format a survey on paper to mail to households and offer a prepaid return envelope for respondents to mail back responses. This is likely your most expensive option.
Costs are driven up by data entry. It also can take up to 4 to 6 weeks (or more) for responses to stop trickling in. Among the 3 options, this is least likely to be utilized for Voice of Customer research.
Why is VoC Market Research Important?
Voice of Customer (VoC) market research is essential for several compelling reasons, all of which contribute to a business’s ability to thrive in a competitive market.
Here are the key reasons why VoC market research is so important:
1. Enhanced Customer Understanding
VoC research provides deep insights into what customers truly want and need. By actively listening to customers, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of their preferences, pain points, and expectations. This detailed knowledge helps in creating products and services that are closely aligned with customer demands.
2. Improved Customer Experience
Understanding the customer journey and identifying areas where customers encounter challenges or frustrations enables businesses to make targeted improvements. By addressing these pain points, companies can enhance the overall customer experience, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Informed Decision-Making
VoC data serves as a valuable resource for making informed business decisions. Whether it's product development, marketing strategies, or customer service improvements, having a clear understanding of customer feedback ensures that decisions are based on real, actionable insights rather than assumptions.
4. Competitive Advantage
In a crowded market, businesses that effectively utilize VoC research can differentiate themselves from competitors. By continuously adapting to customer needs and expectations, companies can stay ahead of the competition and maintain a strong market position.
5. Identifying New Opportunities
VoC research can uncover unmet needs and emerging trends within the customer base. These insights can lead to the development of new products, services, or features that address these opportunities, driving innovation and growth.
How Does the VoC Market Research Process Work?
The Voice of Customer process is fairly straightforward. It is highly engineered and task-oriented moving from Step 1 through Step 7. These are the key steps our market research company follows when executing VoC research for our clients.
Step 1: Kickoff
All great things start off with a kickoff, even the Super Bowl. This should be a meeting (either in person or by phone). Here, get your stakeholders together to discuss objectives, expectations, and what types of action you would like to take from your VoC results.
Step 2: Workplan
This becomes your driver's manual for the project. Develop a workplan that highlights the timeline, tasks, and responsible parties. This is important to keep everyone in the loop throughout the process and help people involved in the VoC to understand where everything stands.
Step 3: Survey Design
This is the most important step of the Voice of Customer process. This is when you or your choice of market research company takes all of the feedback from the kickoff and translates the objectives into survey questions.
The survey design addresses flow, logic, skip patterns, and eliminates bias. If your VoC survey is not professionally written, your results will suffer. But, if you are conducting the study in-house, here are Must-Have Voice of Customer (VoC) Survey Questions.
Step 5: Programming
Once the survey document is finalized, it is then programmed into your online survey software. The programmed version is often shared with the client for testing. The survey also goes under extensive testing with the VoC market research company.
Step 6: Fieldwork
Once the survey is programmed, tested, and finalized, your next step is a test drive or soft launch. Take 1% of your customer sample or 100 contacts and send the invitation to the survey to test return. Here you can head off any issues and make corrections before you open up full fieldwork.
Step 7: Analysis and Reporting
The last step is after fieldwork is closed. Then the fun begins with the analysis. Cases often have to be cleaned up and edited for completeness and quality.
Once the data file is ready, the VoC market research company prepares charts and graphs, creates a themed executive summary, and most importantly, adds interpretation, insight, and recommendations from the analytics.
How Often Should I Conduct VoC Market Research?
This is dependent on your needs. When it comes to VoC market research you have several options for longevity of the program. Here are 3 examples.
Option 1: Ad-Hoc
Ad-hoc VoC is market research that is a one-time project.
Perhaps you have a new product launch and you need to receive feedback on likelihood to use, price, and use some conjoint questions to understand the appeal of packages. This would be an ad-hoc project that is conducted once before product launch to address specific objectives.
Option 2: Periodically
The easiest example here is conducting a customer loyalty survey on a yearly basis or every 18 to 24 months.
Using periodic VoC ensures you are reaching out to your customers on an infrequent yet regular basis to understand Net Promoter Score (NPS), drivers to loyalty, ease of doing business, and likelihood to switch.
These customer satisfaction metrics must be measured regularly without over-surveying customers.
Option 3: Continually
Continual VoC would be classified as transactional surveys or monthly surveys. These pop-up as part of a large CX program at a company.
Transactional surveys are defined as surveys sent out after a sale occurs, after a shipment arrives, or after you place a call to a customer service representative. These transactional surveys are sent out to continually measure and monitor the customer experience.
Another example here is monthly satisfaction surveys at a bank or credit union. Here the financial institution sends a survey to any new account holders or those who open a new loan.
How Much Does VoC Cost?
This is always the golden question, isn't it? Unfortunately, the answer is: it depends.
What does it depend on? Lots of variables…
- Number of questions you want to ask
- Number of customers you want to contact
- Number of completed surveys needed
- Methodology of choice (email, phone, mail)
- Types of deliverables you need (high-level report or something comprehensive)
All of these variables impact the cost of the VoC research. Again, a short phone call or a couple emails with a VoC research company is enough for them to draft a quote or proposal to answer this question for you.
Contact Our VoC Market Research Company
Drive Research is a global Voice of Customer (VoC) market research company. Our team manages VoC research for a variety of clients across many industries. Interested in learning more about our VoC services or receiving a quote or proposal? Contact us today.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
George Kuhn
George is the Owner & President of Drive Research. He has consulted for hundreds of regional, national, and global organizations over the past 15 years. He is a CX-certified VoC professional with a focus on innovation and new product management.
Learn more about George, here.
