Benefits Of Voice Of The Customer & Its Business Impacts

Using the benefits of voice of the customer (VoC) applications is the most critical element to retain happy customers and turn potential ones into loyal customers. It’s a powerful business tool that provides you with the apparatus necessary to understand what customers want and think of your products and brands.

When companies know what consumers think is lacking in the products, it helps them uncover insights on the various drawbacks and how to make up for them. It provides the impetus to improve, be it product design, marketing, or sales.

In this article, we will cover the VoC benefits and take a peek into some real-world applications where VoC has become a game-changer for many organizations across multiple sectors.

What Are The Top Benefits Of VoC?

The benefits of voice of the customer programs are enormous and therefore are increasingly popular among companies of all sizes. By applying the VoC data through a sentiment analysis API, organizations are finding better ways to retain customers and turn potential customers into loyal ones.

That’s exactly why the world is seeing so many companies becoming overly customer-centric. The voice of the customer has become the hallmark of modern-day business and tuning in to it offers several benefits to businesses such as:

1. Service Improvement

When VoC benefits are recognized as imperative to the success of products and services, companies are bound to take customer feedback very seriously. This feedback loop prompts companies to improve upon their weaknesses. By implementing voice of the customer process, their products and services become significantly better at satisfying customers.

An amazing customer service guarantees that customers are going to be loyal and come back to the company for more products. This sense of reliability and trust is only built when a company takes the voice of the customer analysis seriously. In fact, satisfied customers will go the extra mile and recommend your product to their family and acquaintances.

A shining example of the benefits of voice of the customer data is that of McDonald’s when it launched its VoC program and realized that a majority of its customers wanted to have a variety of Big Macs. After knowing that, the global food chain launched the Grand Mac, and it became one of their most successful products.

2. Brand Management

VoC programs allow companies to know how customers perceive the brand. Knowing that makes brand management easier. Businesses understand which aspects of their brand are the most important to customers, and which ones need to be improved upon. Thus, VoC benefits include bringing about new opportunities for branding that weren’t visible before.

In today’s age of social media, any business must maintain a healthy image of its brand. It takes one dissatisfied customer’s post on social media to tarnish a brand’s image. That’s why being attentive to customer cues is so important.

For example, Volkswagen experienced a huge blow to their brand image after the 2015 emissions scandal. It reduced their sales by 30% and cost Volkswagen billions of dollars. On the contrary, a VoC program could have saved the company a lot of money.

3. Product Innovation

Products are constantly evolving and VoC benefits help businesses stay on top of things. When companies understand what their customers want, need, or don’t like about the company’s products, they constantly think about how it can offer customers a better experience to increase profits.

Apple’s history speaks at length about the power of customer feedback analysis. For many years, Steve Jobs tried to find the perfect balance between technology and customer experience. He believed that if you start with the customers in mind – what their needs are and where they want to go next – everything else falls into place.

His strategy for Apple was grounded firmly on delivering an incredible user experience and going beyond people’s expectations of what a computer can do. As a result, Siri (the first virtual voice assistant) came to be and other phone brands followed suit. This is a classic example of the benefits of voice of the customer data that shows how technology progresses based on customer feedback.

4. Marketing

Marketing is tightly knit with customer experience analysis. One of the most powerful marketing tools is word-of-mouth and VoC benefits are proof of that. Customers are more likely to trust other consumers who have tried a product rather than a company marketing that product.

Voice of customer analysis allows a company to view its product from a customer’s perspective. In this way, an enterprise understands what the customers like or dislike about a product and comes up with ways to improve customer experience.

In essence, a company’s product’s success is tied to its happy customers. Meanwhile, happy customers are tied to the company’s brand image and marketing. Once a company has built trust with its customers, there’s no limit to how much market share it can capture.

In fact, that’s why many companies launch beta versions of their products. They know the value of VoC benefits. That’s why they want to test the waters before going all out. They take customer feedback, make adjustments, and fine-tune their product to maximize customer experience.

5. Increased Revenue and Customer Retention

When we combine all the above factors, it’s likely that a company’s revenue will skyrocket because the company has made sure that its products go the extra mile for its customers. Another one of the benefits of voice of the customer programs is that it helps build brand reputation and thus, customer loyalty.

This is how Apple became the flagbearer of innovation in the smartphone market. Therefore, a VoC program creates a feedback loop that successful organizations use to dramatically increase revenue and customer retention.

Similarly, Mcdonald’s introduced McCafe as a way of giving its customers the feel of an upgraded homemade coffee. They also wanted to satisfy customers who wanted healthier and a variety of food options. Not only did this lead to good brand management and innovation, but it also increased revenue and increased customer loyalty for McDonald’s.

What Are The Top Practical Examples Of VoC In Business?

From small and medium-scale to large enterprises, the VoC tool has become a must-have for every organization. This is in part due to the rising competition, and also because businesses are aware that they can also harness freely available information on social media through social listening to obtain VoC benefits. As technology becomes more advanced, customers’ demands for product experience have become increasingly difficult to meet.

For example, a decade ago no one would have thought you’d have to go to the mall to do shopping. Today, you can easily order something online and it’ll be delivered to your doorstep without hassle.

This shows how global businesses are shaping their operations around VoC. Here are some real-life Voice of the customer examples that show how the voice of the customer process has proven to be a game-changer for many organizations.

• VoC in Pharma

Nahdi Medical Company, a major healthcare provider in Saudi Arabia, wanted to improve its services by using precise Arabic sentiment analysis. The purpose was to optimize VoC benefits by analyzing feedback from employees and patients to improve the healthcare delivery process.

Repustate developed this model specific to Nahdi’s requirements to deliver granular data analytics in Arabic language (and all its dialects). This way Nahdi Medical Company can take advantage of the benefits of voice of the customer data and process a particular patient’s information from a sea of data seamlessly.

• VoC in Consumable Goods

Another company we partnered with was Pena Global, a business consultation group. The company needed a sentiment analysis solution for the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). Meanwhile, AARP wanted to take customer feedback on the new diet program it was designing for seniors.

We successfully developed a customized aspect-based sentiment analysis tool for AARP. This model included social media listening and text analytics so that AARP could get in on senior peoples’ feedback on social media.

• VoC in Healthcare

Another success story on the benefits of voice of the customer is related to the healthcare consultancy in Saudi Arabia, Health-Links. Health-Links specializes in data analytics for healthcare.

With the help of data-backed knowledge from its annual 12 million surveys, it informed different healthcare providers and programs on how to prioritize cases and become more efficient. Health-Links was looking for a scalable sentiment analysis solution with Arabic NLP. Repustate developed a solution that gave them the advantage of VoC benefits.

The Repustate engine not only analyzed the surveys at scale but also hosted a customized sentiment analysis model that was compatible with their industry and needs. It also helped them discover the Patient Voice with new topics and themes that were previously unknown or overlooked by other technologies in healthcare.

• VoC in Banking

Repustate is proud to have worked with one of the major banks in South Africa and delivered them the benefits of voice of the customer analytics. The bank needed data on customers so that it can stay ahead of its competitors. To that end, we started a social media listening program to gather customer data as much as possible.

Our social media listening campaign and text analytics used hashtags on Twitter and Facebook until we had collected over 2 million pieces of feedback from existing and potential clients. We found that it was very easy for customers in South Africa to be dissatisfied with banks.

Consider it an intelligence-gathering project, but it worked wonders for our client. Again, this indicates how important VoC benefits are for companies if they want to stay ahead of the curve.

• VoC in Automobile Sector

We worked with a multinational automobile brand, which had recently recalled one of its products, and wanted to know how customers perceived the brand. Our client chose us for the challenge.

We successfully used Repustate’s Sentiment Analysis engine to thoroughly target major social media outlets and over fifty blogs to extract information about the brand. We found content in multiple languages and our team examined whether there were any regional differences in how people responded to the recalls.

Moreover, the company had also hired a PR crisis management company to contain the fallout. Our sentiment and video content analysis measured public sentiment after each PR campaign as well. It was a two-fold service for our client thus showing that benefits of voice of the customer programs can be experienced no matter what industry, geolocation, or native language.

Learn more about the Voice of the Customer examples

Ending notes

Customer data is pivotal to business innovation and that’s why brands are becoming increasingly customer-centric and acknowledging VoC benefits. Enterprises know they cannot afford to ignore customer feedback otherwise they lose out to the competition. Repustate is a one-stop Voice of Customer Analytics solution to gain meaningful insight into what customers think about your brand.