Are you really able to hear what your customers are saying about you? Not only to you, but to the world in general? How well do you know, not just their voiced needs but their unexpressed needs as well? Being insightful of the said and unsaid needs of your customers is critical to creating superior value for them. Voice of Customer (VoC) is a systematic and cyclic approach that brings you closer to these customer needs.

VoC programs are designed to identify your customers’ current and emerging needs, understand, and prioritize them. Incorporating VoC programs leads to customer-focused product development, service betterment, and improved company-customer relationships. Here are some traditional and contemporary methods for capturing your customers’ voice:

Customer Feedback – Gauging customer-brand relationship through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, is common. However; the traditional way of annual and biannual surveys are no more welcome among your customers. Customer priorities are changing fast and they are keen to see their changes implemented faster. Frequent customer conversations are important to show them that you care about their opinions. To be in alignment with your customers’ current perspective, implement monthly or quarterly surveys.

Interaction Monitoring – Keeping track of complaint calls and emails, and call monitoring, offer great customer insights. Integrate automated survey tools to assess customer satisfaction after an activity, say a purchase and helpdesk interactions.

Online Customer Behavior Analysis – Use Web Analytics to measure activity of your customers on your website and analyze their behavior. You can keep track of your customer conversations on social media websites through text analytics.

For a VoC program to be effective, commitment to customer-centricity in employees across divisions is crucial. Getting all your employees involved in online communities is another effective technique to keep them abreast of your customer attitude and thoughts. You can integrate the VoC efficiency with Six Sigma approach to achieve powerful results.

Six Sigma is a set of practices aimed at decreasing variations in processes, products, and services, to increase compatibility with customer expectations to the maximum. Identification and understanding of customer expectations is the first step of Six Sigma approach. Every process is then analyzed for its efficiency to produce the preferred outcome. Achieved performance is measured against standards, and processes are enhanced, and results refined, to reduce the variation to acceptable levels. Six Sigma aims at customer satisfaction, VoC shows the way.

With customer experience becoming a key brand distinguisher, it is essential that you create a highly customer-aware organization. VoC programs should be integrated into every organizational level, from product development to the boardroom, to achieve this objective. With such infusion, you can create a truly outstanding customer brand experience.