5 Ways to Understand the Voice of the Customer with Voice Technology

There's no doubt that customer feedback is important for businesses. It can help you understand what you're doing well and where you need to make improvements. But in the past, capturing and understanding the voice of the customer was a difficult process-it often involved surveys or focus groups that were time-consuming and expensive to conduct. But now, with the advent of voice technology, businesses have a new way to collect customer feedback and harness the voice of the customer. Voice technology is already being used in a number of customer-facing applications, such as customer service and call center operations. But it's also starting to be used in other areas, such as market research and product development. Voice technology can help businesses collect customer feedback in a more natural and efficient way, and can provide insights that traditional surveys and focus groups may not be able to provide. Before we dive into 5 ways that voice technology is being used to capture the voice of the customer, let's discuss what exactly the voice of the customer is.

What is the Voice of the Customer?

Voice of the customer (or VoC, also occasionally called "customer voice") is the customer's opinion about a company, including general impressions as well as specific feedback about a company's products and services. It can be positive or negative. Customer voice is important for businesses because it can help them understand what customers think about their business and where they need to make improvements. There are a number of ways to collect the voice of the customer, such as surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups, but there are problems with each of these methods. Surveys, for example, often only get 2% or 3% response rates, and those responses are typically only from people who are either very happy or very upset. Additionally, although surveys can be sent quickly after transactions, the other methods-like customer interviews-come with a time lag, which can lead to lost information as people forget how they felt about their experiences.

5 Key Uses for Voice Technology in the Voice of the Customer

With the advent of voice technology, however, businesses now have a way to collect customer feedback that solves the problems discussed above-simply by listening to what their customers are saying. Here are 5 of the top use cases for voice technology in capturing the voice of the customer.

1. Customer Service

Customer service is one of the most obvious applications for voice technology. Call center agents can use it to collect customer feedback after a call. This feedback can be used to improve the customer service experience and make sure that customers are getting the help they need. What's more, searchable audio can help managers and marketers quickly pull out customer comments about specific things based on information that already exists-no focus groups needed.

2. Market Research

Market research is another area where voice technology is starting to make an impact. Businesses can use voice technology to collect customer feedback about new products or services. This feedback can help businesses make better decisions about what to develop and how to market their products. For example, voice technology can help businesses understand how customers feel about their products and services. This is because it can capture the customer's tone of voice, which can provide valuable insights into their emotional state. Voice technology can also help businesses track customer satisfaction over time and across different channels.

3. Product Development

Product development is another area where voice technology can be used to collect customer feedback. By collecting customer feedback throughout the product development process, businesses can make sure that they're developing products that meet customer needs and expectations. It's not uncommon for this process to happen even without voice technology-but extracting insights from customer interviews can be challenging and time consuming without the ability to search audio or easily create searchable transcripts, for example.

4. Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring can help businesses track customer sentiment about their products and services. This information can be used to make improvements or take corrective action if necessary. Social media monitoring sometimes makes use of sentiment analysis, which is a process that analyzes customer feedback to understand the customer's overall attitude towards a product or service. This information can be used to improve customer satisfaction or take other actions to improve the customer experience.

5. Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing has been using surveys to understand what messages, sales pitch, or ads resonate with their customers. But with voice technology, agents could simply ask where a customer saw the business or how they felt about the message, sales pitch, or ad and get immediate emotional feedback-audio that can be stored for later analysis, or quickly turned into a transcript. In the near future, using emotion detection, the company could also determine how the customer truly felt about the messages that they'd seen.

Wrapping up

Voice technology is changing the way businesses collect the voice of the customer. By making it easier to collect VOC data, businesses can make sure that they're constantly improving their products and services to meet customer needs, coaching their customer-facing employees, and determining what sales or marketing messages resonate better. This will help them stay ahead of the competition and continue to grow. Overall, voice technology is providing a new way for businesses to collect customer feedback and harness the voice of the customer. It's efficient, natural, and provides insights that traditional methods may not be able to provide. So if you're looking for a new way to collect customer feedback, consider using voice technology to unlock even more insights.