Leveraging the Voice of the Customer in 2020

The good news? The data is plentiful. The tools exist. Customers are handing you feedback. All your business need to do is analyze it, distribute the insights, and act on them.

Introducing digital consumer intelligence (DCI)

DCI brings together many different data sources to help find meaning in the voices of billions of people. It empowers brands to take their understanding of consumers to a whole new level, acting as the cornerstone of a customer-centric, company-wide strategy.

Everything from marketing campaigns to product updates can be centred around real-time consumer data. In this report, we’ll take a look at some of the many ways you can leverage digital data sources to extract powerful insights. We’ll cover:

1. Improving customer experience
2. Developing innovative products
3. Predicting what consumers will want in the future
4. Reacting to customer crises

And we’ll finish up by talking about what’s needed to elevate the voice of the customer – what does it take to build customer-centricity into an organization at scale?

1. Improving customer experience

Happy customers = happy business. Creating better customer experiences should be at the core of every conversation when building out strategies across the organization.

The key to improving CX is meaningful DCI. Ad hoc customer research is no longer enough, especially when modern-day consumers can broadcast their dissatisfaction with your new product, clunky website, or marketing campaign globally in an instant.

Being able to monitor positive and negative customer experiences on a minute-by-minute basis can help you respond quickly with product enhancements or remedial action.

Remember, customer experience incorporates all aspects of the customer journey, from research through to advocacy. Insights on each step can be gathered from a multitude of sources, from search to survey to social data.

Here’s an example of how social data helped inform Wargaming on how customers received an important update.

2. Developing innovative products

When you create something cutting-edge and new, you can set yourself apart. When you create something cutting edge and new as a response to pressing customer needs, you can set yourself apart and drive a lot of sales.

To get to those needs, businesses must seek the voice of the customer in a variety of ways. This could involve:

• Finding the questions people are asking around particular products or topics to find pain points, using a content analyzer like BuzzSumo
• Asking consumers directly about what they like and don’t like about particular solutions, using a survey tool
• Finding out how people talk about their preferences around different products on social networks or forums, using a tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research

Broadening your lens can be vital to unlocking this innovation. Consumers don’t exist in a vacuum, so looking at trends outside your industry can help you answer key questions and pinpoint trends you may not have otherwise considered.

Start looking in places you haven’t looked before. When you tap into different platforms or data sources, you can build out a more holistic picture of who your audience is and what they want.

This kind of practice will inform the development of new or existing products, but it’ll also ultimately help build out your customer profile, supports sales, and create more targeted marketing campaigns.

3. Predicting what customers might want in the future

Broad trend prediction is always a challenge, since so many things can affect what the next ‘big thing’ will be.

Your approach should depend on your own industry and business and the many factors that affect it, and there are a few ways to look at it.

Firstly, there are existing products, or iterations on those products, to make predictions about. By segmenting online discussions using custom classifiers, those that indicate intent to purchase can be measured and upticks can signal that demand is on the rise. Other indicators, like particular influencers posting positive reviews of a product, or general conversations around it seeing a rise in positivity, could also help your business work out the demand levels to expect. Looking back at historical data of this nature alongside sales data can help build out prediction methods looking ahead.

Secondly, there are products that you don’t currently deal in or even know about yet to make predictions about. Here’s an example:

4. Reacting to customer crises

There are a few things you might consider when evaluating how big an issue something could turn into. For example:

• Is this issue core to our brand?
• How influential are the people involved?
• How fast is the story being picked up by other authors or influencers?

An influx of mentions from one person may not be as worrisome as a few mentions from two or three influential people. Tracking the velocity of conversations can help your team prioritize a response and strategy before things escalate further.

DCI tools enable you to track the volume of company, topic, or product mentions over time, so when crisis strikes the situation can be monitored closely. This trajectory – whether viewed hourly or minute-by-minute – will tell you whether the crisis is growing, peaking, or disappearing.

The correct set up can mean that any potential crises are picked up immediately by the team through automatic signals or alerts. The example below illustrates how this can work in practice.