Advance Your Organization’s Voice of the Customer Strategy

In this guide, we’ll talk about how organizations at the different stages of maturity operate in relation to VoC strategy and advise on how your organization can advance. 

We’ll also share thoughts from Brandwatch’s internal VoC expert and Director of Consumer Insights Kelly Autenrieth. She has been with Brandwatch for over eight years, three of which she has spent working in research and helping clients get closer to their customers in order to make better decisions. 

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to take the DCI Assessment that will help you identify exactly where your organization stands on VoC strategy and how you can improve in this area.

What is VoC all about?

VoC strategy is essentially about customer-centricity within an organization. But what does it mean to be truly customer-centric? 

The idea of customer-centricity is not exactly new. Many businesses declare the customer to be at the heart of their operations and core company values. Some of those companies go to great lengths to monitor customer preferences and pain points, investing in the associated human resources and technology while trying to be ever-receptive to feedback across all channels and touchpoints. Others might claim to be customer-centric but don’t engage in any kind of listening, effectively blocking their ears to valuable customer input. 

When we talk about the voice of the customer, we’re not just talking about the ways part of your organization might monitor the conversation and keep a finger on the pulse of what customers want. A great VoC program helps integrate the voice of your customer into existing business processes to ensure that customer feedback is not only heard but also acted upon and that customer voices echo across all areas of your organization. It’s something that’s built into your organizations’ values and long-term plans.

What VoC strategy looks like across different stages of DCI maturity:

There are four key stages of DCI Maturity: 

1. Monitoring (earliest stage)
2. Developing intelligence
3. Digital consumer intelligence
4. Embedded digital consumer intelligence (mature stage)

Here’s what VoC strategy typically looks like for organizations at each of these stages.

1. Monitoring

At the earliest stage, we’d expect organizations to have only a vague or limited connection between customer insights (CI) and their overall mission statements.

This is a discovery stage, at which teams can begin to recognize and identify the ways customer information and data are currently captured. With an audit, an organization will start to understand how diverse voice of the customer data is, where and how the information is being captured, and what, if anything, is being done with the data. This initial evaluation shows the gaps in how customer insights are collected and processed, and can open up room for fresh ideas and opportunities. For example, what could product developers get out of accessing support ticket data? 

Real client example

Let’s look at one of our healthcare brand clients through the lens of the DCI Assessment. This client is in the early stages of maturity as they engage in standard social monitoring, capturing what is being said about the brand (whether the feedback is negative or positive) and listening to topics they already anticipate. The opportunity here would be to go beyond their current monitoring and pivot into discovering what consumers say beyond brand-focused conversation. For the company’s research and insights experts, this is a chance to shift their approach from reactive monitoring to proactive listening. This new approach may involve establishing best social listening practices across the organization, as well as reviewing the existing toolbox and potentially considering an upgrade. Another key area of focus would be to start building a better culture of data within the organization and making sure consumer insights are increasingly accounted for in the decision-making process.

2. Developing Intelligence

At this stage of DCI maturity, the voice of the customer is beginning to play a more important role in informing business decisions. Businesses at this stage are also beginning to tie customer insights to ROI, but there is still plenty of work to be done. 

At this point, an organization can begin to explore new data sources and different ways to blend them to get even deeper insights about what their customers need. For example, what could be achieved by blending social data with an organization's Net Promoter Score (NPS)? 

Real client example

We reviewed another Brandwatch client – a healthy snacks brand – on their performance within the VoC pillar. This client is aware of the importance of data and is already actively gathering a fair amount of insights from various sources. The challenge is that the collected data is fragmented and comes from different partners – there’s no single system in place to organize, process, and analyze the consumer insights at scale. 

How can the company advance its VoC efforts?

We recommend putting together frameworks around how the data is managed, and unifying this process across the organization. Data is fundamental to the decision-making process and, again, building a strong culture of data is a crucial part of maturing within digital consumer intelligence.

3. Digital consumer intelligence

At this ‘advanced’ level of maturity, the voice of the customer starts playing an active role in most strategic projects. 

“With the initial results of voice of the customer programs leading to more buy-in of customer insights across the organization, it's likely a dedicated individual or team is primarily responsible for collecting, analyzing, and centralizing consumer insights. With clean, historic data coupled with an ongoing collection of data, the types of analysis being completed are probing deeper questions,” Autenrieth explains. 

“Examples include audience segmentation based on customer demographics, and understanding motivations and perceptions,” says Autenrieth. At this point, the organization will start identifying competitive opportunities as well as white space opportunities (eg social selling and research) as it moves beyond brand centrism. 

Real client example:

A global fashion brand is already getting granular, segmenting different audiences and monitoring changes in conversations and trends within each specific segment. The challenge the brand is facing is linking these efforts to key business objectives. In order to close that gap, the organization needs to establish new practices for better measuring ROI.

Determining answers to the following questions can be helpful with this process:

• What are the goals of our programs (what does good look like?)
• What are we measuring already and what would we like to measure?
• Once we have the right measurements in place, how can we go about establishing a baseline as a frame of reference for comparing our results?

Answering these questions will often need a multi-team effort, and establishing these relationships is part of building the status of the voice of the customer throughout the organization. It’ll help everyone become more aligned and work towards the same goals.

4. Embedded digital consumer intelligence

At the ‘mature’ stage, VoC is integrated as a requirement in all strategic decisions. Customer insights are explicitly tied to hard ROI metrics that are easily quantifiable. 

This provides a balanced, contextual, and qualitative understanding of the customer. Practically, these programs may include journey mapping with customers during a new app or product launch, designing personas based on ethnographic or behavioral data, creating a jobs-to-be-done framework that informs a product or service, or looking at best-in-class brands to analyze behaviors or strategies to replicate or avoid.

Here are some quick real-life examples of companies and their VoC programs in action: 

1. A large healthcare organization used integrated datasets such as support emails, chat logs, customer feedback, and surveys, and ran a text and sentiment analysis over thousands of different data sets to discover influencers and identify health trends. 
2. A well-known retail corporation assigns a Guest ID number after the first consumer interaction with the brand, and then continues to build a customer profile by adding demographic information and tracking purchasing history. This program enables the company to make accurate predictions based on consumer purchasing patterns. This popular e-commerce business is truly customer-centric and heavily data-driven. It actively studies social media data to establish customer sentiment trends, and it's continuously listening to customer feedback from returns, refunds, customer service conversations, and product reviews. All customer insights are accessible across the organization via the Customer Insights Center of Excellence, and they feed into the company's strategic and operational planning processes.

How does the VoC pillar relate to the other pillars of DCI?

Governance

It's crucial that the data captured about customers online is in line with global and local regulations. Data management practices and processes have to be put in place to ensure an organization is gathering high-quality data throughout the data life cycle and to prevent data integrity issues. Such practices include consistent segmentation and personas, and standardized metrics across the organization. You can read more on creating an excellent data governance program here.

Insights flow

Consumer insights should be readily available and distributed throughout the company to inform strategic and tactical decisions. As Autenrieth explains: “We all know that the best decisions are made based on data. And we need to make sure that consumer insights are readily available throughout the organization.”  You can read more about improving insights flow here.

Speed to insight

To achieve excellent speed to insight, organizations need to create a process that enables them to get valuable consumer data into the hands of decision-makers. By accelerating in the area of speed to insight, customer complaints, potential reputational crises, or new trends can be picked up and acted on early to mitigate any risks or to take advantage of potential opportunities. The results of improving in the areas of speed to insight and VoC can be greater loyalty, increased customer lifetime value, and revenue growth, all based on a company taking customer feedback seriously and acting on it swiftly.

Culture of data 

For digital consumer intelligence to help direct strategic and tactical decisions, a strong culture of data needs to be encouraged at all levels of the organization. A good culture of data means an organization fosters respect for the voice of the customer.

Experimentation

Experimentation should be conducted with the consumer or customer in mind. “Remove the guesswork from your strategic decision-making,” says Autenrieth. “Think in the terms of ‘what do I need to find out about my consumers?’, and that should lead to the best research method.”

5 quick tips for a better VoC strategy

1. For organizations in the early stage

Audit existing opportunities that capture customer feedback. You have to know where you are currently to get where you want to go, so use this opportunity as a roadmap to identify what channels already exist, and where there are clear gaps or a lack of healthy, trusted data.