Show me consumer intelligence in action!
Activating the voice of the customer isn’t just about delivering rock-star customer service. While that is incredibly important, there’s a knack for capturing the voice of the customer in a way that produces tangible results. If you’re short on time, feel free to skip straight to the detailed list of VoC tools I’ve thrown together.
Table of contents
- What does voice of the customer mean?
- Why is voice of the customer important?
- What are voice of the customer tools?
- Which voice of the customer tools to use
What does voice of the customer mean?
Let’s start with the basics. What is the voice of the customer and why is it so important for marketing and optimizing your business?
To put it plainly, voice of the customer is a term that describes gathering your customer’s preferences. Their desires, expectations, and thoughts. How they feel about your brand, product, or service.
By investing in proper voice of the customer analysis, you’re able to collect feedback to make better decisions. Collecting insights on the wants and needs of consumers will help you drive improvements. The end goal is to create the best customer experience possible.
Target is just so much more peaceful than Walmart
— ً (@viagrafaII) May 4, 2021
Walmart might want to tap into this consumer’s reasoning.
Data collection of your customer’s experiences, preferences, and aversions is often a tricky process. How an individual feels about a given product, topic, or industry is rooted in their experience.
And, experiences are personal, at times emotional, and very rarely black and white. It can be easy to reduce a consumer to just a number, but collecting customer sentiment will enable you to come out on top in the long run.
Why is voice of the customer important?
Because feedback is important. The biggest brands in the world would be nowhere without customer feedback. Without improvement, we’d just be stuck where we’re at, on a plateau forever. Seems a bit bleak, no?
Oatly is liable to stumble upon some fantastic new flavors in their comments section.
How exactly does listening to the voice of the customer help you improve your company? Glad you asked. There’s a ton of benefits from implementing VoC tactics, but here’s a quick summary of all the magic a voice of the customer tool can do:
- Improve your product: This includes product development, product conception, you name it! You’re creating a product for consumers, so wouldn’t what they think matter most?
- Develop customer experience: Ahh yes. The Holy Grail that is CX. Strive for customer satisfaction in everything that you do.
- Avoid crisis: Crisis out of the blue? No thanks. By keeping an eye out for what your customers like and specifically dislike, you can steer clear of a PR crisis.
- Boost sales: By getting valuable input about the customer journey, you’re sure to increase sales.
Without a detailed idea of what your audience wants or needs, you’re more liable to trip up or make costly mistakes that needn’t have happened. So play your cards right, and invest in the proper tools for capturing the voice of the customer.
What are voice of the customer tools?
Simply put, voice of the customer tools are solutions that enable you to better understand your customer. Knowing what consumers are thinking will lead you to become a more customer-centric brand.
VoC solutions are programs or platforms that collect vital customer information. Their opinions, experiences, views, feelings. How they feel about the weather, pineapple on pizza, or the latest King Arthur movie. The data you gather from voice of the customer platforms help you make informed decisions.
This emoji cloud is representative of consumers’ feelings about pineapple pizza.
What tool you decide to use is up to you. Some knights ride into battle wielding a broadsword, while others prefer a spear or a nice solid club.
VoC programs are equally diverse. They can be as clear-cut as a quick survey, or as sophisticated as an integrated analytics model that predicts which product performs best.
Which voice of the customer tools to use
Alright, let’s get into the good stuff. A whole bunch of companies collect consumer feedback, but not as many act on it. Why shouldn’t you be the one that takes the leap? Use the tools below to begin leveraging the voice of your customers.
- Talkwalker
- Alchemer
- Reviews.io
- Olark
- Zendesk
- Medallia
- SentiSum
- GetFeedback
- Ask Nicely
Talkwalker | From intelligence to impact
Here at Talkwalker, we put the consumer at the heart of all we do. Activate the voice of the customer in real time by making sense of consumer feedback across all channels.
Whether you’re looking to better understand your VoC analytics or improve customer relationships, we’ll help you capture the voice of your customer without headaches.
Key products to help you meet customer expectations:
- Analytics: Never miss out on VoC conversations with a platform that analyzes online, social, print, and TV/radio content all in one place. Tap into the voice of the customer in 187 languages!
- Quick Search: This convenient feature allows you to find trending content popular among your consumers to improve your campaigns and communication. Discover valuable details about consumer insights complete with an accessible, clear, and visually appealing dashboard view.
- Paid Social: More of a defensive player? Use Talkwalker’s AI-powered sentiment analysis and alerts to track the voice of the customer and react quickly to any risky situations.
Talkwalker’s analytics provides insights on a variety of metrics.
Alchemer | A customer-centric transformation
Looking for a makeover? Offering a variety of services, Alchemer helps you truly become a customer-centric organization. They focus on finding and keeping customers by providing hyper-personalized solutions. Alchemer allows you to transform your business in 5 key ways:
- Surveys: Collect customer data by applying surveys to systems you already use
- Workflows: Gather and workflow feedback to ensure your customers stay at the heart of your business. Make sure everyone’s on the same page internally!
- Audience: Identify, access, and manage your audience in a way that drives results.
- Communicate: Whether you want to use emails, SMS, video, or even audio, Alchemer has endless options so you can interact with the people providing feedback as well as analyzing it.
- Analyze: Combine and leverage your intelligence apps, sales software, analytics tools, and more. Who said you had to start from scratch?
Make customer centricity the heart of your business.
Reviews.io | Reviews for reliable growth
Nothing builds trust like a genuine review from a satisfied customer. Reviews.io makes this the focal point of their platform, offering services that help you collect genuine reviews that boost click-through response. Check them out to build your brand with the voice of the customer leading the charge.
Here are just a few of their many useful features:
- Google Seller Ratings
- In-store Reviews
- Video Reviews
- Reviews Adverts
- Reviews in Salesforce
- Review Publishing
- Social Proof
- SMS Reviews
For you nay-sayers, they can even build eye-catching, creative video reviews from your customers. That’s certainly one way to get someone’s attention!
Authentic reviews? Sign me up!
Olark | Listen and learn with live chat software
Even before the pandemic, getting a customer face-to-face wasn’t always an option. That’s why Olark’s live chat is so handy. Talk in real time, organize your customer data, and leverage chat insights to optimize your products and services.
Their handy-dandy features include:
- Customization: Customize your chatbox that aligns with your website even as it evolves. Gotta keep your branding consistent!
- Automation: Time is money, so automating specific messages triggered by customer behavior is sure to help.
- Reporting: Olark's live chat reporting provides info on your chat volume, ratings, and agent activity for smarter decisions in real time.
- Searchable transcripts: Better understand your customers with a detailed transcript archive. This treasure trove is full of actionable info such as customer contact details, profile data, or notes to follow up.
Customizable chatbox for even more efficient conversations.
Zendesk | Champions of customer service
Zendesk employs a powerful combo of broad customer service expertise and deep product knowledge for a unique customer experience. They ensure you optimize your business even as it evolves, providing CX operations with a scalable solution. Customer service to action voice of the customer, who would’ve thought.
Useful tidbits to try out:
- Messaging: Provide support to customers no matter how they prefer to interact with you, whether that’s over messaging, live chat, social, email, a call, or by homing pigeon.
- Help center: Allow customers to help themselves with a help center and community forum. Plus, it saves you time!
- AI-powered bots: Personalize the experience for each customer, even as you scale.
- Agent workspace: Provide more personalized support to customers with one unified agent workspace.
Find your zen and listen to your customers.
Medallia | Meet expectations in real time
Communication is key. Therefore, how you go about it is of paramount importance. Medallia allows you to access one trusted view of the voice of your customers, wherever and however they choose to connect with you.
Perks from Medallia:
- Conversations: Reach your customers through SMS and messaging.
- Speech: Get powerful insights from every call.
- Digital: Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in your customers’ journey.
- Social: Improve revenue by managing your social media channels with social listening.
- Surveys: Set your brand apart with direct feedback.
- Video: Change how people interact with and experience your business.
Ensure customer support that would win you a gold medal.
SentiSum | AI-powered tagging and automation
What’s another way to tackle voice of the customer? Making sure your teams have everything they need. SentiSum does this by providing AI-powered tagging and automation for support teams.
Automated features to try out:
- 100% CSAT insights: Automated, granular analytics for context and sentiment.
- Prioritization: Respond faster to tickets that require urgency.
- Ticket routing: Save time on assigning tasks.
- Monitor reviews: Make sure negative reviews are taken care of in time.
- Response suggestions: Access automated responses so your agents can save time.
Make sure your teams are well equipped with valuable info.
GetFeedback | Keep up with your customers
This holistic CX platform gives you everything you need to continuously improve. True to its name, Getfeedback does exactly that. Flexible and easy-to-use, this platform allows you to add media and make other modifications to suit your needs.
Plus, you can even connect your CX data with your Salesforce customer data. Automate survey distribution, assign follow-up tasks, and give your team valuable insights so that they can keep up with customers in a constantly shifting world. Head over to their website and see how to take customer service to the next level.
- GetFeedback platform: Adaptable CX program for your specific needs.
- Direct: Get customer feedback via email and SMS.
- Digital: Real-time feedback on websites as well as mobile apps.
Go out there and get it.
Ask Nicely | Making CX awesome
As aptly named as GetFeedback, this VoC software gives your real-time customer feedback in a neatly packaged platform. Using Ask Nicely is basically like having a coach that you can carry around in your pocket. Motivate and empower your frontline workers to guarantee that every customer experience is awesome.
The things you can do with Ask Nicely:
- Feedback: Measure, understand, and act on customer feedback.
- Frontline: Make sure your frontline teams are motivated and aligned with a super convenient app.
- Insights: Identify where you’re doing well with growth metrics and increase referrals.
They even have a handy customer experience blog with helpful topics like metrics for tracking customer satisfaction and how to empower your frontline employees. Maybe being nice really does pay!
Encourage your team from afar.
Listen to the voice of your customer
There you have it. Some details on the incredible value of implementing VoC strategy, and 9 voice of the customer tools that will help you better understand consumers, optimize your brand, and boost business.
Still unsure? Let me prove how helpful voice of the customer analytics can be. Take just a few seconds to check out our free consumer intelligence dashboard for some super valuable insights!
