Voice of customer examples and tips

Voice of customer examples and tips

If an organization’s goal is to put the customer first, the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is an important tool. When you meet the VoC, you understand who your customers are, what they expect from your product or service, and you can meet all these expectations.

So when you want to start a customer-centric organization, the voice of customer examples is very important. Therefore, in this blog, we explain to you all about what exactly this term means and how you can apply the tool in a structured way within your own organization. We also give you 3 tips on how to map out the Voice of the Customer.

Collecting data to get to the Voice of the Customer

Using the following 3 tips, it becomes easier to find out where the wishes of the customer lie (this is the voice of customer examples).

• Use open-ended questions. This gives your customer the opportunity to develop an answer within his/her own frame of reference. If you work with closed questions, the answers are limited, so useful information may not be included. In addition, the customer may not always be aware of certain product or service options. When asking questions, the “5x why?” method is a useful tool to get to the essence of a customer’s desire.
• Walk through the process from the eyes of the customer through a Customer Journey Mapping. In this, you ask questions such as “When do we interact with customers?” and “How do customers experience the process? This ultimately allows you to make the customer journey as relevant, differentiated and “fluid” as possible.
• What many overlook is that the voice of customer examples is an ongoing process, with continuous change over time. As technology advances, this process is further accelerated. This makes it extra important to maintain close contact with the customer to keep up with these developments.

How do you maintain customer contact?

As we described above, it is essential to maintain good customer contact. This is because it is a continuous process, with changes taking place. We give you 3 tools that will help you maintain this contact in an effective and efficient way:

• Voice of the Customer employee: This is an employee who pays attention within his or her company only to the voice of customer examples and everything around it.
• Co-Creation: When developing products or services, co-creation is used when the organization works with the customer. This gives your customer a say and, as an organization, you get to know more about what is important to your customer.
• Net Promoter Score: This is a relatively simple but very powerful tool when you want to measure customer satisfaction. It also gives an indication of the growth potential of the product or company.

The “VoC” culture

There are more and more organizations trying to continuously create value for their customer in the most efficient way possible, using tools such as Lean or Six Sigma. This continuous improvement of the value chain, creates positive effects. Customer demand is very important here. Contact with both the direct purchaser of the product and (in)direct colleagues must be maintained continuously to avoid waste and to work in the most efficient way. When you know what your customer’s needs are, you also know which products you need and which ones you don’t.

When you ensure that engaging with the Voice of the Customer becomes a daily action, you create a VoC culture. The result? Your customers gain more trust in the organization and waste is reduced!

Maak de Voice of the Customer meetbaar

Mapping the Voice of the Customer is harder than many think. A few examples of problems that are more common are:

• Customers want more certainty about delivery on the agreed date;
• Customers want faster answers to their questions;
• Customer services did not answer the customer’s question;
• Customers want more insight into delivery times.

Therefore, it is important to make VoC measurable. By using the Critical To Quality (CTQ) tool, it becomes possible to make the VoC concrete. With this tool, you connect critical quality characteristics to customer requirements, making it clearer exactly what the customer wants.

Once this is done, you can then use the KANO model to prioritize and structure the customer’s wants.

What does user centered design mean?

User centered design is a term used to talk about processes that address user characteristics, habits or preferences when designing a product. In a sense, user centered design is what user centered design sounds like: people design the product around the user’s needs, rather than the user meeting the design.

Read more about user centered design!