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Designing and implementing a successful voice of customer strategy is no small feat. Goals need to be set, quantitative and qualitative data-gathering methods need to be chosen, and technology for synthesizing and analyzing data needs to be built or bought.
Hailey Whitney, senior manager of customer programs and intelligence at ActiveCampaign, said that while the company’s focus is on comprehensive customer feedback, this feedback is gathered at specific points to surface specific insights.
“At the advocacy stage, we use VoC data to identify customers who are most likely to become advocates for our brand and invite them to provide testimonials and collaborate on case studies,” Whitney said.
When it comes to gathering data, large quantitative data sets can often flesh out qualitative insights from interviews and surveys. There’s also space to be creative, as evidenced by Productive Edge. The company works in the healthcare space and gains industry insights through a podcast featuring expert interviews.
As for the question of build or buy, sometimes the answer is, “Why not both?” Of course, the answer is not as simple as that; read on to discover the best practices that enable ActiveCampaign, Productive Edge and two other customer-centric Chicago tech companies to capture and leverage the VoC.
Hailey Whitney
Sr. Manager, Customer Programs & Intelligence
Companies use ActiveCampaign’s suite of marketing and sales tools to automate tasks and focus on designing sales strategies.
Where is the best place for ActiveCampaign to gather the feedback needed to capture the voice of the customer?
We place a significant emphasis on obtaining comprehensive customer feedback throughout the entirety of the customer journey. Because we have over 185,000 customers, we can’t just monitor or rely on one channel for feedback, so we implemented several channels and VoC methodologies, which are seamlessly integrated into every touchpoint of our customer experience.
These include direct in-app and email surveys, a dedicated webpage for customers to submit and vote on ideas for new features and enhancements and the collection of feedback through customer-facing communication channels. We conduct targeted customer research that combines motions such as regular customer user interviews with our product team, hold user testing groups when we have new features and host monthly customer panels. We also monitor and capture engagement with social communities, including business review sites like G2.
We believe in the importance of gathering feedback at every stage, including not only post-purchase touchpoints but also pre-purchase touchpoints.”
How do you synthesize this data in order to capture deeper insights into your customers’ behaviors and preferences? What tools, technologies or methodologies do you use to accomplish this?
We have several strategies that we use to categorize and analyze qualitative feedback. One involves utilizing a custom feedback intake and categorization process, which captures the sentiment and topic of each feedback item. This data is then surfaced through our business intelligence and analytics visualization tool, which enables us to identify common themes and track trends over time. This process also allows us to measure impact through a scoring methodology we use to understand which parts of our product are being more positively talked about and which ones have a more negative sentiment.
In addition, our BI tool allows us to layer in additional data sources such as customer behavior and demographic data to enrich our understanding and assess roadmap prioritization. To gather feedback at scale, we utilize surveying tools like Qualtrics, which employs intelligent text analysis to help us analyze responses. Additionally, we use a front-facing feedback management system, which serves as a central place for customers to collectively share and vote on ideas and suggestions for product enhancements and new features.
How do you leverage VoC to improve the different stages of the customer journey or to inform your product/marketing/CS strategies?
We believe in the importance of gathering feedback from customers at every stage of their journey, including not only post-purchase touchpoints but also pre-purchase touchpoints. For instance, our sales reps are required to provide details on deals that were lost to a competitor before they close them in our CRM. We use this information to inform our product roadmap and to help us craft better messaging and provide insightful data for our sales team. In our post-buyer journey, we continue to gather feedback through a variety of methods.
We deploy a CSAT survey after each support interaction and send a survey automatically after onboarding or migration to identify areas for improvement. We also send a quarterly NPS survey to both account owners and users, which helps us identify opportunities for improving the overall product experience and informs our education team on ways to improve their content. At the advocacy stage, we use VoC data to identify customers who are most likely to become advocates for our brand and invite them to provide testimonials and collaborate with us for case studies.
Sarah Speigle
Senior Product Manager, Local Strategy
Companies use ReviewTrackers to stay on the pulse of customer sentiment. Its software collects and analyzes reviews from more than 100 platforms to provide insights on the customer experience, a company’s reputation, how the competition compares and more.
Where is the best place for ReviewTrackers to gather the feedback needed to capture the voice of the customer? And why?
We’re super fortunate that ReviewTrackers views our comprehension of customer needs and wants not as a nice-to-have but instead as fundamental to the success of the company. It really is empathy first here: Top-down, we’re encouraged to care about the user and that ethos is clear in the types of enhancements we go after when it comes time to build. We recently built a microsurvey product that we methodically use to survey our own clients in addition to helping them do the same with their customers.
Additional investment in tools like digital experience analytics platforms and searchable call recordings is huge and, collectively, it’s super helpful to source insights at scale. We’re excited to be a part of that. And finally, for many of us, nothing can replace direct conversations with someone engaging with your product. Product managers seek to have a relatively high volume of these conversations monthly; hearing what’s working and what isn’t or dreaming with a customer on what could be is very powerful and engaging. It really builds relationships as much as it fosters the next wave of roadmap potential.
In a culture where the collective genuinely cares about customer experience, it isn’t hard to source problems to solve.”
How do you synthesize this data in order to capture deeper insights into your customers’ behaviors and preferences? What tools, technologies or methodologies do you use to accomplish this?
We use many tools, including call recording, digital experience analytics, CRM, billing softwares and our own microsurvey product to source VoC insights. Most have some level of quantitative reporting functionality. We might leverage this ability to establish and compare the prospective value of feature requests or to determine the frequency of a bug’s occurrence over time. Hard data will always be valuable when determining how to deliver maximum value to customers.
With that said, in many industries it is difficult to achieve a sufficient data set to draw concrete, quant-based VoC takeaways, and so we regularly look to our product managers to make qualitative judgements. Customer conversations are crucial to this end because they facilitate comprehension and engagement with the larger “why” rather than limiting understanding to a single feature.
The real magic happens when the qualitative and quantitative meet, when an idea is sparked for a product manager in a customer call and they have a wealth of tools and data to easily validate that inkling and turn it into something actionable that drives value as quickly as possible.
How do you leverage VoC to improve the different stages of the customer journey or to inform your product/marketing/CS strategies?
In a culture where the collective genuinely cares about customer experience, it isn’t hard to source problems to solve. From there it comes down to what is the most effective way to solve that problem. Sometimes it’s a matter of building when we’ve deemed there is real value for multiple users in adding functionality to the platform. We prioritize enhancements that add the most value and we prize the health and stability of our platform, so while we build and release quickly, we don’t make the choice to build lightly.
That’s where other teams, specifically customer success, shine. They’re fundamental in the discovery efforts of understanding VoC, but are also the steam engine behind operationalized or managed-service solutions that are often more efficient value-adds than a code-based approach. Recently, we saw a melding of the two when a large client required custom reporting. Some of the use cases were reflected in other customers’ needs and they are now incorporated into our platform. Others, highly-specific in nature, were packaged into an appropriate managed services flow. Boom: value delivered.
Marisa Knopman
VP, SI&A Growth
Bounteous is a digital experience consultancy that helps companies build new digital experiences for consumers.
Where is the best place for Bounteous to gather the feedback needed to capture the voice of the customer?
We often use “voice of the customer” as a shorthand for customer understanding and insight. To really understand customers and their needs, we must look beyond the voice; we must also observe and pay attention to nonverbal emotions and cues, which often point to unmet or implicit needs. The voice matters, but customers express values and needs through subtle whispers as well.
There are many ways to get to customer understanding: from pouring through customer service call logs to co-creating prototypes and directly talking with customers as they navigate through an experience. For online experiences, we might conduct session replays, following users as they try to complete an objective or a task, like opening an account or completing a transaction.
The real magic happens when our teams make the leap from data to insight. In that leap we try to answer questions like: Why did the customer abandon an experience? Why did the customer develop a workaround to solve a problem? These answers start to point to real customer needs, mental frameworks, assumptions and so on.
The leap from data to insight occurs when we actually get underneath intention, perception, motivations or a set of needs.”
How do you synthesize this data in order to capture deeper insights into your customers’ behaviors and preferences? What tools, technologies or methodologies do you use to accomplish this?
Data is very good at offering a view into what is happening but lacks a perspective into why something is happening. The leap from data to insight occurs when we actually get underneath intention, perception, motivations or a set of needs. Only then can we take meaningful action and design new experiences, journeys and solutions. At Bounteous, we call this a critical insight, and it’s a key driver in the way we use our co-innovation methodology to meet customer needs.
We look at both digital footprints as well as non-digital signals to get a broad view of what matters to customers and why. Sometimes we layer third-party data into our analysis to broaden our purview and scope, to uncover interesting connections and build a cohesive picture of understanding.
The list of available customer data and research tools at our disposal keeps growing. Additionally, our teams make it a practice to implement measurement strategies and data and analytics feedback loops into our co-innovation client partnerships. This helps us track what’s working, what’s not and points to areas worth digging deeper into on an ongoing basis.
How do you leverage VoC to improve the different stages of the customer journey or to inform your product/marketing/CS strategies?
Uncovering and leveraging customer insight is critically important to all of our clients. In some cases, we are optimizing an existing experience and in others we are driving net-new experiences. Our work with a popular men’s personal care brand known for its deeply loyal customer base is a good example of both.
The company needed a roadmap to capture the next wave of growth from innovation efforts and a better understanding of what motivates customer groups. Bounteous conducted a qualitative deep dive into how people think, feel, buy and use personal care products. We validated our findings with a national quantitative research study of the addressable market. We developed a digital marketing and media strategy across their chosen target segments relevant to each audiences’ specific nuances.
Our goal is to leverage customer motivations to support journeys and build experiences that will deepen the relationship between our client brands and their customers. Whether we are removing pain points along a journey or identifying new opportunities to create value, our objective is to empower that relationship.
Katia Loboda
Marketing Manager
Productive Edge is a digital consulting firm that specializes in designing and delivering digital products for companies in the healthcare industry.
Where is the best place for Productive Edge to gather the feedback needed to capture the voice of the customer?
Our mission is to deliver exceptional services, solutions and experiences to clients, and as such, it’s imperative for us to deeply understand their challenges and goals. We go straight to the source for insights and feedback – our clients. We’ve introduced a live interview and podcast series called “The Health/Tech Edge.” Our team interviews clients within the healthcare industry to deepen our understanding of industry and organizational challenges, trends and opportunities. These first-hand insights allow us to better address concerns and continuously improve our services to provide the best possible experiences.
Through the live interviews on our podcast, we gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and preference.”
How do you synthesize this data in order to capture deeper insights into your customers’ behaviors and preferences? What tools, technologies or methodologies do you use to accomplish this?
Productive Edge captures deeper insight into customer behavior by utilizing social media monitoring, email engagement and interviews through various channels, including social media and direct outreach. We analyze customer interactions and conversations with our social media content to identify areas for improvement and respond to concerns in real-time.
Direct emails with surveys and targeted content help us track engagement and gather feedback quickly, while interviews give us a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences. By analyzing data from these methods, we identify common themes and pain points in the customer journey and take action to address them, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
How do you leverage VoC to improve the different stages of the customer journey or to inform your product/marketing/CS strategies?
We recognize that capturing the voice of the customer is crucial for enhancing the customer journey, improving our products and services and driving business growth. Through the live interviews on our podcast, we gain a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences, which helps us develop more effective strategies for customers. Additionally, through social media monitoring and direct outreach with surveys, targeted content and news and events, we are able to track engagement and gather feedback to fine-tune marketing messaging, improve and expand products and services offerings, and drive customer success.
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