Voice of the customer is the process of identifying customer expectations and preferences. This is a feedback form from a client, in which he shares information about his impressions of the company’s product.
Feedback is recorded through phone calls or e-mail messages, which are usually initiated by the marketing department of the company. Through this process, a company can improve its reputation and its products so that they meet customer expectations. Through this feedback, customers have a positive experience of the products they purchase as the company takes steps to improve those products.
Customer voice encompasses everything that users say and write about a business and helps bridge the gap between expectations and actual company experience. And also increase loyalty – if the customer experience of your products is at a high level, do not hesitate, they will return to you more often. Work on the Voice of the Customer methodology on sites usually consists of three stages:
1. Gathering information
At the first stage, we investigate problem areas on the site using web analytics systems. These can be high churn rates, bounce rates, and a strong drop in conversion. Usually, already at this moment, it becomes clear what questions and in what parts of the site to ask users.
The feedback we collect is of two types: passive and active. Passive is when you have nothing to do with whether they write you something or leave you in languid ignorance. For example, when users write about problems in the “Site Feedback” widget or in a special feedback form. The special value of such comments is that they are left right at the moment.
We have many times overcome the doubts of customers that someone would leave such feedback. Usually, this veil leaves the eyes after the first 15-20 reviews are received. The fact is that, unlike, for example, polls in email newsletters, the user has just encountered some kind of barrier. And he urgently needs to talk about it. A week later, when he receives a letter with a survey, he will no longer remember the details of his journey through the site.
Active feedback is when you yourself initiate a dialogue with the user with polls, checkout forms, embedded in a page with content blocks, and so on. The key is to ask the right questions at the right time and in the right place. Then the user will not be confused by either pop-ups or the need to write something. You will catch him exactly at the moment when he is almost ready for dialogue.
Active feedback is your unique chance to hear the user and get cool insights. It sounds corny, but if you didn’t ask him a question, you would never know his opinion. Thus, having identified the problem areas of the site, we decide which sections of the user path we need to understand more deeply. We select the necessary tools for this and formulate the right questions.
2. Categorizing and prioritizing feedback
Collecting feedback is just the tip of the iceberg. The most interesting thing starts at the stage of its processing. If you blindly implement everything that they write to you, you will spend a lot of time and not the fact that you will do better. In addition, the opinions of users do not always coincide when it comes to, for example, features.
To see the whole picture, we categorize reviews by parent and child categories. The result is branches of categories that are conveniently categorized by the number of mentions. An example of such a thread: Checkout / Payment. And if in one of the categories there are 500 reviews, while others do not even reach 100, it becomes clear what is “burning” right now, and what can be postponed until better times.
3. Analysis and decision making
In addition to prioritization, reviews are analyzed in web analytics systems. We link them to Google Analytics. This allows, for example, to reproduce the errors that users write about – in the WebVisor, see the session record and see with your own eyes what happened.
Or follow the path of a customer who told about search errors – in Google Analytics, visualize what exactly he was looking for. Continuous analysis of reviews not only forms the developer backlog, but also helps to carry out major redesigns, evaluate new product features, and monitor the dynamics of website satisfaction.
