How customer success teams can improve customer retention with VOC?

Did you know Zara only spends 0.3%t of sales on advertising?

And doesn’t have much marketing to speak of!!

Yet, it has the most loyal customer base. 

– But, why?

Well, one thing that Zara does is, it knows what to focus on and how to make its customers happy. That’s why they take customer feedback SERIOUSLY. 

And that’s where VOC comes into the picture.

So, what is VOC?

Voice of Customer (VOC) – Brief

Customer feedback is crucial for any business’ growth. And a VOC program helps businesses gather customer feedback through multiple channels and enable customer-centricity across the organization.  

And not just that, an efficient VOC program helps you recognize what is working and what is not, identify the areas of improvement, and listen to and resolve customer issues in time.

When you focus on customer expectations, resolve customer issues in time, and improve customer experience, you are boosting customer satisfaction and giving them a reason to stay with you.

That’s why an efficient VOC program is critical for any business. — It helps you retain your customers.

And that’s why 82% of companies say that retaining a customer is less expensive than acquiring a new one. That’s why focusing on customer retention is important and a lucrative VOC program helps you achieve it. 

Let’s deep dive into this and understand how you can use the VOC program to improve customer retention.

How can you improve customer retention with the VOC program? 

A VOC program helps you achieve the following.

• Actively listen to your customers
• Gather comprehensive customer insights from multiple channels 
• Take instant action on accumulated feedback 
• Improve your products and services
• Optimize your marketing efforts 
• Launch a customer loyalty program
• Enhance customer experience 

Now let’s look at each point in detail. 

1. Actively listen to your customers 

To deliver a great customer experience and make your customers stay with you, you need to listen to them. And a VOC program is the best approach to listening to your customers and understanding their expectations.

VOC program lets you listen to your customers actively by sending NPS, CES, CSAT, and other surveys on multiple channels. Only when you directly hear from them and talk to them about your brand, service, or product, that you’ll know what needs to be done.

Sending a survey is the first step, analyzing the gathered feedback is another story. This brings us to the second point. 👇

2. VOC offers comprehensive customer insights from multiple channels 

After collecting the feedback from all the channels, it’s important to analyze each feedback and understand what your customers are saying, what their top complaints are, and what’s their sentiment when they interact with your brand.

Analyzing feedback is easy when you get 100-200 pieces of feedback. But what to do when you get feedback in thousands?

In such instances, tools like Text Analysis come in handy. 

Text analysis helps you analyze all the collected feedback and gives you top trends and sentiments instantly. Here’s an example.

Now that you have the customer insights, you know which features your customers are liking, what changes are required in the product, which service works best, where is the gap in the customer journey, and a lot more.

Now what to do with these customer insights? – Take action on it.

3. Take instant action on accumulated feedback 

Collecting feedback is of no use if you won’t take any action on it. After getting insights on customer feedback, identify the issue from the trends. Work on the issues and inform them that you’ve listened to them. And after you’ve resolved the issues, communicate to them that their issues have been resolved. Basically, close the feedback loop as soon as you have customer insights. 

This will significantly boost your customer retention rate.

Pepsi did the same!

Create a VOC program with SurveySensum. Request a Demo for Free →

4. Improve your products and services

Listening to the voice of the customer also helps you improve your products and services. Along with complaints, customers also share what they want to see in your product, a new feature, a new template, and more. They give you ideas for your product roadmap. 

And not just that, your loyal customers are the best people to test your product. Since they are the consumers, they will share their honest feedback on what’s working and what’s not. And also will share their expectations helping you create the best product and deliver an incredible service.

But if you’re not listening to them then you are at a LOSS. If you won’t listen to them, then your customers will move past you to where they are valued, most probably your competitors.

5. Optimize your marketing strategies 

VOC program can also help you optimize your marketing strategies and deliver to the customers’ needs more suitably by using customer feedback appropriately.

You can use this data to run campaigns and spread awareness about your products and services in the market. This will help you to invite new customers and simultaneously update your existing customers about your new product launch, feature launch, event, etc.   

After knowing customer expectations, and requirements, you can also predict what your customers need in the future and then, you can align your marketing efforts.  Also, you can use your customer’s language to build customer relationships through your marketing.  

6. Launch a customer loyalty program 

Your loyal customers are marketing your brand, increasing referrals, and spreading good Word of Mouth (WoM) amongst their friends, family, colleagues, and on the web i.e., social media channels and much more. 

So, what are you giving to your loyal customers in return?

NOTHING? 

Well, it’s time to make them feel special.

This is the time to give a platform to your loyal customers. Invite them as chief guests or speakers to share their entire customer experience and journey with others. 

Launch a customer loyalty program and give vouchers, offers, discounts, or loyalty points to appreciate them for being loyal customers and for motivating them to be part of premier customers. 

Note: Customer loyalty programs and customer retention plans are intended to increase revenue. So, I hope you’re doing it right 😉 

7. Enhance customer experience 

With 9 out of 10 businesses competing on customer experience, it’s the organizations that take customer experience seriously that will stand out from the noise and win loyal customers over.

That’s why focus on keeping your customers happy and satisfied at all times.

Remember, happy customers, are twice as motivated to share their good brand experience with their friends or colleagues or on social media platforms. 

So, enhance customer experience by giving them the best services. Empathize with them to build great customer relationships to make sure they stay by your side. 

Another thing to note is that closing the loop should be your team’s priority. To set the priority, gather customer feedback in real-time, analyze the feedback, work on the issues and inform the customers about it. (And SurveySensum is a great tool to help you with that). So enable your CX team to deliver the best value IN TIME.

Create a VOC program with SurveySensum. Request a Demo for Free →

Now you understand how you can leverage VOC to retain your customers. Let’s learn how to calculate customer retention rates. 

Calculating customer retention rate 

The customer retention rate is calculated on your previous existing customers who use your products and services over a period of time. So, to calculate this, first, you need to select the tenure for which you want to calculate and then segregate the number of customers at the starting time, ending time, and new customers added during that tenure. 

After segregating, use this formula while calculating the customer retention rate.

Formula to calculate the Customer Retention Rate

For example, you chose the tenure from 2019-2022 i.e, 3 years, 

Customers in the starting year i.e., in January 2019, let’s say 10,  

Customers in the ending year i.e., in December 2022 are 80 and

New customers over the whole 3 years are 100

The customer retention rate will be: 

{(80-10) / 100} X 100 = 70% 

Thus, your customer retention rate is 70%. 

Use this formula to calculate the customer retention rate as retaining your existing customers is less expensive because acquiring a new customer can actually cost you five times more.  

To recapitulate, 

VOC programs have the potential to make your business double. Because with this program you can collect, listen, analyze and take action on customer feedback. So, start leveraging the VOC program and retain your valuable customers by following the 6 points given above.