Voice of Customer

What is a Voice of Customer (VoC) program?

VoC tries to understand what a customer needs and wants and any concerns they may have, by continually gathering, analysing, and acting on customer feedback both at an aggregate and individual level. The programs are designed to inform constant quality improvement and ultimately increase brand advocacy.

VoC and the Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Many VoC programs have been built around the ever-increasingly popular metric Net Promoter Score (or NPS) which is a derivative of the traditional 11-point likelihood to recommend metric developed by Fred Reichheld.

Some programs in fact only have an NPS question followed by reasons for giving that score as their entire VoC program, however this presupposes (as its author purports) that NPS is the only metric you need to collect because it is correlated with growth – a claim that is the subject of much debate.

We believe it's best practice to augment NPS with other tried and tested metrics that have also shown strong links to growth.

Other metrics used in VoC

In many ways, VoC programs have morphed from traditional customer satisfaction surveys and, in many instances, these have evolved together into a single program under the VoC banner. Therefore, we will often see not only the NPS metric but other metrics such as:

Frequency of collection

There are several ways to run a VoC program: continuously - based on customer touchpoints, or periodically - based on a point in time. Choosing the right approach is determined by several factors including the level of customer engagement (low to high), the level of interaction with your brand (i.e. the number of touchpoints), the ease and convenience for your customer to participate and your appetite for measurement.

Getting it right is a bit of a balancing act and D&M Research can help design an optimal program for you.