Voice of Customer is nothing new. But between rising customer expectations, and as a result, the rise of CX as today’s competitive frontier, and advances in technology, organizations are rethinking their approach. To understand what’s changing and why we combined findings across the year of customer voice data and a survey of CX professionals. Check out our infographic that highlights the top five things to know about VoC in 2021. 

Too often, when organizations think about getting started with a traditional Voice of Customer program, things generally go one of two ways: 

You’d be hard pressed to find an executive at any company billing itself as customer-centric who will say that listening to the customer voice isn’t important. So it’s quite possible that a Voice of Customer initiative has been on your radar for some time, but it’s also quite possible that your version still exists as a quarterly survey program, or maybe as an aspirational bullet point in an internal strategy deck. Unfortunately, VoC initiatives have long been easy to cast aside in favor of priorities perceived as lower effort and higher impact. But VoC has come a long way — it’s never been more important to have a sound strategy in place, nor has it ever been more achievable to drive and measure positive outcomes for your customers and your organization. Best-in-class CX organizations are trading old-school VoC programs for VoC Ops, a new-action-oriented approach that applies a deep understanding of your holistic customer voice to daily, weekly and long-term decisions that measurably improve CX. 

Traditional Voice of Customer approaches fall short of measurable impact because they often rely on data that is siloed, one-dimensional and stale. Poor CX data management results in an inaccurate and illegible portrayal of the customer voice, and uncertainty about how to improve CX. According to Forrester, 77% of companies say that they don’t model the drivers of CX quality regularly, leaving them in the dark about what matters most to their customers. 

Used correctly, Voice of Customer is one of the most impactful ways you can improve your company's customer experience. According to a recent HBR Salesforce report, companies agree that customer-sourced "data has a clear role to play in developing a superior customer experience." Yet only 23% actually act on the customer feedback they receive. 

Data is growing by leaps and bounds, the convergence of extremely large data sets both structured and unstructured define Big Data. The increasing awareness of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices among organizations and volume, variety, velocity and veracity at which data is generated have caught the attention of the enterprise in a bid to enhance digital technologies and guide digital transformation.

The emergence of customer experience (CX) as a primary differentiator has turned up the volume on Voice of Customer (VoC) programs. When 84% of customers say that experience is just as important as products and services, the pressure is on for organizations (especially those dependent on recurring revenue) to listen to their customer voice. Without incorporating VoC insights into the product, organizations lose touch of what their customers need.