Voice of Customer Analytics To Reinvent Customer Experience in Your Retail Business

“VoC analytics can serve as a useful addition to customer journey analytics, providing insight into the motivations and thoughts of individuals and segments,” said Lizzy Foo Kune, Senior Director Analyst Gartner for Marketers.

Without considering what customers are getting and going through in their journey, your brands cannot succeed. Especially in the retail sector, pleasing customers is of utmost importance for generating higher ROI. As processed customer data comes with meaningful information regarding customer-satisfying opportunities, you can leverage it to increase the customer base for your retail business.

Further, Your brand must acknowledge customer pain points and address the issues by hearing the voice of the customer with the help of analytics to bring better solutions for the customers. In this article, you will learn about the connection between Voice of Customer analytics and customer experience and how VoC analytics assist retailers in running a successful business.

What is Voice of Customer Analytics?

Voice of customer analytics helps retail businesses by gathering and analyzing feedback from customers about their experiences with the company. This feedback can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction, preferences, and expectations. This data can help retailers make informed decisions about their products, services, and marketing strategies. It can also help them identify areas of improvement and opportunities for growth.

VoC analytics also provides an opportunity for retailers to engage with their customers on a more personal level, allowing them to build stronger relationships and loyalty.

Link Between Voice of Customer Analytics and Customer Experience

Adobe's 2022 digital trends report reveals that almost 60% of senior executives rank data and insights as their top technological priority for the year ahead, and 37% of marketing and IT practitioners admit that a huge barrier to great customer experiences is poor integration between their technology systems.

In this digital era, customer experience is one of the top factors driving customer decisions. You need to know what customers are asking for to provide best-in-class customer experiences. And for that, VoC analytics is an apt technological solution to stay quick and relevant. By analyzing gathered VoC data, your brand can tap into customer insights that showcase various aspects that support your business operations to remain customer-centric.

You must utilize the proper customer experience strategy and suitable technologies to sync operations to get fruitful outputs from the VoC analytics program. Or, if you do not want to go for an in-house team, opt for a trustworthy customer experience analytics platform that can produce the required valuable insights for you.

To illustrate, Clootrack, a CX analytics platform, analyzed 243,917 total customer conversations for its Customer Experience Analysis Of D2C Beauty and Cosmetic Brands in The USA to reveal the top 5 factors that indicate why a customer selects or rejects a makeup product.

Using this insight, any D2C brand can enhance customer experience by emphasizing its strong points and reworking weak points. The brand can actively run marketing campaigns and promote the areas where the customers show the most interest to increase revenue. For the weaker sections, the brand can employ analytics to identify customer issues and devise solutions considering those problems for better results.

Similarly, VoC analytics work for every industry and help brands to deliver top-notch customer experiences.

How Does Voice of Customer Analytics Help Retail Businesses?

According to Statista, global retail sales were projected to amount to around 31.7 trillion U.S. dollars by 2025, up from approximately 23.74 trillion U.S. dollars in 2020.

And if you are a retailer, there is a high chance you are going to increase sales if you understand these And if you are a retailer, there is a high chance you are going to increase sales if you understand the 11 ways Voice of Customer analytics assist retail businesses in making their customers happy and satisfied:-

1) Utilize Customer Data for Analysis

Why is customer data the crucial element for retail businesses? Because customer data consist of hidden customer behavioral pattern that, on processing, reveals customer intent. And on aligning the business value with customer preferences, customer relationships with the brand becomes strong with every interaction.

For retail businesses, customers are the major source of revenue. And the equivalent of that is customer data, the critical source to comprehend what customers perceive of your business, using which you can deliver highly-valuable solutions to customers that increase your Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Customer feedback from customer interviews, online customer surveys, focus groups, recorded call data, online reviews, social media platforms, and such consumer data sources are available to generate a successful voice of your customers that assist your brand in developing a customer-first mindset.

Here are a few points that showcase how customer data, when analyzed and implemented in organizational procedures, bring positive modifications to your retail business:-

Leaders can promote customer-centricity using customer data and analytics to generate smooth and uniform customer experiences.
Teams can collaborate efficiently to make the customer journey frictionless by understanding customer expectations through data analytics.
Data clarify the intent of customer-based operations and aid the brand in achieving the best results for both customers and the company.

2) Leaders Make Impactful Decisions

Decision-making becomes an easy task to perform when leaders choose to lean on the outcomes of a customer analytics program whose compulsory intake is VoC data. Today's companies are competing based on customer experience, and to get ahead of the competition, decision-makers are tapping into the reports that are the outputs of competitive analysis based on customer preferences.

Using big data and data analytics to make better business decisions prove to be highly fruitful for stakeholders associated with the brand. Data-driven decisions show more effective results than the variety of other methods used to draw conclusions. The Voice of Customer analytics reveals many diverse marketing aspects from the customers' point of view that your brand work on to increase customer retention and acquisition rates.

According to customer behavior indicated through insights, leaders can surround their opinions and ideas with customer demands. And delivering solutions based on customer needs increases customer loyalty and trust in the brand. With the help of in-depth customer research with customer analysis, leaders can make impactful decisions on:-

Frequency of brand and product promotion and the platform on which to promote.
Decide which business section to focus on and which to concern less about by analyzing the current status.
Ways to optimize the sales process to get desired customer service results.

3) Quicker than Manual Workforce

Gathering feedback from various sources and analyzing it with manual force is time-consuming, ineffective, and irrelevant, as, in this digital world, we have abundant customer data available. Voice of Customer analytics uses technologies like ML (Machine Learning) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) for better CX that also assist your brand in revamping the customer-centric approach for building better solutions.

And the best thing is that you can be quick with experimenting with the latest trends revealed by the customer insights report. Manually finding out and segregating the trends that might or might not work unnecessarily drains a lot of effort. VoC program involving analytics assists you in heading your efficiencies and capabilities in the right direction.

With VoC analytics, you can generate a customer experience governance strategy where you can decide the hows, whys, and wheres of your manual and tech resources allocation regarding customer-related operations - whether in-store or online. Overall, the customer program involving VoC analytics tools increases the efficiency of the organizational processes focusing on improving customer conversion rates.

Here are some more benefits of the Voice of Customer analytics over deploying your staff members:-

The chances of errors decrease by a significant amount.
It reduces the workload of your employees.
It aids in your digital transformation journey.

4) Reason for Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the prime factor for keeping customer-brand relationships strong. Without customer support, any retail business can go down in no time. You must operate according to their wishes to keep the customers' support alive. The outcomes of Voice of Customer analytics indicate customer requirements, and working on those outcomes satisfies the customers.

The technologies behind the understanding of consumer wants are robust whose results are reliable enough to operate on for a better customer experience. The analysis keeps the retailers alert in every worst situation, like a sudden inflow of customer complaints due to problems with products or services. An immediate fix can prevent the loss of customers and uplift your brand image.

Here are a few suggestions on how you can ensure customer satisfaction with the help of VoC analytics:-

Use a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey as input in the analytics program to comprehend your consumers' demands.
Measure CSAT score and take suggestions from stakeholders to enhance retail business operations.
Remain transparent to the customers regarding every activity involving their data usage to create a good impression that satisfies them.

5) Support Employees With Actionable Insights

If you ease and support employees' work, you create an environment that increases the productivity of the organization as a whole. Employees can work on multiple complex projects if they have the right set of information to proceed with customer-related. With customer analysis reports, staff members can align their operations to provide a connected experience that delights them.

Retail stores can look into the daily behavioral patterns of customers in their online and offline stores. Determine what factors customers are responding to most with a thorough customer review analysis. And there might be other annoying factors that irritate customers and draw them away from your brand solution. Share the insights with employees and train them accordingly so that they can handle customers well with their raised concerns.

Here are a few elements that customer insights obtained from VoC analytics can help employees at the retail store to manage customers well:-

Employees can comprehend customer troubles that can be solved with coming service or product updates. Furthermore, assuring them of a better solution.
Guide customers to a suitable solution according to their unique needs.
Employees can effortlessly understand the customer perspective so the purchase process can be quicker, making customers happy.

6) Open Doors to New Opportunities

Businesses with a growth mentality often do not have to struggle much if they use analytics to discover new opportunities that are heavily beneficial. Many times, well-doing organizations miss the opportunity as they can not figure out what customer trends will rule the market soon. With the outputs of VoC analytics, retailers can find what customers would love to purchase, either as a single entity or combined with other products.

Customer analytics assure that the new product that you innovate will get traction in the consumer market after the launch. It ensures your efforts do not go down the drain and you start the customer-based initiative that works well. Not only for products, but you can discover opportunities in different business sectors, such as marketing, sales, and tech, to try out new things that might satisfy your customers.

Here are a few practices to keep in mind to find new opportunities to stay ahead in the competitive race:-

Always look for the areas that create a huge buzz in the industry and analyze if or not your company can afford to implement them.
Examine the feasibility of the trend with respect to your customer base. Will they accept it, or will it be a waste? Connect with your customers through various modes and ask the same to capture their responses.
If you finalize moving ahead with the trend, use analytics to onboard stakeholders and show them how valuable the implementation can be to get their support.

Must Read:- Three Ways Customer Experience Insights Solve Rapid Product Innovation Challenges.

7) Improve Customer Experience Through Better Services

Gartner's report reveals that in 2025 and beyond, customer service and support organizations will look markedly different than they do today. As they unlock the power of data and analytics and automate basic issue resolution tasks — service and support organizations will increasingly predict and even prevent service issues.

Customer service is a necessary part of retail businesses. Any kind of uneasiness in this section can upset customers. And it can result in worse - the customers might not return and will never refer your brand to others. Voice of Customer analytics can help retailers prevent such situations. Analysis reports can reveal the customer interaction areas where a gap exists in the connected experiences, ruining the customer experience.

Here are a few ways your retail business can improve consumer experience with better services:-

Use VoC analytics to find the issues with your customer service system to solve them.
Empower customer-facing employees with the power of information that can ease the customer journey.
Create new customer service strategies using customer analysis reports to acquire new customers.

8) Optimize Prices, Products, and Services

You can attract more customers with customer analytics by revising your prices, fixing your products, and providing better services. Retail customers have loads of options to pick solutions from the market. Your products and services need to be authentic for your target audience. So that the customers go for your offerings every time they want a solution in your niche industry. Utilizing VoC analytics, you can become the market leader with maximum profit.

You can look into metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score, Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer loyalty metric to measure how customers respond to your offers. Then, accordingly, you can bring changes to different business aspects to retain and acquire customers.

Apart from that, you can observe customer behavior at different points of contact by collecting customer feedback to comprehend what track you must follow to run a flourishing retail business. Make positive reviews visible to potential customers by promoting solutions backed by those reviews. Here are a few points that show how important is Voice of Customer analytics:-

Pricing a product or service is the difficult part which analytics make much easier for your brand.
Analytics indicate the functional issues in your product and provide fixes for the problem, as customers also mention the solutions they would prefer to have to solve their problems.
The analysis report showcases the fault in your customer services and enables you to develop customer-centric solutions.

9) Prevent Resource Wastage

The correct allocation of organizational resources prevents wastage which benefits your brand to use the saved resources on other operations. Your organization can identify if there is a scarcity of resources to execute necessary operations. Primarily, the Voice of Customer analytics act as a helping hand in optimization processes. It supports rebuilding procedures that do not show relevant results but simultaneously use many resources.

Insights obtained from analytics bring clarity to your CX vision for serving retail customers, which in return assists you in deciding which CRM software or customer tools to stick with for fetching profitable results in the long run. Pre-planning the tools and techniques as per the customer program requirement saves the company's assets for the operations that will bring higher value or future functionalities that will result in brand development.

Find answers to these questions from your analytics report to save your company property that your brand can save a good amount of revenue with:-

How can your company save resources by optimizing customer-related processes?
How to assign resources in such a manner that does not adversely affect the customer program you wish to initiate?
How to develop a system that checks the usage of resources for monitoring?

10) Competitive Intelligence

Voice of Customer analytics reveals every characteristic of the competitive aspect using which your company can create a reference scale in accordance with a particular element of similar business operations. Your business units can comprehend respective activities performed by your competitors and measure if or not your working status is stable on the reference scale you developed.

You can learn about the strategies of your competitors with much ease by utilizing analytics. Definitely, what works for them, might not work for your retail business, but you can get an idea of how they proceed with the customers you want to target. Here are a few information pieces related to your competitors that VoC analytics can provide:-

Delighting factors in your competitor's products or services that attract customers.
Factors that upset their customers so that you can provide better offer to gain customers.
Position of your competitor for a particular product or service feature in the industry.

11) Emerging Trends

Trends draw customers' attention more quickly than any other marketing tactic. With digitization on the rise, customer behavior, preference, thoughts, and product-purchasing attitude frequently change. And to keep up with customer trends, you can use VoC analytics to stay updated and work accordingly.

The Voice of Customer analytics reveals trends that customers prefer. On top of that, you can detect how viable it is to implement customer trends for your company. Here is what analytics provide retailers with concerning customer trends:-

Inform about which market section is super active.
Your brand can understand the potential of a trend, and that is what differences it will bring to your business.
Ways to implement a particular customer trend.

Voice of Customer Analytics Will Lead To Business Growth

Voice of Customer analytics, when properly implemented, gets the best results for retailers. It allows businesses to understand customers' expectations and business values to be followed to get desired outcomes. VoC programs take valuable customer feedback as input, increasing their authenticity and reliability for the generation of customer-focused solutions.

The valuable insights from these customer programs assist your brand in making enhancements to various elements of different departments, including marketing, sales, supply chain, and many more. The outputs of VoC analysis help your brand deliver the best customer experiences at every touchpoint. Analytics is the go-to solution for various customer issues, and you should never miss out on using it to attract retail customers for higher revenue generation.

Want to know Ways To Use Data Analytics To Improve Customer Experience?

Read Data Analytics: The Key To Real-Time Adaptive Customer Experience!