8 Voice of Customer Tools to Monitor Customer Experience
More businesses aim to capture Voice of Customer (VoC) data each year.
But only 14% of marketers feel customer experience is their strongest company trait.
You already know you need an amazing customer experience (CX) to keep retention high.
But how do you know where to invest your time, effort, and money?
With the right Voice of Customer tools in place, the answers are at your fingertips.
VoC tools capture customer feedback, storing it in one place. Then, they turn it into actionable insights that drive data-backed business decisions.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss:
- What Voice of Customer (VoC) is
- The benefits of using Voice of Customer tools
- The 8 best Voice of Customer tools
What is Voice of Customer (VoC)?
Voice of Customer (VoC) is your current and potential customers’ opinions and experiences about your product or service.
Capturing VoC involves collecting and analyzing customer feedback through various channels. The most popular ones include:
- Surveys
- Customer interviews
- Social media
- Online reviews
The goal of collecting VoC is to understand your customers’ needs. As well as their expectations, preferences, and pain points. Then, use this information to improve your products and customer service experience.
Ultimately, this information can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
B2C and B2B businesses can both use VoC programs.
Giant B2C companies like Adidas can use VoC to uncover faults in physical products. Or they might discover that they need to improve their customer service. VoC tools might reveal customers complained about long holds and unpleasant phone calls.
Benefits of Voice of Customer Tools
The benefits of VoC programs are apparent.
A study asked marketers how VoC programs added value to their businesses. 61.2% said they increased their Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction.
37.9% said they saw an increase in retention. And 33% received more referrals and positive word of mouth.
There are countless benefits outside these, too. Here are a few of the biggest reasons you should spend time improving your VoC strategy:
- Identify customer needs and preferences. VoC tools allow you to gather customer feedback. This gives insight into your audience’s needs and preferences. You can then use it to improve and meet customer expectations better.
- Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can improve customer loyalty by listening to feedback and addressing their concerns. This can lead to increased customer retention and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
- Increase revenue and profitability. By improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, businesses can increase revenue and profitability. Satisfied customers are likely to repeat purchases and recommend your business to others.
- Stay competitive. You can stay ahead of the competition and differentiate yourself in the marketplace simply by staying aware of your ideal customer’s preferences.
How Do Voice of Customer Tools Work?
Voice of Customer tools collect and analyze customer feedback from various sources.
They then use advanced analytics to categorize feedback and identify trends and patterns.
VoC tools can also segment feedback by customer demographics. This includes age, gender, location, and other variables. This allows you to identify patterns in your audience. Then, you can tailor your products and services to meet their wants and solve their problems.
Another essential feature of VoC tools is integrating feedback data with other business systems, such as CRM, marketing automation, and customer service platforms. This integration enables businesses to take a holistic view of customer interactions and identify opportunities to improve the overall experience.
Top 8 Voice of Customer Tools to Drive Customer Experience
1. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is a comprehensive customer experience management (XM) platform. It offers various VoC tools, including surveys, feedback forms, and text analytics.
Their software has three main parts:
- XM for Customer Frontlines
- XM for People Teams
- XM for Strategy & Research
The Customer Frontlines program lets you improve customer experience in your contact centers. People Teams increases team engagement.
And Strategy & Research helps you develop products based on relevant market research.
2. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey lets you create and distribute surveys. This lets you collect customer feedback and then analyze and visualize the results.
You can choose from various survey question types, customize the design of their surveys, and distribute them via email, social media, by generating a QR code, or by other channels.
The platform also offers advanced features such as data analysis, reporting, and integration with other business tools.
3. Medallia
Medallia is a customer experience management platform that offers VoC tools such as surveys, social listening, text analytics, and more.
Its features give you a birds-eye view of the metrics you need to maximize customer experience. Monitor what customers are saying on social media. Store feedback from calls, emails, and other forms of communication for later analysis thanks to Medallia’s transcripts, speech analytics, and ticketing systems.
Medallia’s AI and machine learning tools give you personalized data. This lets you analyze structured and unstructured insights in a cinch. You can also tap into data that reveals what your audience cares about most and predicts their buying behaviors.
Finally, Medallia integrates with various programmes and apps.
4. InMoment
InMoment is more than a Voice of Customer tool. Their software is focused on improving the experience of everyone who interacts with your company–customers, potential customers, employees, etc.
Their CX technology uncovers how you can increase your customer base, reduce churn, cut business expenses, improve relationships, and more.
You have complete control of how you use it. The self-service option lets you DIY everything. But you can also consult strategic advisors if you want full service.
Like Medallia, InMoment also leverages the power of AI. Their powerful AI tools let you say goodbye to data silos and get straightforward recommendations for action. The software also identifies the most impactful actions you should focus on, helping you make data-supported decisions personal to your brand.
5. Verint
Verint is a customer engagement platform that offers VoC tools such as surveys, feedback forms, and speech analytics.
Their technology works to improve customer experience through all your communication channels–digital and physical, AI-based or human-based–seamlessly.
The platform is divided into four parts: digital-first engagement, experience management, workforce engagement, and open cloud platform.
Digital-first focuses on improving CX on the digital channels your customers use most. The digital-first engagement platform includes conversational AI, channel automation, knowledge management, and more.
The workforce engagement platform automates engagement for your office, contact center, branch teams, and more with the power of AI. Features include workforce forecasting and scheduling, interaction insights, real-time work, and more.
Use the experience management platform to interact directly with your customers and team to collect feedback using text and voice surveys, digital feedback, digital behavior analytics, predictive modeling, and more.
Finally, the open platform lets you access powerful insights driven by AI and analytics. And the engagement data management feature is a centralized location for all your analyzed CX data.
6. Thematic
Thematic is an AI-powered platform that makes it easy for you to analyze customer feedback at scale. Its cutting technology centralizes and organizes your feedback data to reveal powerful insights.
As well as robust analysis tools and shareable dashboards, Thematic has multiple features securely leveraging Generative AI to get true value from your feedback:
- Answers, which makes it easy to analyze feedback and validate your ideas. Simply ask a question, like “What are the top issues for users on our paid plan?” and receive a narrative answer with visuals from the trusted data.
- Summarization, which generates helpful, accurate summaries from your feedback wherever needed across the platform. Summaries automatically update based on a huge range of filters, such as region, date, sentiment, app name, customer segment, feedback category, matching keywords etc.
The way Thematic uses large language models (LLMs) avoids the normal issues, where the LLMs produce inconsistent results or 'hallucinate'.
In Thematic, feedback is themed and categorized by type and sentiment. Insights and research teams have validated the accuracy of this data - and it's this accurate data that is used by the Generative AI features. This means Thematic delivers accurate and consistent answers, always.
7. AskNicely
AskNicely tracks metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), team analytics, percentage of repeat customers, and more.
The software is designed to connect your frontline to your bottom line. A unique way it does this is by letting you compare your team members’ performances at a glance. This makes it easy to spot what your highest performers do differently. Plus, you can accurately calculate how your increased CX has impacted your revenue.
AskNicely’s goal-setting feature is another unique perk. The system lets you set personal NPS goals and track progress from your phone. And since you can compare employees in the app, it also lets you show them appreciation.
8. Forsta
Forsta is a Human Experience (HX) platform.
It claims to be the world’s number-one market research technology platform and uses various research tools to collect and analyze customer feedback data. A few include sample and panel management, surveying, advanced reporting and analytics, data visualization, and more.
Forsta’s analysis and visualization tools enable you to drive customer retention, revenue growth, and operational efficiency.
The technology first gathers feedback using customizable surveys. You can also take data from other channels. Next, Forsta organizes your data so you can easily search for and filter it.
Forsta has tons of data visualization tools. You can quickly assemble reports, presentations, infographics, graphics, and more.
Finally, Forsta’s automation tools help you identify action steps according to your collected data.
Final Thoughts on Voice of Customer Tools
With these VoC tools, you can understand your customers to a tee. And as a result, improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, increase revenue, and stay competitive in the marketplace.
Of course, the best solution will be the one that meets your unique company needs, and fits in with your existing workflows. There are a few key things to consider when trialling different tools to find the right fit.
