Your consumers are your brand’s heartbeat. Without their support, your company could suffer a cardiac event signaling a downfall. This is why tracking and measuring your consumers’ collective voice using voice of customer analytics is so mission critical. It teaches your brand how to live its healthiest brand life, by maneuvering around trouble spots and shifting to meet customer demands. Let’s see how that looks!
Voice of customer analytics can inform your brand around ways to endear your company to consumer hearts, creating loyal and long-term customers. These statistics reveal the importance of keeping your finger on the consumer pulse:
- 71% of consumers would rather buy from brands whose values align with their own.
- 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company
- On Twitter, bad news travels six times faster and farther than good
Tracking consumer sentiment with voice of consumer analytics helps diminish bad behavior and amplify positivity swirling around your brand. It’s as close to brand magic as your company can get!
What is Voice of Customer Analytics?
Voice of Customer Analytics is focused around understanding your consumer and how they feel about your brand, your products and services. It also uncovers what they expect from your company as well as others in your industry.
Having a grasp of this allows your brand to develop offerings and create better targeted messaging to improve customer acquisition and retention.
Utilizing consumer insights analytics for this purpose, brands can identify problem areas early by tuning in to conversations happening on social channels, review sites and news channels. They can catch on immediately when there are conversations about your brand or issues in your industry. This allows you to pivot as needed to meet consumer demand. It does this by helping companies:
- Gain an intimate understanding of their customer base, including buying behaviors, preferences and expectations
- Recognize potential product and operational improvements
- Uncover loyalty drivers and better understand path to purchase
- Develop customer profiles to identify target audiences and prospects
It basically provides all the tools you need to uncover trends, understand consumer sentiment and what drives consumers to purchase one product over another. And it alerts you to any disturbance in the force so you can be quick to respond. Let’s explore further!
The Characteristics of Your Customer and More (a 360 view)
The customer’s experience with your brand dictates whether they will become a loyal life-long customer or whether they will go elsewhere. It’s imperative that brands keep a watchful eye on consumers every step of the way – from consideration to hopefully, post-purchase brand loyalty. And your success begins with knowing your consumers preferences.
Many voice of customer analytics tools offer light demographics such as gender or ethnicity, but that is just scratching the surface. To understand your customer, you have to peel back the layers to reveal their common interests, professions and attributes. These are the details that reveal aspects of their character that make them, “them” – such as their belief systems and values. And this is essential, as 71% of consumers would rather buy from brands whose values align with their own. And you can’t “align” with an unknown.
For example, below, we see common interests of a top beverage brand’s consumers. The size of the bubble indicates the conversation volume. And we can see if an interest is over-indexing with this group (they’re talking about it more often than the rest of the general population online) or under-indexing. This could be the basis for a winning campaign that more complete connects with the beverage brand’s audience.
On the other hand, it can also provide intel on what to avoid talking about as well.
Knowing what makes your consumer tick is a direct line to their buying behavior. And voice of customer analytics gets you there.
Measuring Your Customer Care Performance
90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. So, tracking your performance using voice of customer analytics will help ensure that you spot something wrong immediately. It’s important to move quickly if something goes awry as bad news travels much faster than good – especially on social media. In fact, on Twitter it travels six times faster – and farther. That’s a statistic you want to stay ahead of.
Today customer experience goes beyond just a friendly voice on the other end of the line or a quick response to a consumer’s complaint over social media. Companies must track and measure how their brand is being perceived, as brand perception can change in an instant.
Our voice of customer analytics helps brands examine their consumer journey from first consideration to post-purchase sentiments. And here, when we look at what’s driving the positive sentiment, we discover many conversations which specifically praise them for their customer service – and this is a recurring theme along each step of the consumer journey.
Attracting Life-long, Loyal Consumers
After brands have baited and hooked them, it’s time to be sure they don’t get away. Voice of customer analytics goes beyond the purchase to help you do just that.
Daily monitoring of your customers, or prospective customers, is essential as their opinions, likes and even values change over time. What worked six months ago, or even last week, may feel hopelessly outdated tomorrow. Brands use voice of customer analytics to create a baseline to measure these changes against.
For example, sustainability has been a hot topic, specifically when the pandemic hit and products were harder to come by. Consumers learned to use products differently and began practicing sustainability in their daily lives. And for many, this meant a switch to brands who also valued sustainability! In the past two years, we see a gradual increase in the sustainability conversation, as well as positive sentiment in favor of it.
And the conversation doesn’t focus on one type of sustainability, but rather on all of them from water and electricity to even feeding cows seaweed to reduce methane emissions. And brands seeking to capture the attention of consumers need to evolve their messaging to include this shift.
Brands that adopt a customer-centric approach will be the companies that thrive in the New Year. Having voice of customer analytics helps brands create the best customer experience from beginning to end, to retain existing customers and win over new ones. Reach out for a demo to see its potential in action!
