Voice Of The Customer Examples And Best Practices To Drive eLearning Business Success
In this article, we've compiled plenty of Voice of the Customer examples and best practices for you to try. After this read, you'll be able to turn words into action. Are you ready to make the most of it to scale your eLearning business? Don't take it lightly. VoC efforts work, and such feedback can provide a unique perspective for your products and where you should be heading.
What your own customers feel about your eLearning products and services is the way to improve your business by taking action based on that feedback. That's how you get more customers. It's all about adding value to the Customer Experience. Today’s eLearning marketplace is dominated by on-demand courses and subscriptions. Hence, eLearning businesses need to pay closer attention to what their customers want from their products. Ask them to express their needs, and you can only get better.
But, to make the most of the Voice of Customer (VoC) data you collect, it's essential to know when to request feedback. Then, how you share and use that valuable feedback with your team matters. Making it part of your daily workflow is key if you want to impress and serve your customers. It's always about them, not your business. Customers care to see what you can do for them.
Let's dive in...
What Is Voice Of The Customer?
First off, let's start with the definition of Voice of the Customer. Voice of the Customer, simply known as VoC, is the process businesses use to gather customer feedback. They do so to identify existing gaps between customer expectations and the on-hand Customer Experience. All the data you gather in VoC will help your eLearning business to identify which gaps exist and how you can fill them. For this reason, you can use a variety of VoC programs and conduct them in different ways.
For example, VoC in subscription-first eCommerce might need a completely different approach than VoC in banking. You could, for instance, use a dedicated online page for gathering feedback from your customers. Or, you could regularly run surveys on pricing if you want to get a better idea of what customers think about the subscription plans you offer.
Read on as we use several examples to help you get ideas for gathering customer feedback to shape your product roadmap or decide which new features you should release.
Best Practices For A Voice Of The Customer Program
1. Use Multiple Channels To Gather Feedback
Customers speak to you in so many different ways. Sure, you can use a direct Q&A format to get the insights you need, but it goes beyond that. Each one of your customers takes action with your product. For example, usage frequency is an indication. The same goes for creating a support ticket, or even when it comes to feature adoption. All these actions reflect the Customer's Experience of value. While I do agree that direct feedback is always helpful, it's also crucial to be ready to capture indirect feedback.
For example, many LMS vendors ask customer feedback and gather LMS reviews on eLearning Industry's platform. By doing so, they can get a top-ranking position in our new top list, The People's Choice LMS.
If you're wondering what makes for indirect feedback, you can leverage channels like:
- Call center information and support tickets
- Product metrics and data within your tool
- Messages on your social media pages
- Community comments on forums
- Reviews on niche platforms
Getting valuable information from different types of customers is also crucial. Segmenting feedback has its advantages. For instance, end users and frontline workers have different information to provide compared to management-level contacts. While the first group can share details on their daily workflow, the second group can describe the overall effectiveness of your service in a different way.
When talking about Voice of Customer examples and best practices, this is one of the most crucial.
2. Share Feedback Across Your Teams
You need to coordinate cross-functional alignment and collaboration with your teams. But enabling all customer-facing teams to proactively impact your Customers' Experience is not always easy. Hence, you must find creative ways to give them access to your rich customer data.
By capturing conversations, escalations, or different engagements and making them available, your customer success team will benefit a lot. But it's not only them that get to win. The data you have gathered from the sales team, the support team, and the CS team can give ideas and help you personalize upselling opportunities, or even create renewal campaigns based on a record of customer behavior.
In short, it's essential to have access to your customer's comprehensive history with your organization. That way, for every engagement, you can allow each member of your team to talk with authority and, most importantly, with relevance. You see, by doing so, not only will the customer feel valued and listened to, but you'll be able to create the basis for long-term loyalty and trust with your eLearning brand.
3. Respond To Voice Of The Customer In A Timely Manner
If you Google for Voice of the Customer examples and best practices, you'll see that collecting customer feedback is not enough. The most critical part of the VoC process is that you take action on it.
You see, your customers are very concerned about your response to their feedback. And, they want an answer as soon as possible. In fact, according to research, when enterprises listen to their feedback, customers are more likely to be loyal to those businesses. Why wouldn't you want to capitalize on this trend? To get the most out of it, you must respond quickly to any direct feedback. Receiving customer feedback is just the first step. What's more important is that you acknowledge the customer's effort. And, of course, make sure to explain how you'll use the information provided to help improve their experience with your eLearning product or services.
Sure, any customer can make suggestions for improvement. But still, they are suggestions. Your eLearning business, or any business for that matter, can't possibly incorporate every piece of feedback. However, it's critical to let them know that you'll take that feedback into consideration. Do yourself a favor and nurture any exchange of information to your advantage.
On that note, I invite you to take a look at our LMS directory. Plenty of users have left reviews for products they've tried. When going through the reviews, you'll notice that the best LMS software are the ones that listen to customer feedback and have put an effort to actually improve the User Experience based on those comments.
4. Find The Right Time To Ask For Feedback
As we continue discussing relevant Voice of the Customer examples and best practices, it's important that you develop a cycle of communication during the post-purchase Customer Experience. You have to establish a dialogue of open communication between you and your customer. And, make sure to have this in order when valuable times of change come up. Meaning you'll want to understand the needs of the customer at specific times. Then, you'll know how your eLearning organization can best support them.
So, it's vital to time your requests for customer feedback. A good idea would be to use a VoC strategy that focuses on periods of transition or reflection. That way, you can let your customers vent any frustrations they might have. Or even better, give your customers the opportunity to applaud the improvements you've made in the given moment.
Seeking feedback during these times is something you might want to consider:
- Shortly after customers complete onboarding.
- When you see changes in customer behavior.
- After the introduction of new product features, make sure to follow up.
- In case the pre-defined customer goals are complete; that way you can find opportunities for retention, engagement, upselling, cross-selling, etc.
5. Personalize Your Voice Of The Customer Feedback Requests
This is one of my favorite Voice of the Customer examples and best practices. Today's eLearning marketplace is customer-centered, as it happens in any industry, to be honest. So this means that customers are now in full control of their service partnerships. Consequently, customers now have more expectations from eLearning companies. And, of course, every customer wants to feel special. So, personalized attention is also on the rise.
On that note, every single one of your customer interactions should be laser-focused on each specific customer and their post-purchase experience. When you communicate with users, the more relevant your communication is to the customer's product and brand experience, the better. They'll understand that you care about that specific moment of need and that you do have their experience in mind.
If you want your customers to see you as a partner rather than just another company that's taking their money, you must make sure that you deliver value in every engagement. Don't miss this opportunity. Use the data to your advantage. For example, by diving into the data, you can time feedback campaigns and get what you need. Such timely campaigns could be sent out around customer milestones or achievements. Or you could even focus on changes in customer behavior. The more you keep your questions relevant to the Customer Experience, the more rewarding the feedback you'll get.
Voice Of The Customer Methodologies To Follow
Did you know that 94% of customers who believe that their experience with a business is "very good" are more likely to get additional products or services in the future from that company? As you can understand, knowing how customers perceive your eLearning company is crucial if you want to be successful in this competitive market. eLearning businesses with a growth mindset always make sure to focus on making an impact on the Customer Experience.
But to learn more about your customers' point of view, you must first ask yourself:
- Are there any specific purchasing behaviors or patterns?
- In what ways can I help my customers with our eLearning products and services?
- Do I have a way to understand how to fulfill the customer's needs?
Thankfully, there are several Voice of the Customer methodologies you can use to get answers to those questions.
Here's what you can do:
- Voice of the Customer surveys
- Focus groups
- Customer interviews
- NPS software
- VoC data collection via passive feedback (live chat, customer support call data, social media and social listening, online reviews, web behavior)
Take our recent survey, for example. We've asked our readers what kind of topics they'd like to read on our eLearning publishing platform. After getting the results, we wrote down a full report. You can download it here: eLI Audience Survey: Leveraging eLearning Buyer Insights To Fuel Marketing Strategies. Based on the data, we managed to figure out hot topics our readers would love, plus we got plenty of ideas to help us promote their eLearning products and services. Understanding your buyers' pain points and expectations is key to success. You can do something similar for your business!
Summing Up
VoC, as a strategy, has a clear goal. It offers a direct channel for customers to express their thoughts about your eLearning business or product. And it's your job to listen to customer feedback by thoroughly reviewing their unfiltered experiences.
eLearning businesses can leverage VoC analysis in many different ways. Obviously, there are many different techniques you can use to understand customer sentiment. But, what you must note is that when conducted effectively, Voice of the Customer analysis provides businesses like yours with actionable insights. Later on, based on that feedback, you can use what you've identified missing from the Customer Experience to meet customer expectations. That will help you to effectively reduce churn and get new clients as the word goes around that you do listen to customer feedback and improve.
Of course, there are several survey software and data analysis tools you can leverage. But it's equally important to learn how to ask for customer reviews. The more you get, the better data you'll gather to analyze customer feedback and then manage to align your eLearning offerings with customer preferences. Surely, I hope all the abovementioned Voice of the Customer examples and best practices will help you create better Customer Experiences. Remember, more sales are all about delivering a great experience. After all, you want your customers to stay. And if you can, turn them into your brand advocates!
