3 Reasons For 'Voice of the Customer' Meetings

Businesses are fighting to save money right now, understandably so, but many seem to be passing over a critical cost-saving piece - customer feedback. 

Customer anecdotes specifically, are one of the most important indicators of where your product is working, and where it’s not. 

While all good teams have quantitative measures in place to track how their users are engaging with their products, the best teams understand all metrics have blind spots. 

Regularly reviewing actual customer anecdotes, especially patterns of similar anecdotes, helps you unearth problems or opportunities that you may have failed to measure.

“The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.” - Jeff Bezos

So, assuming you are reviewing your quantitative data regularly, you’re missing a key part of the picture if you’re not also reviewing your anecdotes on a similar cadence.

Let’s talk about three major reasons why.

#1 Increased profitability through activation and retention

Keeping your customers activated and engaged is one of the most efficient ways to retain them long-term. No matter if you're a tech giant or a startup, building products and services more aligned with the needs of your customers is an absolute must to keep their attention.

When a product or service isn't catered to its customers, is when churn rears its ugly head. When it is, you start developing more and more brand evangelists who spark your flywheel with positive reviews and peer-to-peer referrals. 

Customer feedback, when analyzed and addressed, provides a roadmap to feature build outs and service priorities. Which leads us to reason number two.

#2 Money saved staying on track with data-informed goals

Do you find your team blindly investing time and money developing features or adding services that no one wants, or worse, that actually harm the user experience instead of improving it? By having ‘voice of the customer’ meetings where you analyze the pain points of the customer together, you’re able to stay in tune with what customers want and need from your product or service. This allows you to make informed decisions and save money by not wasting resources on features that may not be necessary or desired by your customers. 

What’s more, keeping your team, especially builders, close to end customer feedback is critical. It’s too easy for most employees to get so disconnected from their actual customers, separated by walls of management and dashboards, that they lose empathy for their customer. 

Builders who feel empathy for their customers ship better products, and there’s no better way to create that than having them sit in the room, read real  complaints about their work, and take responsibility for required actions. Likewise, reading positive feedback is a huge motivation.

The last piece here is announcing changes made that came directly from customer anecdotes, to the customers themselves to complete that feedback loop. Thus reason number three.

#3 - Greater trust & loyalty built with your customers

Finally, letting your customers know that you’ve taken their feedback and applied it, builds trust between you and your customers. Building trust through communication leads to long-term success for any business as it encourages loyalty from those same customers who continue returning over time due to feeling valued by your company.

Collect, understand, improve, announce - repeat

A good ‘voice of customer’ meeting ensures that the important pain points or opportunities expressed in customer feedback actually get taken as action items, and are surfaced to the appropriate visibility of leaders, vs. buried in distributed ticket queues that never get the required attention.

Take the time to collect and analyze customer feedback, address it as a team, apply it to your product and service, and announce those changes to your customers. 

To get started, purchase a customer feedback software like Unwrap.ai to aggregate all of your customer feedback and automatically provide the top insights. It will make preparing for your ‘voice of customer’ meetings a lot easier!