The Gist:
- VoC tools make excellent CX possible. Good customer experience remains a priority in 2023, meaning companies should look to optimizing voice of the customer strategies.
- Top tools include top technology. The top VoC tools on the market utilize technology like sentiment analysis, real-time response triggers, automated conversation tagging and more.
As consumer behaviors and demands continue to evolve, brands are now focusing their efforts on delivering a good customer experience, even if that’s at the (slight) expense of the actual product or service they sell. In fact, CMSWire research found that 79% of organizations believe digital customer experience to be extremely or very important.
And for enterprises to consistently deliver a good customer experience, they need to know the wants, needs and preferences of their customers, hence the rise of "voice of the customer" (VoC) campaigns — where brands aim to purposefully curate and act upon the voice of their customers.
What Is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?
Voice of the customer, or VoC for short, is a method of capturing and analyzing customer feedback to understand needs, preferences and expectations. It's an approach that focuses on the customer's perspective, giving organizations insights into what customers want, how they perceive the brand and how they interact with products and services.
VoC can take many forms, including surveys, interviews, focus groups and social media monitoring. These methods allow organizations to collect customer feedback from various touchpoints and channels, including websites, mobile apps, contact centers and in-store experiences.
By analyzing this feedback, companies can identify trends, pain points and areas for improvement, enabling them to make data-driven decisions that align with customer needs and expectations. Ultimately, VoC can help businesses improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention, optimizing the entire customer experience and driving business growth and success.
What Are Voice of the Customer Tools?
Any VoC strategy requires voice of the customer tools. These VoC tools are software solutions that allow organizations to capture, analyze and act on customer feedback.
Some of the most common VoC tools include:
- Feedback management platforms: Help companies collect feedback from various sources, such as email, web surveys and social media, and consolidate it into a centralized database.
- Sentiment analysis software: Uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to analyze customer feedback and identify positive, negative or neutral sentiments.
- Customer journey mapping tools: Allow companies to visualize and analyze the customer experience, identifying pain points and areas for improvement.
CMSWire found that, as of 2023, 45% of organizations use VoC tools within their customer experience ecosystem — ranking above solutions like marketing automation, sentiment analysis and customer data platforms (CDPs). And 30% plan to use VoC tools in the future.
By leveraging these tools, companies can gain a deeper understanding of their customers and improve customer experience.
As of 2021, according to Statista, around 50% of companies said they were fully capturing their VoC data. That leaves 42% of organizations only partially capturing VoC data, while the remainder isn't catching any significant information at all.
Related Article: Voice of the Customer: What Is and Why Does It Matter for CX?
Top 10 Voice of the Customer Tools to Know About
We've taken a look at the solutions available, and have put together a list of voice of the customer tools you should know about in 2023:
Let's take a deeper dive into these VoC tools.
1. Medallia
Features: Customer feedback collection, data analysis, insight sharing
Medallia bills itself as an enterprise experience platform. It can collect customer feedback from a range of sources, including web, email and phone surveys, social media and reviews.
This is more than a feedback collection tool, however. Its advanced analytics capabilities allow companies to identify trends, understand customer sentiment and prioritize areas for improvement. It also provides tools for sharing insights across departments.
2. ResponseTek
Features: Omnichannel feedback collection, text analytics, automated on-demand reporting
With ResponseTek, enterprises can access targeted surveys and choose customers to complete a survey depending on their actions.
This voice of the customer tool gathers data through either email invites or via the company’s website and social media handles. The tool creates a detailed customer journey data report which provides information on churn reduction, type of interactions, touchpoints, revenue and more.
3. Qualtrics XM (Formerly Clarabridge)
Features: Automated actions to improve customer experience, real-time conversational analytics, natural language understanding
Qualtrics acquired Clarabridge in 2021, changing the name of the VOC tools to XM Discover and Qualtrics Connect, all falling within the Qualtrics XM umbrella.
Qualtrics XM acts as a centralized hub for voice of the customer campaigns. It allows organizations to fully understand what people are saying about them, no matter where they're saying it. The data collected can be easily filtered and parsed with natural language processing, which incorporates linguistic categorization, emotion detection, text analytics and sentiment analysis.
4. InMoment
Features: Survey and data collection, predictive analytics, human-assisted artificial intelligence
InMoment is a comprehensive customer experience optimization platform. Via its Experience Hub, this voice of the customer tool offers a variety of solutions, including employee engagement, social reviews & advocacy and (let’s not forget) its VoC platform.
The VoC platform provides online reports, real-time alerts and notifications and occurrence management. It combines survey data with customer data from other sources such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, social media and financials.
5. Forsta HX (Formerly Confirmit)
Features: Survey design and deployment, voice of employee tools, social listening and analytics
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In 2021, Forsta was listed as a leader on Gartner's magic quadrant for voice of the customer. The Forsta Human Experience (HX) platform promises to deliver a reliable, flexible and powerful solution that can transcend data silos.
This voice of the customer tool uses customizable surveys to solicit customer insights, brings all data into one spot and uses advanced analytics tools to search, sort and filter in a variety of ways. This is one voice of the customer platform that also allows for data visualization. It easily allows companies to put together graphs, reports, presentations, infographics and more, letting data tell a complete story.
6. NICE Satmetrix
Features: Omnichannel feedback collection, text and speech analytics, customer journey-based design
NICE Satmetrix offers a cloud-based VoC solution and is the co-developer of the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The Net Promoter Score is a numeric scoring system that helps identify customers primed for acting as brand ambassadors.
This is one of several VoC tools that gathers both structured and unstructured data in real-time. It offers multi-channel capabilities, an intuitive dashboard and real-time alerts. It also features a natural language processor engine. The advanced analytics capabilities support root cause analysis, sentiment analysis, correlation analytics, trending topics and more. Users are also able to publish positive customer feedback onto their social media channels.
7. Verint XM (Formerly ForeSee)
Features: Real-time listening, trigger-based feedback solicitation, closed-loop action
Verint acquired ForSee in 2018, with the solution now available as Verint Experience Management (XM).
This voice of the customer tool takes a holistic approach to customer experience, incorporating voice of the customer data across web, mobile, social and survey feedback. Organizations can use active listening to identify and fix customer issues in real-time. They can also utilize closed-loop action to follow-up with individual customer feedback.
8. MonkeyLearn
Features: Data visualization, sentiment analysis, customer satisfaction score analysis
MonkeyLearn is a VoC platform that allows for the simple, clean visualization of feedback. It uses text analysis and data visualization to provide greater data granularity. It also includes ready-made machine learning models and the ability to build and train your own language models code-free.
Organizations short on time can take advantage of the tool's built-in templates, which are tailored to different business scenarios and include pre-made models and dashboards.
9. AskNicely
Features: Real-time customer feedback collection, personalized alerts, daily feedback overviews
AskNicely is a customer experience platform that's designed for service-oriented businesses. It provides an easy way to measure every customer experience across channels and improve frontline teams.
This voice of the customer tool can also integrate with more than 50 other platforms, including popular workplace solutions like Qualtrics, Salesforce, HubSpot and more.
10. SentiSum
Features: Automated tagging and reporting, CSAT analytics, auto-prioritization
SentiSum uses a natural language processing engine to tag and categorize customer service conversations. These tags get to the root of topics, quickly understand customer sentiment, trigger automation and, ultimately, boost customer experience.
This voice of the customer platform offers a simple dashboard that allows for easy, individualized monitoring form team members.
Related Article: Align Your Voice of the Customer Initiative With Your Customers
Choosing the Right Voice of the Customer Tools
Voice of the customer tools are essential for any organization looking to improve customer experience, a necessary differentiator in 2023. With the right VoC tools, companies can capture and analyze feedback, gain valuable customer insights and take data-driven action to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Each platform above offers unique features and capabilities, making it essential to choose one that best fits your needs and objectives. However, whether you're a small business or large enterprise, investing in VoC tools can have a significant impact on your bottom line.
