Voice of Customer in Retail: 7 Ways to Increase Revenue

Voice of the customer data is all audience feedback collected by an organization from its audiences via reviews, survey forms, and social media comments to gauge brand reputation and sentiment. 

These insights can significantly impact marketing efforts, product roadmaps, and sales strategies.

Voice of customer in retail provides businesses with a clear analysis of customer needs and behavior. If the data is available in large amounts, it’s challenging to manage.

Thus, data and analytics service providers need to effectively analyze and structure such data before revealing valuable retail customer insights that can change the customer experience.

Why Do Businesses Need Voice of Customer Analytics?

Research by Gartner identified that businesses can increase both upselling and cross-selling success rates by around 15%-20% by gathering client feedback. 

A recent study reports that approximately 94% of US audiences show more interest in making frequent purchases from an organization with a good customer experience (CX).

Businesses need customer feedback analytics to understand how their audiences interact with products, websites, and services.

Businesses that invest heavily in voice of the customer programs experience higher customer retention and employee engagement. Hence, they identify VoC as a means to achieve higher sales. 

Customer requirements can be classified as social responsibility, cost, quality, service, safety, and delivery.

Meeting all these requirements will lead to smooth operations of the organization. The major challenge is how an organization collects and synthesizes all the feedback.

There are multiple ways a business can obtain VoC. Some of them are:

1. Industry data

How Voice of Customer in Retail Connects to Revenue

Measuring ROI from VoC strategies is important for illustrating their impact on operational efficiency and financial performance. 

By integrating customer feedback into business outcomes, businesses can focus on improvements. Major regions of ROI are:

• Reduced churn: Happy customers don't plan to leave, reducing acquisition costs

Businesses can improve this analysis by connecting behavioral data with survey results.

For example, combining churn data with feedback reports or transaction histories lets teams identify which challenges lead to customer churn and which experiences increase lifetime value.

How Does VoC Increase Revenue?

Let’s see how exactly VoC contributes to higher profits. 

Increases customer experience

VoC programs help brands find customer challenges across support channels, websites, stores, and apps. 

For example:

• Poor product availability

Improves customer retention

Retaining present customers is easier than acquiring new ones. VoC enables organizations to know why customers leave and what keeps them from leaving. 

By looking at retail customer feedback, reviews, and surveys, businesses can strengthen customer relationships.   

Enables customized marketing

Retailers use VoC insights to:

• Send targeted offers

Reduces customer churn

VoC helps brands analyze complaints and address concerns to improve satisfaction. 

Supports smarter product decisions

Companies can use VoC data for:

• Product quality improvement

Measuring the Revenue Impact of VoC

Brands usually monitor customer feedback using the following metrics:

• Frequent purchase rate

Understanding the VoC metrics that impact revenue helps organizations connect customer experience improvements directly to business growth.

How Do Retailers Use Voice of Customer Data?

Improving customer experience

One of the major benefits of using VoC data in retail is improving customer experience. 

Retailers inspect feedback to find:

• Checkout issues

Personalizing customer interactions

This allows retailers to:

• Improve loyalty programs

Enhancing product development 

Retailers use survey responses and product reviews to:

• Improve packaging

Tracking brand reputation

Retailers can monitor customer sentiment trends, social media conversations, and brand mentions.  

Improving marketing strategies

Retailers use VoC insights to:

• Filter messaging

These steps guide retailers on how to use VoC data to analyze both structured and unstructured data in real time.

Examples of the voice of customer in Retail

Real-world examples of VoC in retail are as follows:

Website and behavioral analytics

Customer behavior itself is a type of feedback. 

Retailers analyze:

• Session duration

Example

High cart abandonment on a payment page may show:

• Complex checkout

AI-powered sentiment analysis

Modern retailers use NLP and AI to examine customer feedback. 

AI tools process:

• Survey responses

Example

Sentiment analysis can identify whether customer sentiment toward a new product launch is:

• Neutral

Omnichannel feedback integration

Retail customers communicate across different channels:

• Mobile apps

The voice of customer strategy for retail combines feedback from all platforms into a unified customer view. 

Example

A retailer may integrate:

• In-store feedbacks

The voice of the customer retail examples also apply to other industries, such as travel, financial services, SaaS providers, and healthcare.

Industry Use cases

The following are the voice of the customer industry use cases: 

Healthcare Industry

The healthcare sector elicits powerful emotional reactions, including fear, relief, hope, confusion, and worry.

Hence, the voice of the customer focuses mainly on sentiment analysis, the process of predicting emotion from audience comments or opinions across various platforms. 

Banking Industry

The banking and personal finance sector has undergone major change and disruption in the last few years.

Reducing churn is a major challenge for banks, as they offer multiple promotions and bonuses to attract customers from competitors or retain existing ones. 

Automotive Industry

The automotive industry uses a combination of digital retailing and AI solutions in its services, resulting in enhanced loyalty and margins. 

Hospitality Industry

The hospitality industry uses customer voice data to deliver extraordinary service to its visitors. 

Aviation industry

Voice of customer data is used by the aviation industry to build brand reputation and retain customers.

They can identify their customers' needs and respond quickly.

7 Ways Voice of Customer in Retail Impacts Customer Experience

Nowadays, product developers use enterprise VoC solutions and product lifecycle management tools to filter their designs based on accurate information.

This helps them generate fresh ideas related to the product and accelerate the product innovation process. 

There are 7 reasons to incorporate retail analytics tools into the retail industry to understand the benefits of VoC:

Applicability & markdown reduction

In the retail industry, companies always try to consider customer trends & adopt them. This can be done to improve shrinking margins and inventory.

Retailers can do one thing: differentiate their products to meet users’ demands.

If shoppers find that you offer a product not available in many stores, they will return to your store frequently, helping you build a strong reputation in the market. 

If retailers don’t pay attention to capturing and implementing consumer insights into their product planning & pricing, they lose consumers' trust.

Sustainability

Once customer insights are converted into a binary format, VoC technology can provide a highly detailed view of sustainability.

Also, VoC will inform retailers to create customer-oriented production and supply chain processes to generate relevant selections.

Customer engagement

Nowadays, all retailers and brands use social media to build strong connections with their audiences.

Over 71% of retailers agree that customer input matters a lot in the product creation process. 

Listening to the needs of target customers can make retailer-shopper relationships even stronger, and their feedback is valuable to product designers in developing innovative products.

Retailers can minimize sampling costs, reduce merchandise with low consumer interest, and reduce oversampling by listening to their target audience's input.

Production efficiency

The latest survey conducted by Sourcing Journal reveals that 45% of industry experts agree that effective planning during the product development cycle can significantly improve operational efficiency.

So, it’s better to expand a VoC strategy to the whole supply chain.

In the end, the VoC data results in enhanced production agility, reduced inventory, and decreased environmental impact.

Enhanced revenue

Incorporating customer voice can provide greater visibility into your retail campaigns and deliver more powerful sales & marketing concepts. This results in an increase in revenue.

For example, using NLP and AI, you may find that your shoppers have a positive opinion of in-store displays. 

Based on this report, you can replicate the outcomes' success and enhance the current displays while producing fresh yet identical concepts for upcoming productions.

Store layout & design

Voice of customer strategy for retail helps companies design stores and create a better experience that responds to shoppers' interests, driving higher sales & foot traffic.

Product development

Voice of customer AI analytics guides retail businesses to discover preferred features of enhancements, creating impressive products that connect to their preferences. 

VoC analysis is a good tool for product managers to filter and organize a product blueprint and to follow the customer’s entire lifecycle.

This will provide a clear understanding of a product and whether its features meet shoppers' expectations.

Voice of Customer in Retail: Key Approaches for Business Growth

Listed below are the most common VoC methods for retail business growth. Each provides unique approaches to collecting data and capturing numerous kinds of data.

Surveys

Both retail and eCommerce industries conduct NPS (net promoter score) and CSAT (customer satisfaction) surveys via email, app, or live chat at clear user lifecycle touchpoints, including upon cancellation, after onboarding, and after purchase, to identify audience pain points.  

Chatbots & Live chats

Chatbots & live chats are helping retailers address various audience issues that don’t require interaction with a support agent, but they can be powerful for gathering VoC data.  

Moreover, when audiences repeatedly raise the same unresolved issues, retailers have to reconfigure the chatbot to address them permanently.  

Customer reviews

You can find multiple services and online product review sites with effective VoC data that can be extracted directly with many APIs or web scraping tools.

Like social media comments, they provide candid, open sayings, but they normally go into detail. 

Oberlo's online review statistics show that 56% of audiences read at least the top 5 reviews before making a purchase. 

Website behavior

User behavior, such as visit frequency, time spent, purchases, and follow-up click-throughs, can be analyzed to determine how visitors interact with the website.

Various tools, such as Crazy Egg, Google Analytics, and Hotjar, can extract this information to understand user experience and their behavior on the website. 

This is numerical data, but when combined with survey comments and form feedback, companies can understand what they expect and how they behave towards services or products.

Call center data and sales calls

Listening to the customer service calls that are recorded to improve the quality of service is the best way to find out minor or major issues of the audience. 

Also, sales calls provide data on what clients are looking for in a product and how a company stands among its competitors.

What are the 4 Steps of a VoC Program?

The complete VoC process consists of 4 major steps:

Plan: This step involves systematic planning to capture customer feedback, analyze sentiment, and translate key insights into actionable recommendations for organizational growth.

Feedback collection: Earlier surveys were the most effective way to gather customer feedback.

Later, with advancements in digital communication platforms, customers’ voices have grown louder on community forums, in online reviews, and on social media. 

Feedback collection also includes identifying the origins of VoC data associated with your organization, adopting feedback concepts across multiple touchpoints, and properly gathering the data. 

Analyze: Soon after collecting raw data, analyze the sentiment in the feedback using VoC analysis.

You can segregate the feedback information and extract valuable insights to ensure the respective VoC data is actionable. 

Act: Both data and insights will become powerful if changed into action.

This step involves analyzing and solving recurring customer challenges across various interactions.

Also, it implies the team's immediate involvement in responding to negative feedback.

How to Implement Voice of Customer in Retail (Step-by-Step)

Let’s see how to implement VoC analytics (Step-by-Step):

Step 1: Define clear KPIs and objectives

Before you start collecting feedback, define what you are trying to achieve. 

Consider this:

• Do you like to increase customer experience?

Step 2: Establish major customer touchpoints

Your customers communicate with your business in several places:

• Social media

Step 3: Gather feedback from various platforms

Don’t depend on a single source. The perfect VoC strategies integrate unstructured and structured data. 

Step 4: Select the relevant VoC tools and platforms

Use an integration of quantitative and qualitative techniques to gather varied customer insights. 

Ensure the tools you use integrate with current systems (helpdesk, CRM, etc.) to simplify voice of the customer analysis.  

Step 5: Classify your customers 

Various customers have various expectations. 

Classify your audience according to:

• Shopping preferences

Step 6: Convert insights into action

Collect feedback and act on it. 

Step 7: Track, Report, and Repeat

The VoC project requires continuous refinement.

Voice of the Customer Data Best Practices

Listed below are the crucial voice of the customer’s best practices to maximize a company’s growth:

Define your objectives

Establish clear goals for the voice of the customer program to gather shopper feedback, ensuring they align perfectly with your business strategy.

Define relevant, measurable, and achievable goals to facilitate progress tracking.

Select the perfect tools & mechanisms

Evaluate your resources and requirements before selecting appropriate data-gathering tools and mechanisms to accurately collect and analyze shoppers’ feedback.

If unsure, pilot various mechanisms to identify which ones provide powerful insights.

Develop a dedicated VoC team

Provide the necessary training and knowledge to build a team to execute the voice of the customer program.

Inspire cross-functional participation to promote broader awareness of customer requirements and streamline decision-making.

Visualize outcomes

Establish clear communication concepts to circulate the findings from the VoC program to suitable stakeholders.

Use presentations, reports, or data visualizations to convey complex information in a simple-to-use format, ensuring insights are accessible to all participants.

User insights

Create an effective plan to implement changes based on insights from the VoC program. 

Categorize actions according to resource needs, possible effects, and utility.

Allocate transparent ownership and a target date to ensure on-time execution and an outstanding user journey.

Track and repeat

Constantly evaluate the effect of modifications by monitoring KPIs and consumer feedback.

Be ready to make further adjustments and to constantly track your VoC program to ensure it remains fruitful and relevant.

Nurture a culture of constant development by learning from setbacks.

Ask for customer input

Ask customers to participate in interviews, communities, or surveys to involve them in the VoC program.

Make it effortless for them to offer feedback by providing multiple channels, including social media, chatbots, phone, and email, and appreciate their honest, valuable input.

This provides a clear idea of whether the customer experience is consistent over time.

Merge VoC data

Use data analytics tools to merge VoC data from multiple sources, providing a comprehensive view of consumer needs and sentiment.

This integrated concept allows precise decision-making.

Keep up continuous commitment

Consider your VoC program a continuous process and revisit its goals, mechanisms, and objectives regularly to ensure they align with your business requirements and consumer expectations.

Maintaining a strong commitment to VoC will help you stay active in the market and cultivate long-lasting success.

How to Collect Customer Feedback in Retail?

Post-purchase surveys

This is the most frequently seen way to collect retail customer feedback. 

Retailers can send surveys:

• After online purchases

Best practices

• Keep surveys simple and short

Example questions

• What changes would you like to see?

In-store Kiosks

In-store feedback kiosks let customers instantly share their experiences before they leave the store. 

Popular kiosk feedback options

• Emoji-based responses

This method offers real-time insights into:

• Product availability

QR codes

QR codes have become a powerful tool for retail feedback. 

Retailers can place QR codes:

• Store displays

Track ratings and online reviews

Customers usually share opinions on:

• Google reviews

Tracking reviews allows retailers to understand:

• Common complaints

Social media listening

Social media platforms are precious sources of unfiltered customer opinions.

Retailers can track:

• Hashtags

Social listening tools help brands identify:

• Product feedback

Customer support channels

Retailers can inspect:

• Call recordings

Support feedback allows identification:

• Service gaps

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys

NPS lets retailers find:

• Dissatisfied customers

App feedback widgets and website

Retailers can embed feedback widgets into mobile apps and websites. 

Examples:

• Star-rating widgets

These tools help collect feedback during:

• Product searches

Apart from these, businesses rely on AI-enabled analytics to improve retail revenue by leveraging customer feedback and building trust.

How Do You Analyze Voice of Customer Data?

VoC data impacts the whole purchasing lifecycle from sales and marketing to consumer success and product.

Data Collection

You need to focus more on listening to your audience’s experiences and gathering their feedback through interviews or sentiment analysis (social media interactions & reviews).

It’s better to gather all the details already available online and ask the audience directly.

Text Analytics

Text analytics is a major component of the voice of the customer programs.

By analyzing comments, text documents, and surveys, CX professionals can gain detailed insights into how consumers think and feel about products or companies.

Sentiment Analysis

The sentiment analysis process combines NLP and ML, a major component of a retail company’s ability to adapt to the industry's rapidly changing demands.

Conducting a voice of the customer sentiment analysis provides insights into the major problems consumers face in their customer experience.

By understanding customer sentiment about services or products, you can decide where changes are needed across your product strategies, marketing, and branding to increase your customer base.

Sentiment analysis tools minimize misalignment and provide a comprehensive view of patterns across the user experience.

Identify Trends

Soon after analyzing customer feedback, you should start identifying trends. In this case, the voice of customer data analysis offers much-needed insights. 

Here, you have to look at how many times in a year customer satisfaction has reached a higher level.

This analysis is required to understand which strategies are most effective and which aren’t.

This information can be used later to make better decisions that ultimately enhance the customer experience.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking provides an in-depth comparison of your retail business process and practices with those of your competitors.

By benchmarking VoC data, your customer experience team should focus more on consistent improvement.

Visualization

Data visualization is a critical stage in capturing consumer feedback throughout the consumer journey.

Using VoC data, you can develop dashboards or graphs to visualize user data regularly.

This helps retail brands focus more on the specific needs of their customers at all steps of the purchasing lifecycle and optimize experiences to increase customer satisfaction.

Take Action

Based on the details collected from VoC data analysis, you should make decisions related to customer service and product development.

This ultimately leads to increased brand loyalty, retention, and sales.

How to Use Voice of Customer Data like a Pro?

Listed below are a few ways to use the voice of the customer data like a pro:

Data collection

VoC data can be gathered from numerous origins. To gain a comprehensive understanding of user sentiment, retail companies must rely on advanced analytics tools to analyze the data. 

Analysis and reporting

After using analytics for feedback analysis and offering insights to retail industries via dashboards, visualizations, and impressive reports. 

Sentiment analysis

It is a powerful tool for analyzing the emotion behind consumer feedback, helping retail brands measure consumer satisfaction and focus on key areas for improvement. 

Text analytics

Mainly used to discover key phrases or keywords in audience feedback that are associated with a brand, allowing it to discover trends in audience feedback.

Social media monitoring

It allows retailers to discover and decide what consumers think about a company and its products and services across all social media platforms. 

Customer journey mapping

This allows retailers to map all steps of the shopper’s journey, helping them identify major pain points and take appropriate action to improve the shopper experience. 

Integration with different systems

The best VoC platforms can integrate with various systems, including marketing automation, customer service channels, and CRM.

Benefits of VoC Analytics in Retail

Here’s how VoC data analysis retail benefits businesses:

Supports personalized shopping experiences

VoC analytics retail helps brands enhance customer segmentation and create targeted marketing strategies. 

Improves marketing performance

Voc analytics allows marketers: 

• Understand customer intent and language

Thorough understanding of customer expectations

By looking at feedback from several touchpoints, retailers can find: 

• Which services create frustration

Quickly identify customer pain points

Common issues identified through the voice of the customer in retail are:

• Website usability issues

Improved customer retention and loyalty

The voice of customer in retail improves:

• Repeat purchases

How AI in VoC Analytics Improves Customer Experience? 

AI improves every step of the VoC implementation strategy by automating data acquisition, interpretation, and insight delivery. 

Multi-channel data ingestion

AI regularly gathers feedback from social media, support tickets, surveys, chat, and calls, reducing silos and human efforts. 

Automated tagging

ML allocates clear topics and sentiment in the absence of rigid taxonomies, adjusting to changing language. 

Intent and sentiment detection

NLP determines what customers think and what their next move will be, encouraging timely interventions.

Insight summarization

Generative AI aggregates vast amounts of input into clear, structured insights and identifies emerging themes. 

AI-based VoC programs minimize the gap between action and feedback acquisition, converting customer signals into a regular, organizational-level feedback loop.  

A report from IBM states that conversational AI has minimized agent effort by approxiatemately 87% and increased productivity by 94%. AI-based VoC platforms provide a consistent view of audience sentiment, making feedback more strategic.

Understanding the Importance of Voice of Customer Tools for Your Business

VoC tools can be programs or applications that enable your business to collect consumer viewpoints and feedback.

These voice of customer tools can gather voice of the customer information either indirectly or directly to assist in notifying your buyer characters. 

These tools are similar to mobile surveys and are complicated, as they use predictive analytics to indicate which products to select and how much to charge for them, in order to expect better returns. 

There are an unlimited number of voice of the customer tools available on the market.

According to Gartner, VoC solutions integrate feedback from various sources, including both direct and indirect interactions with consumers.

With integrated technologies such as text mining, web analytics, social media monitoring, and speech analytics, businesses can fully understand their audiences’ voices. 

As this industry continues to grow, more and more companies need to adopt new VoC analytics tools under the guidance of professionals. 

When choosing a VoC solution, it is crucial to spend some time analyzing how that tool meets your company's requirements. 

VoC tools are effective at collecting large volumes of descriptive data but fail to convert it into actionable insights.

Your responsibility is to ensure that you have selected the right VoC provider to save your organization money and time.

Best VoC Tools for Retail Businesses

Advanced VoC tools for retail let retailers build powerful customer relationships and improve service quality.

Qualtrics XM

Qualtrics is a reputed enterprise-grade VoC platform. 

Major features

• Advanced reporting and dashboards

Ideal for 

Large retail organizations looking for deep customer experience analytics

Medallia

Medallia allows retailers to map customer journeys, providing a clear view of where they encounter challenges and where opportunities exist to enhance the customer experience. 

Major features

• Text analytics

Ideal for 

Businesses that need complete visibility and live feedback across the omnichannel customer journeys. 

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is suitable for small and medium-scale retail companies. 

Major features

• Simple survey creation

Ideal for

Organizations that need affordable and simple tools.

Zendesk

Zendesk integrates customer support with VoC potential.

Major features

• AI-based support insights

Ideal for

Growing businesses that want to merge VoC strategies and customer support. 

Clarabridge

Clarabridge has expertise in AI-driven sentiment and text analytics. 

Major features

• Emotion detection

Ideal for

Retailers who are managing vast amounts of unstructured feedback. 

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a premier platform for customer experience and social listening management. 

Major features

• Customer engagement analytics

Ideal for

Retail companies have a powerful presence on social media.

How Does Express Analytics Improve Voice of Customer Insights with AI?

Traditional VoC analytics tools rely on forms and structured surveys, leaving tons of valuable feedback untapped. 

With Express Analytics, you can:

• Identify intent, emotion, and sentiment with AI-powered customer sentiment analysis

Conclusion

Customer satisfaction is very important for retaining customers and building an excellent brand reputation, which enhances financial performance by driving revenue.

Retail companies follow the voice of the customer strategy to improve their products, create remarketing campaigns, produce impressive marketing copy, and deliver an exceptional user experience.  

By leveraging VoC data, they can identify multiple opportunities to enhance the experience for current and future customers, making it easier to increase annual revenue.

With VoC analytics in retail, companies can identify friction points in the customer journey, refine product assortments, improve pricing strategies, and personalize experiences at scale.

References:

What Are Voice of Customer (VoC) Tools?

Voice of the Customer (VoC): Streamline data collection + analysis to inform strategy