Even when you have a team of all-star key account managers, you need replicable business processes that everyone on the team can understand and follow. This consistency doesn't just help your account managers have a framework for doing their job well. It also ensures that all of your clients have a similarly enjoyable experience that is geared toward their success. There are fewer risks of error, variability, missed opportunities, and other inconsistencies that can jeopardize customer relationships.
Along with having standardized onboarding processes and upselling or cross-selling procedures, your team should also have a consistent feedback process so you can gain insights from your customers and make the improvements they (and you) need to succeed. In fact, according to SuperOffice, "Gartner research recently discovered that collecting customer feedback can increase upselling and cross-selling success rates by 15% to 20%."
That's just one of the many benefits of enacting dynamic feedback tools that help your clients and your account managers succeed together. Keep reading to learn more about what Voice of Customer software is, what it does, and how it can benefit your team.
What Is a Voice of Customer?
Voice of Customer (VOC) approaches are interview-style of gathering feedback from customers. Users ask personalized questions about potential pain points, success stories, and the short-term and long-term goals of the customer. This qualitative feedback gives organizations more insights into how customers think and feel about the services, as well as how the organization can evolve to meet customers' ongoing needs.
Voice of Customer interviews are a superior alternative to an NPS. Asking clients if they would recommend your services is too limited and doesn't explore the underlying reasons why a certain was given or how organizations can substantively address it. Learn more about VOC feedback approaches and how they differ from NPS here.
Check out the in-depth guide on how the key account management process feeds into the KAM software.
What Does Voice of Customer Software Do?
Voice of Customer is the feedback that can fundamentally improve how you do business, but only if you have the right tools to get the most out of the data you collect over time. Before implementing Voice of Customer feedback questionnaires and interviews, choose software that can help support your endeavors across years of interactions. The right Voice of Customer software handles these tasks:
1. Gathers Data
Just as much as (or even more than) quantitative data, qualitative data needs to be organized and accessible in order for teams to spot trends or potential insights. VOC software can hold all of the questions and answers your key account management team collects. This reduces the risk of errors, such as incompletely recorded answers, answers attributed to the wrong questions, or even feedback attributed to the wrong client.
2. Helps Interpret Gathered Data
Once the data is in place, your software should help you parse through it. This can include identifying positive and negative answers, finding similarities from different actors within the same client organization or across multiple clients, and identifying keywords. The software helps interpret the data both immediately following interviews and surveys and long after the fact so managers can make quarterly or annual assessments.
3. Helps Develop Client-Specific Questions
Personalized interviews get the best insights, but it can be hard to know what questions to ask. Smart Voice of Customer software can assess client profiles and previous pieces of feedback to identify the most important questions. This allows account managers to drill down to the most important issues, circle back to ongoing areas of concern, and get the most value out of the process.
This also makes the process more enjoyable and valuable for the client. Personalized questions show your organization put thought into the interview, value their time, and are committed to addressing specific pain points or needs.
4. Tracks Voice of Customer Interviews Over Time
VOC feedback processes work best when you have periodic surveys and interviews, not just one-and-done questionnaires. VOC software will hold onto the questions and answers from past interactions so you can compare answers to the same question over time, see trends over the life of a client, and not worry about losing insight into your longest (and, as a result, most valuable) clients.
How Will Voice of Customer Software Benefit My Team?
Now that you know how VOC software functions, you can probably already see how it creates new advantages for your business and resolves issues for your clients. But it's just as important to have software solutions that help your employees instead of just adding to their workload. Here's how Voice of Customer software directly benefits your team:
1. Know Your Customer Better
When account managers know their customers better, they can get in front of issues and make the relationship stronger. This results in less frustration, fewer stressful deadlines, and a longer, more profitable relationship. Relationships are one of the most important determining factors for the length of time a client spends with an organization, and VOC software provides the insights AMs need to predict problems, upsell opportunities, and avoid personality clashes.
2. Service Improvement
While relationships matter, results are important, too. Your organization needs to constantly be upgrading the levels of service you provide so your products and solutions stay relevant, vital, and convenient. Improving your services as a result of client feedback interconnects your products with your client’s business processes, making them more reliable and more profitable.
3. Elevate Your Client Relationships
AMs have an easier time managing their clients when the relationships are strong. This may seem obvious, but it's surprising how proactively asking for feedback and giving customers personalized attention can strengthen a relationship and minimize the risk of customers turning to your competitors.
VOC feedback doesn't just introduce an opportunity for AMs to strengthen client relationships. It also provides an easy, actionable process for doing it.
Choose Kapta for Voice of Customer and Key Account Management Software
More and more businesses are implementing VOC feedback processes instead of NPS. Make the switch and get the right software that can help gather, interpret, and manage the data for the long term. At Kapta, we design our key account management software to help with every stage of onboarding, retaining, and elevating clients. Contact us today to learn more or to schedule a demo.
