4 Ways to Develop a Voice of the Customer Strategy Through Community Engagement

Voice of the customer (VOC) is a necessary element of marketing that involves capturing and translating customer experiences and feedback into actionable product and business improvements. According to HubSpot, “Acquiring new customers is 5X more expensive than retaining existing customers.” Having a VOC program or strategy allows you to predict customer expectations and improve satisfaction scores, ultimately retaining customers. Customer community managers can practice social listening, launch polls, and ask questions to generate customer feedback. Hi. I’m Kristin Blye, a customer marketing expert who has consistently achieved a 9 NPS score for community member satisfaction. I’m writing a series on optimizing your marketing strategy to enhance the health and value of your customer community. Here are four ways to develop the voice of the customer (VOC) using your community.

1. Ask Open-Ended Questions Based on Trending Industry Topics

Staying on top of industry topics is mandatory for a community manager. Chances are, what you read in the headlines is just the tip of the iceberg. Thankfully, you have a community of industry professionals who can share first-hand knowledge and experiences that go beyond the newsfeed and help you develop a deeper understanding of the subject. Ask open-ended questions to let your members direct your journey to uncover new ideas for content and learn how to position your product as a solution. Start with what you know and take a pulse check with a simple 10-point scale or multiple-choice question. Then dig deeper with each exposed sentiment. This strategy demonstrates your interest in your audience’s needs, establishes trust through conversations, and empowers your community members to engage. Soon you’ll identify a common statement that you can develop into a discussion forum topic, webinar, or marketing content, or take it to social media for a wider reach.

Success: Through industry research and a progressive Q&A exercise in my community, the consensus was “no” when asked, “Do you think the pandemic generation of learners is a wave and eventually we’ll see student engagement ‘return to normal’?”. This was a provocative question about a sensitive customer pain point, and I was curious about what professionals outside my community thought. We launched a LinkedIn poll, and the results were telling: over half of the respondents believe it is "unlikely" that student engagement will return to pre-pandemic levels. From here, we could confidently say this indicated a significant shift in how students interact with their education and highlighted the need for new strategies to keep them engaged. We set the stage by identifying a problem and a need for a solution. The feedback we received directed our thought leadership content and product positioning. We offered a solution (a combination of customer insight and product positioning) through an omnichannel marketing campaign. As a bonus, the LinkedIn poll spiked our social media audience engagement. This observation led to incorporating more polls into our social media strategy.

2. Listen to Customer Feedback and Create Opportunities for Your Community to Elaborate

Your customers are talking; are you listening? Analysis of NPS or CSAT surveys can provide eye-opening insight into customer likes, dislikes, needs, and tensions. As a marketer, this is your invitation to pry. Identify trends in responses and open up the forum to gather additional context. If customers frequently rate your customer support as a 9 or 10, ask your community what makes this a winning feature. This information will help you evolve a new or existing company value proposition (your five-star customer support) with customer testimonials. If users cite a moment of confusion and frustration, dive deeper into where the problem exists within the customer journey by hosting a community roundtable to understand if the solution requires a complex UX redesign or simple customer education like a training video or additional communication touchpoint. Both demonstrate your company’s dedication to active listening and customer success.

3. Poll Your Community on New Ideas and Build a Conversation Around the Top Responses

A feedback funnel is desired by internal stakeholders and customers alike. Your teams want customer feedback, and your customers want to share their ideas. Offer an evergreen opportunity for users to share product ideations and suggestions. This can be a webpage form, a dedicated discussion thread in your community, or a CTA embedded in each product release announcement. Make the responses visible to the right teams. Quality customer feedback is useless unless it’s placed into the right hands. Utilize your customer community as beta testers by polling them on your product or feature concept. Sometimes you’ll hear, “It’s a good idea, but I’m not sure how much I’ll use it.” Other times you’ll get an overwhelmingly positive response. Incorporating the VOC in your product roadmap will help your team prioritize enhancements and projects.

4. Include Release Notes in Your Community Strategy

Customers care about their investment. Regularly sharing product updates like release notes in your customer community is a great way to generate engagement and interest in your product. Have a member of the product team post the message, an experience equivalent to a chef delivering the food to the table. Next to product updates, community members enjoy meeting the team behind the company logo. Utilize the community discussion feature to generate buzz around news, and source comments and feedback. Maybe you fixed a small bug that a few customers reported, or you added a new accessibility feature that was a mandatory renewal requirement for another customer. Perhaps your community will use this space to provide new ideations, report issues, or reignite interest and excitement in your solution. This simple act of transparency nurtures a respectful partnership between your business and your customers.

Success: Customer engagement skyrocketed 25% each time I shared release notes in my community of brand advocates. This group was particularly interested in innovations because they were tasked with training others on our SaaS tool. The regular updates were written at a high level and delivered by a product team member who was available to get technical or answer questions if they came up. Directly communicating relevant product updates to brand advocates in their dedicated space created a VIP experience and allowed for faster product adoption.

Read more articles in this series: 3 Ways for Community Marketers to Quickly Become Knowledge Experts in a New Industry

Let’s Work Together! Kristin Blye is a member of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Founder of the Bookclub Babes Social Club, and a Customer Marketing Leader, responsible for launching global advocacy communities, leveraging the voice of the customer to position companies as thought leaders within their industries, and developing customer-centric content, campaigns, and events that empower trust and drive engagement.