How to Democratize Voice of the Customer Insights

From our friends at

Do you make major business decisions based purely on gut instinct? If you answered “yes” then don’t worry, you’re not alone, but it’s time to switch to a more data-driven approach.

Making this switch, however, isn’t necessarily as easy as you may think. At many organizations, data is siloed, with internal teams lacking proper access to it –– despite the important role it plays in strategic product-building and decision-making. 

When it comes to customer feedback in particular, although it’s quite standard to collect Voice of the Customer (VOC) insights from customer conversations, the insights often aren’t leveraged to their fullest potential. This usually comes down to lack of access and can have a negative effect on your customer experience as well as your bottom line. Put another way: Democratizing access to VOC insights in your company is key to true customer-centricity and customer-led growth.

If you’re not familiar with the term, at its core, data democratization is the process of ensuring your internal teams have access to quality data to help them make well-informed decisions that benefit the company.

This brings us to our next question…

Why Is it Crucial to Democratize Customer Insights Across Internal Departments?

There’s an ongoing debate about who actually owns customer data—customer support or the product team—but we feel this debate focuses on the wrong issue. Regardless of who owns the data, what matters is who can access it.

Without access to VOC data, cross-functional teams can’t make use of actionable insights that could reveal major issues with your product or service. By pushing customer-centricity to the back-burner, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity for optimization and growth.

Democratizing customer insights helps other stakeholders in your organization, too. Decision-makers across the company get access to insights without needing to continuously reach out to the support team, and department heads can set KPIs and OKRs based on real-life data as well as make faster data-backed decisions.

Best of all, it ensures customers stay at the center of every decision. To better illustrate the benefits, take Gousto’s secret to growth as an example. Having easy access to granular customer insights helps everyone in the company make decisions that center the customer, leading to increased loyalty. 

Joe Quinlivan, Head of Customer Care states: “All functions across the business have access to the analytical tool, they use it for a variety of reasons, from discovery work to identifying any customer friction points and driving broader strategy for the business.”

How to Unlock Customer Satisfaction with VOC

To start a data democratization revolution in your organization, you need to focus on three main actions:

1. Empower Employees with Customer Data 

Regardless of seniority level, every employee in your organization should have access to VOC insights. This ensures that every employee has what they need to make in-flight decisions that benefit the business, and you remove any potential roadblocks that stem from gate-keepers that likely don’t have time to answer questions. If your employees have to request data from the support team every time they need customer insights, it can prolong the decision-making process unnecessarily. 

2. Give Employees the Tools to Work With Granular Data on Their Own Terms

Using the right analytical tool is just as important as giving employees access to relevant (and granular) customer data. Switching between multiple VOC channels merely complicates the data-analysis process. To avoid this, introduce a tool that unifies all channels on one platform. This will empower team members across your organization to access VOC data.

3. Lead the Shift from an “I Think” Organization to an “I Know” Organization

Peter Drucker, a leading management expert, came up with the following analogy: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It’s a powerful reminder that organizational success hinges on your people more than anything else. Fostering a data-driven culture is a crucial step to ensuring data democratization across your company. Creating this culture shift won’t be easy, however, culture comes from the top down, and if you can get your company leaders to buy into data democratization, half the battle is won. 

How to Make VOC Insights Accessible Across Your Organization

1.  Choose the Right VOC Insights Solution

Not all Voice of the Customer (VOC) analytics tools are created equal. Choosing a customer feedback tool that uncovers actionable, granular customer insights from every source is vital. It’s best to have a customer feedback tool that brings all your customer insights together in one easy-to-use dashboard so that you can democratize access to insights, and every team member can leverage them for better decision-making. 

2. Share Your Findings

A great way to maintain transparency throughout your organization is by conducting regular meetings to share findings sourced from customer conversations. When your customer support, product, and marketing teams, plus any other relevant departments, can come together, you’ll experience a plethora of ideas and knowledge-sharing that promotes optimization of your product(s) or service(s). Here, an easy-to-use dashboard that brings all customer insights into one simple interface is key.

3. Increase Accountability and Report on the Right KPIs

When every employee is able to access VoC data, they are empowered to set objectives and KPIs based on real-life numbers. This encourages higher levels of accountability when working to achieve their departmental goals.

Creating A Data-Led Future

Data democratization helps you visualize, scrutinize, and uncover actionable insights from across your company to make impactful decisions for your customers and become a truly customer-centric organization. It’s a process that requires consistency, but––when done right––will boost business profitability and increase product innovation.

VOC insight tools like SentiSum make it fast and easy to access Voice-of-the-Customer data. SentiSum enables you to quickly understand emerging customer trends and common questions, and receive actionable feedback. Want to drive growth using actionable and accurate customer insights? Learn more about SentiSum here, and see how Dixa and SentiSum work hand-in-hand to put your customers at the heart of every decision here.

Author

SentiSum Team

SentiSum Team

SentiSum uses machine learning to tag and categorize all your customer conversations, surfacing actionable insights and making them available across your organization.

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