Chapter 12: Delivering Insights with Voice Surveys

Voice surveys are the latest big thing in customer research. This is because they are simple, fast, and easy to execute.

Unlike traditional (and expensive) text-based surveys that get poor response rates and incomplete answers, voice surveys are shown to get high response rates and in-depth responses. They can be created with just an idea and a template in just a few moments.

This is why voice surveys are quickly becoming the new standard for product innovation. And because they can be so fast and easy to deploy, companies of any size can use voice surveys to engage with users and collect feedback – improving their products more rapidly than ever before.

In this chapter, we'll learn about using Commerce.AI voice surveys to achieve the following:

• Engaging your customers with ease
• Improving your offerings
• Improving customer loyalty

With this knowledge, you'll be able to start using voice surveys to improve your product innovation workflows – fast. As a result, you'll be able to gain a competitive advantage by enabling your product teams to easily incorporate customer feedback in their workflow. Let's get started with the beginning of the customer feedback life cycle – engaging your customers.

Engaging your customers with ease

In this section, we'll explain how to use Commerce.AI voice surveys to engage your customers with ease, by creating and deploying customer surveys and questionnaires quickly using our easy-to-use templates. We'll also show you how you can implement findings in your product innovation strategies and workflows.

In particular, we'll look at how to use these seven voice survey templates:

• Product feature prioritization
• New service offering
• Post-purchase survey
• Hotel experience
• Store experience
• Post-call survey
• Pricing survey

Let's begin with an exploration of one of the most popular types of voice surveys – the product feature prioritization survey.

Product feature prioritization

Product teams are always looking for ways to make their products better. In particular, they're always seeking opportunities to improve User Experience (UX). Unfortunately, there's often a big gap between what the product team wants and what customers actually need.

This is where prioritization comes in. Prioritization is essentially deciding which features to build first, second, and third – or not at all! It can be challenging for product teams without any kind of formal process or structured criteria to work with. This is where product prioritization surveys come in handy. They're a quick and easy way for product teams to collect feedback from users while also identifying which features should get top priority next.

There are two main benefits of this approach:

• It enables users to provide valuable feedback that helps the team prioritize.
• You have a chance to observe how users respond before you jump into building something new, which could save time and money.

For example, let's say you're a consumer electronics brand and you're working on a new product – a new smartphone, perhaps. The smartphone market is notoriously competitive, and users seem to want everything: a big battery, multiple high-quality cameras, minimal bezel, waterproofing, fast charging, and so on.

You've considered these features but know that you'll need to choose just a few to deliver the best user experience. Otherwise, you'll stretch your product resources thin, and fail to deliver exceptional quality for each feature.

A product feature prioritization survey will let you know what features your users care about the most. You'll be able to see which features are the most popular, and you might even uncover some new use cases for your team to consider.

Next, let's look more closely at why you may want to run a product feature prioritization survey, how it works, and who takes part in these surveys.

What is the purpose of a product feature prioritization survey?

A survey such as this is useful because it directly engages with customers as part of your product development process. Rather than solely spending time researching competitors' offerings or coming up with ideas on your own, you can leverage existing customer insights so that your ideas are informed by what people actually want.

It also gives you data directly from real people you know more about than anyone else – namely, actual buyers who are already in the marketplace. This is invaluable because it allows you to understand exactly what people want, what they think about features, and other insights that can't be gleaned from solely researching competitors.

Companies that fail to get feedback such as this can end up making products that don't satisfy their users' needs and missing out on valuable opportunities for greater brand loyalty. For example, a large consumer electronics firm recently updated its laptop line, adding all the features that users had been requesting for several years. They've come under criticism for taking so long to deliver on these features, and for essentially building the same laptop over and over again. A product feature prioritization survey would have revealed these improvement opportunities early on.

How does a product feature prioritization survey work?

The survey template in the Commerce.AI platform is designed so that teams can quickly and easily identify which features to build next based on customer feedback. The format is simple, and the information you provide will help you prioritize the product backlog for your team.

Once users have completed your survey, it will be analyzed by AI systems that will review both the responses and preferences of users, as well as any existing market research or competitive analysis. This will give you a clear picture of what features you should work on building first, second, third, and so on.

These surveys can be sent directly to customers on platforms such as Shopify, which is how some of the largest e-commerce companies communicate directly with their customers. Since customers are the lifeblood of your business, you should always aim to get feedback from them. If you don't, you run the risk of releasing a new feature that no one wants.

Who takes part in a product feature prioritization survey?

You can send the survey to customers who have already used your product or service, or you can send it to potential customers. You can also use the survey to solicit input from employees within your organization, such as designers and developers.

When soliciting input from your team, you should offer them a chance to provide feedback on a specific feature that they're currently working on or interested in building.

New service offering

When planning to offer a new service or product, it's critical to understand the needs of your target customers, as well as the risks and challenges they face. A structured approach to customer research helps teams develop a foundation for their offering, find early adopters, and gain insights that can inform the future development of their services.

One way to understand your potential customers is by conducting customer interviews, which are an invaluable tool for gaining insights into a user's motivations and behaviors. However, conducting individual interviews can be costly and time-consuming. In addition, qualitative research methods such as observation and analysis often yield limited results, due to their low capacity for generating actionable insights that can inform the service innovation life cycle.

To overcome these challenges, many organizations now turn to voice surveys as a primary method for understanding customer needs and preferences. Voice surveys allow you to reach large audiences at a minimal cost.

Let's look at some specific examples. Suppose you operate a restaurant chain and want to understand how customers prefer to order their food. You could conduct individual interviews, but this would be costly and time-consuming.

Alternatively, you could send out a short voice survey that would allow you to reach many more customers at a lower cost and take as little as a few minutes to complete. You could also use the results of your survey to guide the development of new features that may improve customer experience and increase revenue.

Another example is a retail store that wants to understand the items that customers are most interested in purchasing via a voice survey. The store could then use this information to develop new product lines and promote those items in its checkout aisles.

This would help the store increase sales while also providing customers with additional value. As you can see, voice surveys provide service teams with a powerful tool for developing products and services that align with customer needs while also increasing revenue.

Why voice surveys are crucial for new service offerings

The service industry is facing headwinds from a variety of angles. Some of the biggest challenges service teams face include the following:

• The rise of e-commerce
• Demand for instant gratification
• The COVID-19 pandemic
• Increasing competition

The rise of e-commerce has disrupted not just product firms but even many traditional service industries, such as airlines, hotels, and restaurants.

This is due in large part to the fact that people are switching away from in-person interactions with service providers. And given how much time people spend online nowadays, this phenomenon has only accelerated.

The rise of e-commerce has also changed the way customers interact with brands in other ways – for example, when it comes to customer support. Customers now expect an instant response to their questions and concerns, or they'll simply look somewhere else for help or advice.

Additionally, today's customers expect instant gratification. It can be frustrating for an airline passenger to have to wait on hold for over 30 minutes just to speak with a customer service representative. Or it can be frustrating for a hotel guest who has to call the front desk three times before anyone shows up, only to have their room not yet made up when they finally get there.

These challenges, along with customer frustrations, have been compounded amid the COVID-19 pandemic, where customers are more concerned about cleanliness, safety, and hygiene than ever before. The need to create a customer experience that addresses these concerns is putting unprecedented pressure on the service industry.

And it's also creating opportunities for new business models and revenue streams – if service providers can figure out how to meet these needs in innovative ways. Voice surveys are a powerful tool for doing just that.

Finally, competition is an ever-present risk for service providers. To remain relevant in the minds of customers, organizations have to stay ahead of their competition by delivering high-quality experiences at a fair price. This often requires continuous investment in new products and services, which can be difficult when resources are already stretched thin.

Voice surveys give teams an opportunity to engage directly with customers on topics that are important to them – and this engagement can provide service teams with valuable insights into what's important to their customers while also identifying pain points that they need to address if they want to grow their businesses.

Post-purchase survey

The moment after a customer makes a purchase is critical. You're now on the customer's home turf, where they have the power to tell you what they like and don't like about your product or service.

To get a better sense of customer sentiment, companies use exit interviews after a purchase is made. Typically, these are in-person surveys that address roughly six main themes:

• How satisfied the customer was with their experience
• Whether they would do business with this company again
• How likely they are to recommend this company's products or services to others
• What they liked and disliked about the product or service
• What could be improved
• If anything, any other comments that stood out to them

Exit interview surveys typically take around 10 minutes and ask individuals simple questions about their experience. But it's no easy feat getting most customers to participate.

A common criticism of exit interviews is that they are self-selective, meaning that only customers who are enthusiastic about leaving a review are likely to take the time out of their day to complete the survey. But even if you get 1% participation rates, those numbers still represent a tiny fraction of your total customer base.

While those customers might be more vocal than others, it's also possible that they are less representative of the masses – and so it may not be enough for you to draw meaningful conclusions from just their opinions.

Commerce.AI has developed an online tool in which teams can conduct automated voice surveys with their customers after a purchase is made. Customers have become used to speaking freely with technology, strengthened by the rise of voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. We've found that customers prefer these fast, effortless ways to provide feedback over the more tedious text-based alternatives.

This creates the potential for exponentially higher response rates than using traditional exit interview methods, as well as providing more detailed and actionable insights into what drives customer satisfaction and what areas need improvement.

With this powerful tool at your disposal, you can finally hone in on specific problems or concerns that customers have about your product or service so that you can begin addressing them right away – all without any overhead or burden on your team.

For example, suppose you're selling a new line of skincare products. You can set up a survey to ask customers about the efficacy of your and other products and what they liked and didn't like about using them. This enables you to understand whether you should be changing the formula or adding ingredients, or maybe even reducing the price if there is excess inventory.

In Figure 12.1, we can see an example of a Commerce.AI voice survey question, asking the customer, How was your experience with this product?. In the background, complex techniques like natural language understanding extract insights from the customer's responses, while the customer sees a simple, intuitive interface:

Figure 12.1 – A mock-up of a Commerce.AI voice survey

More specifically, you can use a post-purchase survey to achieve the following:

• Understand how satisfied customers are with your product (or service) and how much they liked it in comparison to other similar offerings out there.
• Collect feedback on customer service so that you can improve your support process.
• Determine whether there are any patterns associated with customers who buy certain SKUs or variations of your product, and/or, if so, learn from these patterns to help increase sales volume.

In short, voice surveys are a powerful tool that can help your business address customer issues, improve product quality, and increase sales.

Hotel experience survey

Hotels have a unique set of challenges and opportunities. They are an epicenter for social interaction, professional networking, and business travel. But hotel clientele can be notoriously difficult to engage since they have high expectations for services and amenities.

On the other hand, hotels are in a fantastic position to improve their guests' experience through digital innovation. With the right tools and strategies, digital transformation can help hotels offer unique value propositions that differentiate them from competitors.

For example, hotel brands can gain specific insights into their guests' preferences and behaviors through a hotel experience survey. Here are three ways hotels can gain meaningful insights from the survey.

Using data to improve existing products and services

The survey results can be used to inform product development and service improvements for in-room technology, food and beverage, and overall hotel experience.

For example, a hotel might want to know which amenities guests love most about its property so it can replicate those experiences whenever possible in the future. By using this type of data, brands can ensure they are meeting their guests' needs in new and creative ways while also increasing customer loyalty over time.

Suppose a hotel wants to know which features guests enjoy most about their fitness center. It could use the results of the survey to guide its investment decisions in this space, such as by choosing equipment that will be effective at engaging users and ensuring they have a positive experience. For example, the hotel might decide to invest in treadmills rather than elliptical machines if results show guests prefer running machines more than walking ones.

It could even be something as simple as making small aesthetic changes to the fitness center, such as adding art or better lighting, that will help guests enjoy their experience even more. Whatever the improvement may be, voice surveys will highlight what customers care about, so you can allocate your resources based on what will have a real impact on customer satisfaction.

Identifying opportunities for new revenue streams

Hotels can use the survey results to identify new revenue streams. For example, a hotel might discover that guests enjoy using the hotel's business center, even though they don't plan to meet any of their associates or attend a conference. This could mean the hotel should invest in additional meeting rooms to capitalize on this behavior and turn it into a revenue stream.

Perhaps the business center could be upgraded to a modern, high-end space that matches the rest of the hotel and offers guests Wi-Fi, comfortable seating, and other amenities. This might not only help generate additional revenue for the hotel, but it could also make business travelers more loyal to the brand — and, therefore, more likely to stay at that brand's properties in the future.

By doing so, you'll boost the bottom line while increasing customer satisfaction at the same time.

Ensuring consistency across properties

The survey results can also be used to inform future product rollouts and even franchise agreements if applicable. For example, a hotel brand might want to know which amenities guests love most about their property so they can replicate those experiences whenever possible in other properties owned by the same brand or even other brands.

This is known as parallel innovation, and it's an effective way of spreading innovation across multiple brands while also ensuring they have similar offerings. Using survey data throughout the life cycle of a project ensures all teams are aligned on how to best achieve goals and deliver an innovative product or service to customers.

Store experience survey

When consumers shop online or at physical stores, the experience they have can make or break a purchase. More than half of online consumers say that poor customer service at a retailer is likely to discourage them from making a repeat purchase.

Because the goal of any store is to drive sales, it's critical for retailers and brands to understand what factors influence customers' likelihood to buy, how their shopping experience could be improved, and whether they are satisfied with the store or product itself.

Let's dive into a specific example. Suppose you operate a pizza chain and have just launched a new store design. You want to understand whether customers like the new look and feel of the store. You can use the Commerce.AI store experience survey to understand what aspects of your new design are most likely to influence customers' likelihood to buy, how they feel about your new look, and whether they are satisfied with their overall experience. These insights can help you prioritize your store redesign efforts and ensure that you are investing in the right elements.

You can also use the survey to understand how customers feel about specific aspects of your new design, such as lighting or music. For example, if customers don't like the sound of a cash register ringing when they enter a pizza shop, you may want to consider a noise-free register system.

Another way to leverage this data is to identify patterns and trends that could indicate areas for improvement. For example, if customers consistently report being dissatisfied with their overall experience at your pizza shop, it may be time to invest in an overhaul of your ordering process.

A store's overall customer experience has the potential to drive future purchases, which is why retailers and brands are increasingly turning to data-driven approaches to understand how their customers navigate through their physical spaces.

Retailers can use analytics platforms such as the Commerce.AI store experience survey to survey customers in-store or online about how they feel about the store itself, as well as specific elements of the shopping experience. By gaining a better understanding of what factors influence customer behavior and satisfaction, retailers can make informed decisions about investments that could improve customer loyalty, engagement, and ultimately sales.

Post-call survey

Contact centers have long been a staple of providing customer support, and the rise of chatbots and voice bots has only reinforced that trend. Today, many consumers use contact centers to interact with businesses — and those interactions often lead to sales.

When a customer calls a business — whether they're reporting an issue with an order or seeking help with their purchase — businesses would be wise to collect that information for insights later on. You can do this by conducting a quick post-call survey to understand what (if anything) went wrong and how to improve the customer's service experiences moving forward. This helps organizations prevent costly mistakes from happening by proactively addressing issues before they arise.

A post-call survey can also provide insight into the quality of the overall customer experience, which can influence future revenue opportunities (and losses). For example, if you identify that your call agents aren't properly following up on issues, it may be time to invest in automated reporting capabilities to ensure your agents are doing everything possible to follow up on issues — especially if this is impacting your bottom line.

In addition, these insights can help you prioritize efforts as you develop new products or services for your customers. For example, if you learn that certain features are significantly more important to customers than others based on their responses in a post-call survey, this can help you prioritize your product roadmap.

Like the store experience survey, a post-call survey can also provide insights into how customers feel about specific elements of your service delivery, such as responsiveness or agent knowledge. By gaining a better understanding of the factors that influence customer behavior and satisfaction, you'll be able to make informed decisions about investments that could improve customer loyalty and engagement.

Pricing survey

The prices of your products and services are critical to your business. They can create a barrier of entry for new customers, influence consumers' willingness to pay, and signal value to existing customers.

If you sell a product or service that is priced too low, it will be difficult to capture enough revenue to be profitable. If you sell a product or service that is priced too high, it will likely result in lost revenue and profitability. Pricing is really important!

That said, pricing decisions can be complex and challenging. Many companies struggle with pricing because they don't have the right tools or processes in place for setting prices, making strategic adjustments, or anticipating potential price objections from their customers.

Product innovation teams have a huge opportunity to improve their pricing performance by leveraging the insights from the Commerce.AI pricing survey. The survey is designed to help you understand your pricing strategy and identify opportunities for improvement.

We've provided a template that you can use to quickly design your own pricing survey, or you can use our predesigned example to get started. Either way, we hope that this template will help you engage with your customers on pricing questions and inspire new ways of thinking about how and where to set prices in your products and services.

Why price is key

Why do you need to know your pricing strategy? Many companies have a pricing strategy, but few have a robust conversation around it. Pricing is ultimately about creating an equilibrium between your cost of goods and the value that customers place on those goods and services.

Being able to set prices for your offerings helps you determine how much revenue to generate from each customer segment. It also helps you identify the most profitable products and services that can be leveraged across multiple business units or lines of business. Finally, understanding your pricing strategy can help you make better strategic decisions about investing in new products and services.

Now that we've learned how businesses can deploy voice surveys in a variety of areas, let's explore how to implement your findings to improve your offerings.

Improving your offerings

Your existing products and services are, of course, the foundation of your business. But, if you're like most companies, your offerings are likely to have some gaps. Until now, though, there was no good way for you to know about these gaps.

That's why we created voice surveys. With voice surveys for market research and analysis, you can derive insights into your existing products and services, and help formulate new ones. Let's dive into how to use voice surveys to gain insights into your existing products and customers, and how to leverage those insights to improve your offerings.

Deriving insights into your existing products

Creating and launching a product is only part of that product's life cycle. It's also crucial to understand what makes it succeed or fail.

But in today's fast-moving world, even the most seasoned executives may not have all the information they need to make critical business decisions. So, when you can't find enough data in your existing market research, you need voice surveys.

By answering questions about your product through a survey, you not only get more data but also gain insights into what customers are really thinking. You do this by asking users to vocalize their thoughts and feelings, which is far more engaging than having them respond with one-word answers on a text form.

This insight will help inform better future product development and improvement efforts – and ultimately boost the chances of success for each new offering. Let's explore how you might use this approach to improve both your current products and services, as well as your future offerings.

How to leverage survey feedback to understand your customers

Before you embark on any kind of customer journey mapping project, it's important that you understand what motivates your target customers so that you can devise strategies that will help you increase conversion rates and reduce friction points along the way.

This is where customer surveys come in handy because they allow you to pinpoint pain points that are unique to each segment of your target audience(s). For example, if you have a Software as a Service (SaaS) product that focuses on small businesses, then your customers may be most concerned with costs and pricing. In this case, you'll want to incorporate questions about pricing into your survey so that you can understand what's important to your target customers.

You should also ask customers to rate their satisfaction with your product by answering questions such as the following:

• How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend?
• What's the most common reason for switching from our competitors?
• What features do you wish we offered?

By doing this, not only can you understand what motivates those who use your product today but also those who might become future users. This kind of data will help you improve future products and offerings.

How to act upon those insights

Once you've identified where your customers are feeling pain points or experiencing friction, it's time to move forward with a solution. But first, it's important that you understand the difference between growing pains and fundamental problems with your product.

If one of your survey respondents said they had a problem with something such as late deliveries or poor customer service but they still planned on buying from your company, this is likely a growing pain – an issue that will be resolved once the company scales to meet demand.

If however, respondents said they were dissatisfied with their last purchase experience and were planning on never purchasing from your company again, this is a fundamental problem – one that needs to be solved if your company wants to succeed in its current market position.

The good news for product innovation teams is that most growing pains are avoidable; they're often caused by a lack of understanding around what customers actually want out of an experience.

By really getting inside the minds of your customers through surveys and listening closely to what they say they need, you'll be able to deliver on the promise of your business. As such, it's crucial to ensure that insights from surveys are shared within your company as a means of understanding your customers and building better products.

This will help everyone from product managers to data scientists to gain a better understanding of what motivates your customers – and why – so that you can build with confidence, knowing that you're working with the most valuable asset in any business – your customers.

Coming up with new product ideas

Beyond deriving insights into your existing product line, you'll also want to consider what new products and services you can bring to the market. That said, new product ideas are hard. And the more successful you are, the harder it gets, given the tendency for companies to become complacent and avoid risk.

Most products are developed incrementally, based on customer feedback. The process can be iterated over and over again, with each iteration improving upon what came before. But what if you're a company that has historically focused on solving one specific problem? What if you're trying to come up with something totally new? How do you even start? These questions are often what keep product teams up at night.

With Commerce.AI voice surveys, you can gain insights into your customers' pain points and what they expect from different types of products.

This information will help you better understand the needs of your target customers so that you can identify which ones are most likely to buy your new offerings – as well as inform your next steps, including product development. Let's dig into a specific example, with anonymized company names.

Example – a tech start-up developing a new product

A tech start-up called SportFlix has built an impressive following on Instagram and other social media platforms, where its fans share photos and videos of their favorite sports moments using the company's app. The app also helps fans stay engaged with their favorite athletes and teams – and it can even notify users about important events, such as injuries and changes to lineups.

SportFlix is now looking to expand into other areas that involve watching sports, such as playing fantasy sports or viewing scores from games that aren't broadcast live. This will require the company to create new products for different kinds of sports lovers, who may have different needs than those who use its existing product.

The team at SportFlix wants to understand what types of products are most appealing to different audiences so that it can develop offerings that better meet the needs of these groups.

To do this, they'll need to answer some questions through a voice survey so that they can come up with a list of potential new products. Here's what the team might ask:

• What sports do you watch?
• What are your favorite teams and players?
• What do you enjoy doing during a game or when watching a sport?
• How often do you participate in fantasy sports leagues?
• What would motivate you to use our product instead of other apps?
• Do you have any pain points that we can solve with our existing product, or with future iterations of our product?

By asking these questions, the SportFlix team will be able to gain an understanding of its target audience's interests and preferences – and then use that information to inform future product development efforts. This will result in more successful ventures for the company, as well as higher customer satisfaction and retention down the line.

For example, let's suppose that Commerce.AI's insights reveal, through an analysis of survey responses, that SportFlix fans wish an app existed that they could use to socialize with other fans during a game, as well as check on the latest scores. The team will then be able to use this information to help them identify which features they should build into their product next, or even whether they should build an entirely new app.

While improving your products is vital to staying competitive, customer loyalty can be just as important. With that said, let's take a look at how to use voice survey insights to increase customer loyalty.

Improving customer loyalty

Customer loyalty is important because it helps companies grow and retain customers over time. In turn, growing and retaining a customer base will help a business to succeed – and a company that fails to meet the needs of its customers will eventually suffer from a decline in loyalty.

Indeed, poor customer loyalty results in high rates of churn and decline, which can lead to significant financial losses and a company's eventual demise.

But customer loyalty isn't just about keeping customers; it's also about attracting new customers. To do this, companies must be able to offer products and services that are truly valuable for their target customers – and that means becoming an expert on what those customers want.

With voice surveys, you can obtain feedback directly from consumers, wherever they are. With increased response rates and engagement, you can better understand your customers and their needs, which will allow you to create offerings that address these needs and improve both customer loyalty and customer acquisition.

The key is to make the process as easy as possible for both consumers and company employees. By using Commerce.AI voice surveys, you can gain insights into your target customers' needs in order to help you better serve their needs, while also gaining valuable information about them that can be used to attract new customers down the line.

What drives customer loyalty?

Increasing customer loyalty is essential to sustaining high levels of revenue growth. Let's look at the four main pillars of customer loyalty:

• Generating brand affinity and positive emotions toward the brand
• Increasing purchase frequency and reducing customer churn
• Creating brand advocacy through Word-of-Mouth (WOM) marketing
• Increasing the revenue generated from existing customers

Let's explore each of these pillars to better understand how to use insights from voice surveys, and beyond, to drive customer loyalty.

Generating brand affinity and positive emotions toward the brand

The actions consumers take when interacting with your company's offerings can have a profound effect on their perception of your brand and how they view it in relation to other brands.

If you're operating a hospitality business like an inn, for example, then having happy customers who enjoy their stay will help you build brand affinity and drive retention down the line. The quality of their stay is impacted by a number of factors, including the responsiveness and courtesy of your front desk staff, the cleanliness of their rooms, and the quality of the food and beverages they consume.

Similarly, if you're a restaurant, customers who enjoy their meal experience will be more likely to recommend your business to others – and they'll also be more likely to return in the future.

Brand affinity and positive emotions help consumers make buying decisions that result in increased brand loyalty and purchase intent. This is why it's crucial for companies to listen carefully to their customers; only then can you understand what they really think about your company and how they view it compared to other brands in your industry.

Voice surveys are a powerful tool to find out exactly what your customers want, and they can also help you build brand affinity and positively influence customer loyalty.

Increasing purchase frequency and reducing customer churn

One of the best ways for a company to increase revenue is to grow its customer base –and this starts with increasing customer loyalty through increasing purchase frequency and reducing customer churn.

Customer loyalty is highest when customers perceive that their needs are being met and they have a positive experience with your company's products and services. To achieve this, you need to make sure that employees understand what truly qualifies as meeting a customer's needs, which includes everything from product availability to price point and payment options.

It also means uncovering customer sticking points and coming up with solutions, which is where voice surveys come in. By asking your customers about their pain points, you can identify areas where they are having difficulty – and then come up with ways to solve those problems. This will help to reduce customer churn and increase customer retention because your customers will be more likely to recommend your business to others.

Creating brand advocacy through WOM

If you want consumers to tell their friends about your brand, then it stands to reason that those friends will trust and respect their consumer friend more than they would someone who isn't connected with them – which means good old-fashioned WOM marketing.

Asking questions about what different people value most about certain brands or how often they interact with each brand will help companies determine whether they're successfully creating brand affinity among their target audience via WOM. If not, then there may be room for improvement on one of the pillars of customer loyalty.

Research indicates that customers who are referred through WOM are significantly more loyal customers than those who are referred through other means, such as advertising or social media. This is because customers trust and respect their friends –and those friends will be inclined to tell others about great experiences they've had with your company.

Increasing the revenue generated from existing customers

It goes without saying that improving customer retention is a great way to increase revenue in the long term – but it's also essential in growing your customer base.

To help increase revenue from existing customers, you'll want to make sure that they're satisfied with your company's offerings and services, as well as any additional products or services you might provide them down the line.

Providing excellent customer service will go a long way toward helping consumers feel like they can trust you and your brand – and once they do, it's easier for them to share their positive feelings about your brand with others.

From the customer's perspective, this means that more of their problems are being solved, which can lead to higher levels of customer loyalty. Ultimately, voice surveys are a powerful tool to improve customer loyalty across each of its pillars.

Summary

In this chapter, we've learned about how voice surveys can help companies gain insights into customers' needs, wants, and concerns. By answering questions about their pain points or what they value most about certain brands or products, consumers are able to provide you with valuable information that you can use to develop new offerings or improve existing ones.

By using Commerce.AI's voice surveys, businesses of all types can gain actionable insights into their target markets – and use this information to better understand their customers so that they can continue growing and improving for years to come.

Whether you operate a hotel chain, a number of stores, a software company, or work in an entirely different industry, voice surveys are a powerful way to gain insights into your market and better serve your customers.

As you've learned, the Commerce.AI platform is a powerful mix of machine learning and big data that can be applied to the innovation needs of product and service teams. The platform provides an integrated suite of analytics and AI capabilities that can be applied to better understand customer needs and preferences, predict future trends, and optimize product and service portfolios. We encourage you to use what you've learned to innovate and to consider how Commerce.AI can help your organization.