Imagine a bustling marketplace, overflowing with products and services vying for attention.
How do you stand out? The answer lies in a powerful duo—the Voice of the Customer (VOC) and the Voice of the Employee (VOE).
Mastering these tools will help you craft personalized messages for internal comms and customer-facing marketing campaigns, from videos to emails, that repetitively engage.
Understanding the Voices in the Crowd
Let’s break down these terms:
- Voice of the Customer (VOC): This is the chorus of wants, needs, and experiences expressed by your customers. VOC encompasses feedback through surveys, reviews, social media interactions, and even silence (a lack of engagement).
- Voice of the Employee (VOE): This is the insider’s perspective—your employees’ experiences, suggestions, and frustrations. It includes feedback through surveys, pulse checks, exit interviews, and even casual conversations.
Why Listen to the Voices? The Impact of VOC and VOE
We live in an experience-driven economy. Therefore, VOC and VOE are not just buzzwords.
They are essential tools for:
- Understanding Needs: Through active listening, you can gain a deeper understanding of their needs and motivations. This allows you to develop products, services, and campaigns that truly resonate.
- Building Loyalty: When you actively listen, analyze, and address concerns, both customers and employees feel valued. This fosters trust and customer loyalty and employee retention, leading to repeat business, advocacy, and reduced churn.
- Identifying Opportunities: VOC and VOE can unveil hidden pain points and untapped opportunities. You might discover a customer frustration with a product feature, or an employee suggestion for a streamlined process. These insights can propel innovation and drive growth.
In my experience, using your audience’s voice is the best way to create personalized messages that truly connect.
It makes these messages warm, memorable, and effective because they are within your audience’s context. Individually.
The VOC & VOE Advantage: How They Shape Your Campaigns
Customers expect personalization
Imagine crafting campaigns that speak directly to your customers’ wants and resonate with your employees’ understanding of the brand and vision. This is the power of VOC and VOE in action.
Here’s how they make a difference:
- Targeting the Right Audience: VOC helps you segment your customer based on needs and preferences. You can then tailor interactions, channels, and offers with laser focus, leading to higher engagement.
- Creating Authentic, Personalized Content: Knowing what resonates with both customers and employees allows you to craft genuine content even for each individual. As a result, for example, employees become brand ambassadors, sharing their passion for the company and its vision.
- Improving Customer Journey: VOC reveals pain points and areas for improvement throughout the customer journey. You can then refine campaigns to address these issues, creating a smoother and more engaging experience.
- The Personalization Push: Leveraging VOC and VOE for Maximum Engagement
In today’s crowded marketplace, generic messages fall flat. Personalization is key to capturing attention and driving engagement.
Here’s how VOC and VOE fuel personalization:
- Customer Segmentation: Analyze VOC data to understand customer demographics, interests, and purchase behaviors. This allows for targeted messaging and offers that feel and are genuinely relevant to each customer.
- Employee Insights: Let your employees inform your personalization efforts. They understand the brand voice, product nuances, and common customer questions. This knowledge shapes targeted communication and enhances the overall experience.
- Dynamic Content: Leverage technology to create personalized experiences. Use customer data to dynamically adjust content, visuals, and even calls to action within your campaigns, maximizing their impact.
To learn more about why you should consider personalization in internal comms and customer marketing, watch this video now:
The Power of Video: Connecting Through Personalization & VOC/VOE
Video reigns supreme in today’s information-dense world. Here’s why video is key to emotionally connect with your audience through personalization and VOC/VOE:
- Emotional Storytelling: Video allows you to connect with people on an emotional level. You can weave stories that resonate with customer experiences and showcase employee passion, fostering deeper engagement.
- Personalized Video Experiences: Advanced video technology, like Pirsonal’s personalized video software, allows for dynamic content based on user data. Imagine sending an email campaign to employees to celebrate their anniversary with the organization and cultivate a sense of belonging.
- Human Connection: With personalization, you can add variable content to the videos to make them highly relevant from the viewer’s perspective. These personal connections add authenticity and trust to your campaigns, fostering deeper engagement.
Takes, for instance, the following personalized video. It explains a mortgage forbearance process, helping the viewer understand this next steps while emotionally connecting with him.
VOE and VOC in Real Life
Employees prefer a personal touch but are not getting it from organizations
Imagine a company of 5,000 employees with a high turnover rate. The HR department is baffled.
They offer a competitive benefits package, but employees just aren’t utilizing it. They decide to dig deeper to understand what’s going on.
This is where the Voice of the Employee comes in.
Through surveys, focus groups, or exit interviews, the HR team gathers feedback from employees.
The feedback reveals a surprising truth: employees don’t understand the benefits package!
Why?
The information is presented in dense documents and confusing jargon.
Video Personalization to the Rescue
Armed with this VOE data, the HR team decides to personalize their communication strategy.
They create a video specifically tailored to each employee, like the one above.
The video uses the employee’s data such as:
- First Name
- Salary
- Allowances
- Benefits already being enjoyed
- Benefits not yet redeemed
The video highlights the benefits that are most relevant to each employee, explaining them in clear, concise language.
This personalized approach is a hit! Employees are finally engaged with their benefits package. They understand what they’re entitled to and how to redeem it.
By listening to the Voice of the Employee, the HR department was able to identify a key issue impacting employee morale and retention.
By leveraging personalization, they were able to address this issue and create a more engaged workforce.
The Link to VOC
But wait, isn’t this just about VOE? Not quite. There’s a hidden element of VOC at play here as well.
Consider this: high employee turnover is a negative customer experience for the company itself.
The employees who leave are essentially customers who are unhappy with the service (their employment experience). By addressing employee concerns through VOE, the company is indirectly improving the customer experience (VOC) as well.
7 Keys to Getting VOC and VOE Right
Leaders play a crucial role in harnessing the power of VOC and VOE within organizations. Here are 7 ways to ensure you’re getting it right:
- Create a Culture of Listening: Embed listening into your company culture. Encourage open communication from both customers and employees through surveys, focus groups, and suggestion boxes.
- Make it Easy to Share Feedback: Provide accessible channels for feedback submission. Offer online surveys, mobile apps, or suggestion hotlines.
- Show You Care: Acknowledge all feedback, positive and negative. Thank customers for their time and address employee concerns promptly.
- Close the Feedback Loop: Don’t let feedback gather dust. Share insights gleaned from VOC and VOE with both customers and employees. Explain what actions are being taken in response to their feedback. Transparency builds trust and demonstrates that their voices are heard.
- Empower Your Employees: Train your employees to actively listen to customer concerns and feedback. Equip them with the tools and resources to address issues and share insights with leadership. Empowered employees become brand advocates, naturally incorporating VOC into their interactions. This will make your Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Enablement peers happy. Very happy.
- Integrate VOC & VOE Across Departments: Break down silos. Ensure that VOC and VOE insights are shared across marketing, CX, internal communications, and product development teams. This holistic approach ensures consistent messaging and a seamless customer journey.
- Measure and Adapt: Don’t be afraid to experiment and iterate. Track the impact of campaigns that leverage VOC and VOE data. Analyze what works and what doesn’t. Continuously adapt your approach based on ongoing feedback and results.
Conclusion: The Symphony of Success
Your internal and external audiences are constantly saturated by marketing messages—including yours. Therefore, the human touch is what truly resonates.
By harnessing the power of VOC and VOE, you can create a symphony of success. When you use them, you can also make personalized interactions and messages that are easy to understand, share, and memorize. It makes your campaigns more effective and attracts your ideal audience.
Imagine a satisfied customer, raving about your product or service in a video testimonial. Picture a passionate employee, sharing their love for the company culture on social media. This is the power of VOC and VOE at play.
By truly listening to the voices in your organization, you unlock a wealth of knowledge. You gain the insights to craft targeted campaigns, build stronger relationships, and foster employee engagement. This, in turn, drives innovation, loyalty, and ultimately, sustainable growth.
With more brands prioritizing experience, it’s not enough to just exist. You need to make a meaningful connection with people. The voices of your customers and employees hold the key. Start listening today and unlock the full potential of your brand.
At Pirsonal, we help organizations like yours use the voice of the customer and employees to engage with your people through personalized videos at scale. Contact us today if you want to increase customer or employee experience through video personalization—automatically.
