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Voice Survey: Meaning, Definition, Survey Questions, and Importance

What is a Voice Survey?

A Comprehensive Step by Step Guide

A voice survey is a method of gathering information about customers’ opinions, needs, and desires. These surveys can be conducted by telephone or using text-to-speech technology. Voice surveys allow for a broader range of responses than written surveys can provide, and they also allow you to conduct more interviews in less time than if you were doing them via email or online chat.

For example, people can provide more detail in 15 seconds verbally than they can write in 8-10 words. People find it easier to send voice messages than they do written ones, which is why messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram are seeing rapid growth in that area.

So, voice messages get four to five times more responses than text-based messages. Multiplying both with voice, the surveyor can collect 20–25X more intelligence from customers.

Purpose of a VOC Survey

The purpose of a Voice of the Customer (VOC) survey is to gather feedback and insights from customers in order to understand their needs, preferences, and satisfaction levels. This information can be used to identify areas of improvement and to develop strategies to address customer needs and concerns.

Some specific purposes of a VOC survey include:

  • Identifying areas for improvement: A VOC survey can help businesses to identify specific areas where they can improve their products, services, or the overall customer experience.
  • Developing strategies: Based on the feedback gathered through a VOC survey, businesses can develop strategies to address customer needs and concerns and to improve the customer experience.
  • Measuring customer satisfaction: A VOC survey can help businesses to measure the satisfaction levels of their customers and to track changes in satisfaction over time.
  • Gathering insights about customer behavior: A VOC survey can provide insights about the behaviors and preferences of customers, which can be useful for businesses looking to develop new products or services or to tailor their marketing efforts.
  • Overall, the purpose of a VOC survey is to gather valuable insights and feedback from customers in order to understand their needs and preferences and to improve the customer experience.

Common Voice Survey Questions in 2022

Voice surveys are a great way to get feedback from customers and potential customers about products/services. The questions you ask will vary depending on your business, but common ones include:

Product/Service Focused Questions

  • What product/service did you purchase from us?
  • What would it be if you could change one thing about our service?
  • How often do you use our products or services? 
  • What is the most helpful feature of our product/service?
  • How satisfied are you with your experience with this company?
  • Why did you choose this company over other providers in the same sector?
  • How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?

UX Related Questions

  • Did you find our website easy to use?
  • How do you feel about the design of our site?
  • Were there any problems with finding what you were looking for on our site?
  • What would make it easier for you when using this site?
  • Would you recommend that we add/remove any features from our site?
  • Do you have any suggestions as to how we could improve the experience on this site?

Competitors/Market Standing Related Questions

  • How would you compare us to other companies in the same industry?
  • Are there any features that set us apart from the competition?
  • What do you think of our pricing model/how does it compare with others in the market?
  • When was the last time you used this product/service, and how did it compare with ours?

Customer Experience Related Questions

  • How would you rate the quality of customer service we provide?
  • Is it easy to reach someone when you need help?
  • How long does it take before you get a response from our team?
  • Is there anything that could be improved about our customer support experience?
  • Do you have any suggestions for improving this area?

Benefits of Using Voice Surveys

Voice surveys are a great way to get real-time feedback from customers about their experience. They help you understand your audience’s thoughts about your brand, product, or service.

The answers that voice surveys provide are more accurate than written surveys because people tend to be more honest when speaking than writing down their thoughts.

Easier to Administer

One of the benefits of using voice surveys is that they can be administered more easily than other types of surveys. Voice surveys are usually in the form of an audio file, which means that responses can be recorded without the need for a user to type out a reply or click on an answer.

This makes them ideal for administering in situations where users may not have access to a computer or smartphone, such as when conducting surveys over the phone or in person.

Open-ended Responses

In a voice survey, the respondents are allowed to give open-ended answers. In a traditional survey, respondents are forced to choose between two or more answers. This reduces the survey designer’s biases and tendency to ask leading questions.

An example of designer bias is that US companies often divide the world into US and International. This fails to account for 170 odd countries with different business cultures, causing their international scaling strategy to fall short. 

The leading question remains about respondents’ states even when 30% or more of the user traffic comes from outside the U.S. As a result, these surveys are less inclusive and don’t accurately reflect much of their intended audience.

The open-ended format allows you to engage with the respondent conversationally and learn about their thoughts and feelings without limiting them with multiple choice answers.

Better Reach

Using voice broadcasting is an effective way to reach your target audience. In the present scenario, almost everyone uses smartphones—you could leverage that fact and broadcast in the local language to not be limited by regional expansion but still reach many people.

More Inclusive than Written Surveys

Voice Surveys are more inclusive than written surveys in that they can be used with any number of people. In contrast, written surveys are limited by the number of people who can physically access the survey.

Voice surveys also take less time to complete than written ones, making them useful when you need to gather information quickly.

Challenges of Voice Surveys

While voice surveys are more inclusive than written surveys, they are not without their challenges. Some common voice survey challenges include:

Transcription Challenge Voice to Text

A transcript is a written form of what someone has said, especially when it is recorded. The transcription process involves listening to the audio and typing precisely what was said. The main challenge with voice-to-text transcription is that many words sound alike or have similar pronunciations but different meanings.

For example, the word “house” and “mouse” have similar sounds and can be confused for each other. This can lead to poor data quality if not appropriately handled.

However, Voice Recognition technology rapidly evolves to understand 90-95% of different accents in all major languages. This is a much higher level of comprehension than the average human customer support agent, who only retains 70-75% of the information shared. Furthermore, voice-to-text companies like Softbrik allow businesses to playback and listen to the recorded audio for minor clarity issues, while the AI-enabled platform leaves almost little to no room for error.

Categorization Challenges

The main challenge of categorization is to assign the respondent to the appropriate category. While conducting voice surveys, you need to have enough categories so that each one has enough people in it to avoid distorting results by lumping too many people together under one category.

Categories must be exclusive so that a person can only belong to one category at a time, and categories should also have equal distribution. This means each category should have an equal number of respondents to avoid distorting results by having too much variance between categories.

This is where modern Machine Learning comes in. Leading voice recognition companies use Neural Networks to identify key contexts in the voice feedback and classify them by relevant tags, making it easier for businesses to categorize the feedback and analyze or respond to them by their proper context.

Importance of Voice of Customer (VOC) Surveys

In a world where consumers are the most important stakeholder of any business, knowing what they think is vital to your organization’s success. Voice surveys allow you to understand better how customers feel and what they want from your company.

Improved Service

Voice surveys are one way to improve your customer service. You can use the feedback from a voice survey to improve the quality of your product or service and better meet your customers’ needs.

Brand Management

Voice surveys can help you manage your brand more effectively. You can use the information from voice surveys to assess how well customers respond to the quality of your products and services and how they feel about your company.

Product Innovation & Reduce Cost of Engineering

Voice surveys can help you innovate your products and services. You can use the feedback from voice surveys to understand how customers use your products and what they want in the future.

Example: Feedback on product features can be classified as Bugs, Interests, and Feature wishlists (BIF). The customer success or support team can pass them on to the engineering team. Understanding customer willingness to pay and use your product features can save hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of man-hours of engineering cost to build what your customers actually need and not what you think they need.

Marketing

Voice surveys can also help you get better at marketing. You can use the survey information to identify trends in customer sentiment and determine how best to meet their needs, primarily through ad campaigns. 

Plus, with better engagement, your customer success team can reduce churn, which will increase the efficiency of your marketing budget by 3 times as the cost of acquiring a new customer is 3X the cost of retaining customers.

Increased NPS (Net Promoter Score) & Revenue

Voice surveys can help you increase revenue. The survey information can be used to identify new products or services that your customers want and need and then develop them into successful offerings. 

This can lead to increased customer satisfaction measured through tools like NPS and increased customer retention, which will drive your revenue via repeat purchases.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the importance of a survey?

A survey is a way to get feedback from your customers. It’s important because it lets you gain insights into your customers’ feelings about your product or service and what they want to see in the future.

What are the characteristics of a good survey?

A good survey should be concise and easy to fill out but still provide enough detail to get useful information about your customers’ preferences.