As a Head of Customer Support, you have a gut feeling about what’s bothering your customers.

You likely know most of the issues they’re facing, how they’re feeling, and what kind of improvements they want to see.

But how do you prove it? Beyond doubt? And what are you missing?

Answering these questions is where Voice of Customer Analytics excels.

The right VoC analytic tools turn qualitative customer feedback from ALL your feedback and support channels into quantitative insights you can trust and act on.

This means you can:

• Identify the root cause issues facing your customers
• Quantify their impact on experience and your bottom line
• Build evidence-backed reports quickly to drive change
• Improve CX (reducing churn and boosting revenue)

In this article, we discuss how Voice of Customer analytics works, how leading global companies are using it to improve customer experience, and three best tools in the market.

Jump to:

• What Is Voice of Customer Analytics, and Why Is It Important?
• 4 Different Types of VoC Channels
• How Does Voice of Customer Data Analysis Work? [4 Steps]
• 5 Real-Life Voice of Customer Analytics Applications
• What to Look for in a Voice of Customer Analytics Software [4 Features]
• 3 Best VoC Solutions

What Is Voice of Customer Analytics, and Why Is It Important?

Voice of Customer Analytics provides in-depth insights into customers' feedback to understand their needs, wants, and expectations. 

VoC Analytics tools gather and analyze raw feedback from support tickets, surveys, social media, reviews, and other customer channels and organize them into actionable insights.

In short, VoC Analytics is like a crystal ball that reveals your customers’ true feelings. It tells you what customers think about your services or products, why they're happy (or unhappy), and what they want from their experience with you.

As Erin Corrill, Head of Global User Community at Configura, says, voice of the customer analysis allows you to sift through high-quality, direct feedback from individual customers at scale to identify broader trends.

“Person-to-person feedback is direct and of high quality, but it's limited to one person's perspective,” Corrill said. “[Combining] it with the big data approach … can show trends in specific areas. Once you identify the problem areas, you can ask the right questions to find the root cause and make necessary changes."
- Erin Corrill, Head of Global User Community @ Configura

By focusing on VoC Analytics, you can prioritize customers’ feelings and desires instead of making your own assumptions about what they want.

Example: How VoC Analytics Led to Increased Customer Retention

VoC Analytics helped meal kit subscription company Gousto improve customer retention while reducing overall customer contacts. 

Gousto used SentiSum’s VoC Analytics dashboard to connect data from nine distinct feedback channels into one easily accessible location. 

Here, the team categorized insights with automatic tagging. This highlighted issues that were causing customer churn, such as delivery problems or recipe quality concerns. 

The team promptly addressed these issues and made additional improvements to its product and experiences.

Today, Gousto continues to use SentiSum to analyze customer contacts and monitor sentiment changes over time. This enables the company to make data-driven decisions that boost customer satisfaction and retention—and ultimately improve revenue for its subscription business.

4 Different Types of Voice of Customer Channels

Each Voice of Customer channel is an opportunity to understand your customers and deliver a memorable brand experience.

Here are four main channels that are crucial to capturing insights and fostering strong customer relationships:

1. Customer surveys 

According to Forrester, 70% of today’s brands use surveys to gather customer feedback. This makes sense, as surveys like CSAT and NPS offer a more structured way of collecting and analyzing how customers feel about a brand.

While these insights are valuable, they sometimes miss the spontaneity and raw emotion of real-time interactions. Surveys can also suffer from response bias, which can skew your results (and subsequently, any decisions you might make as a result).

Customers also often submit incomplete surveys or even skip them entirely. Most of the time, you have no visibility into why they gave you a low (or a high) score if they didn’t explicitly state the reason.

The key is to correlate survey scores with insights from support conversations. When you understand every past interaction the customer has had with you, you understand why they gave you a certain score. 

“Modern analytics tools offer a more nuanced understanding by delving into customer feedback, including the subtle sentiments expressed in their comments,” explained Emily Balfour, VP of Technology Solutions at York Solutions.

“By leveraging these advanced analytics tools, businesses can gain deeper insights into their customers' needs and preferences.”

2. Support Conversations 

Support conversations are an overlooked source of voice of customer insights. 

Most customer feedback comes from surveys and reviews, but both are biased by who filled them in and why and when. 

But emails, live chats, WhatsApp for Business messages, phone calls, and other real-time conversations are direct pipelines to your customer's unfiltered thoughts. 

These channels capture feedback in the heat of the moment—no time for customers to sugarcoat or forget the finer details. They are also free of response bias (a common issue with customer surveys) and tend to come in at high volumes.

Looking at the reasons customers choose to contact support helps you find friction in their customer journey that can be improved. Those are your best bet at improving customer experience to retain more customers.

3. Social media 

Social media platforms are bustling with opinions. It’s a vast but noisy space for customer communications. 

Mining VoC data from these channels means separating meaningful feedback from the general buzz. Tools like SentiSum integrate into your social accounts and extract the most useful and relevant data from your feeds.

SentiSum also monitors every social media comment in real-time. It then auto-creates support tickets for those in need of a fast response.

4. Reviews 

Online review platforms like G2 and TrustPilot offer detailed feedback from real customers and thoughtful reflection on their experiences. 

These reviews tend to capture customers at their most passionate—whether that’s positive or negative. 

Balancing these detailed accounts with the immediacy of support tickets and other real-time conversations gives you a well-rounded understanding of customer sentiment.

How Does Voice of Customer Data Analysis Work? VoC Analysis in 4 Steps

VoC analysis tools capture every compliment, complaint, and suggestion customers share. But how does it work, exactly? 

Here’s how tools like SentiSum gather VoC data from across channels and make sense of it in a way that benefits business decision-makers.

[If you’re a visual learner, we recommend watching this video at 0.5x playback speed to understand how VoC analytics works.]

1. Data aggregation

VoC analytics solutions pull data from various sources—including support tickets, surveys, social media interactions, and online reviews—onto a unified, comprehensive dashboard. 

With this information in one central place, you get a complete picture of customer sentiment to identify broader patterns.

2. Analysis

Instead of having to read through each conversation manually, SentiSum automatically analyses and applies detailed tags using machine learning-based artificial intelligence.

These tags are granular, accurate, and free from human-bias. They categorize each piece of customer feedback into:

• Topics (e.g. Request Refund)
• Sentiment (e.g. positive/negative)
• URgency (e.g. urgent/not urgent)

3. Visualization

Once the analysis and tagging process is done (usually takes seconds), SentiSum’s easy to use dashboard shows all the key insights, like:

• Trend of customer contact volume over time 
• Main issues for contact (we call them “topics”)
• Top increases and decreases in sentiment and volume

4. Automations

The best Voice of Customer Analytics solutions allow you to create automated workflows based on the insights from your customer feedback data. 

For example, on SentiSum, you can build custom automations that would push insights back to your customer help desk platforms like Zendesk and Freshdesk. You can also auto-prioritize triage tickets based on the urgency, risk, and sentiment. 

5 Real-Life Voice of Customer Analytics Applications

Once you’ve collected feedback through VoC analytics tools, you can transform that feedback into actionable insights that drive positive changes in your business. 

Here are some compelling ways to use your voice of the customer analysis results to achieve remarkable outcomes.

1. Easily identify friction points in the CX journey

Occasional bumps and snags in the customer journey are inevitable. VoC Analytics helps you pinpoint exactly where and why that friction occurs so you can make targeted improvements.

Meal kit subscription service Gousto used SentiSum to centralize insights from nine distinct VoC channels (from voice calls to CSAT surveys) onto one unified platform.

With SentiSum’s real-time tagging and categorisation, the Gousto team now had an accurate, objective understanding of customer sentiment and the topics driving customer contact.

Gousto teams from across the business—from operations to marketing—now have the ability to self-serve the voice of the customer data they can trust. 

By prioritizing access to voice of the customer data, the Gousto team have made it easier for everyone in the company to tackle friction points, improve customer experience, and make customer-centric decisions.

"Through using Sentisum we've significantly reduced the time it takes to unearth customer insights, and we now understand these at a much more granular level which allows us to quickly put actions in place to drive improvements."
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- Joe Quinlivan, Head of Customer Care @ Gousto

2. Improve CSAT and NPS scores

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys provide a quantifiable measure of how customers perceive their interactions with a brand. 

A VoC analytics platform like SentiSum helps you dig deeper into your CSAT and NPS results. 

Gourmet licorice brand Lakrids by Bülow did this by integrating SentiSum with its support system. 

The team transformed raw, unstructured feedback into actionable insights on customer issues, such as complaints about product packaging. 

The company then made improvements that, along with better customer support training, raised its 5/5 CSAT ratings by 9% within the same year.

3. Boost customer satisfaction and loyalty

Support issues arise for all businesses from time to time, even with the best laid plans. It’s how companies respond to these issues that really determines whether customers will stay loyal to the brand or not.

Fresh dog food subscription company Butternut Box was able to do this when they used SentiSum’s automated tagging system to analyze feedback trends. 

The company gained detailed insights and qualitative topics from support tickets, which helped Butternut Box better align product strategies with customer feedback. 

The Customer Love team at Butternut Box, a fresh dog food subscription company, finds it useful to have SentiSum’s dashboard which shows the “Top Increasing” issues customers are facing. 

These issues might not be a lot, but it’s very important to notice a new issue arising in real-time so you can quickly resolve them and keep customers happy. 

4. Identify areas of improvement in the product

Data from your VoC analytics software can bridge the gap between customer support insights and actual product improvement.

Tools like SentiSum eliminate manual processes and human bias when gathering customer feedback, giving you faster and easier access to more accurate, real-time data. 

Hotjar, a digital behavior analytics solution, used SentiSum to analyze support tickets and identify core issues driving customer inquiries. 

The detailed, automatically tagged feedback in SentiSum offered a richer, more nuanced understanding of how to enhance Hotjar’s product. 

Now, the product team can prioritize updates and changes that directly address user feedback.

“The way I see SentiSum is, it's not about viewing product feedback, it's about discovering product feedback.”
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- Nick Moreton, Director of Support @ Hotjar

5. Use quantitative data to create change

Support leaders and CEOs often have “hunches” about:

• Top issues customers are contacting support teams for
• Customer sentiment as a whole
• Product improvements customers want to see

But it’s difficult to push for improvements in other teams when there is no hard data to back up these hunches. 

Voice of Customer Analytics turns qualitative feedback into quantitative data (e.g. 63% of contacts come from “X” issue), so leaders can use this data to lead improvement projects across the organization. 

“It’s very difficult to convince the rest of the team that something was important when you don’t have the data to back it up,” said Anders Reckendorff, CEO at Scandinavian Biolabs, a haircare D2C brand.

Before using SentiSum, the company was receiving thousands of tickets per month. They were spending a lot of time trying to understand which of these tickets were the top issues amidst all the noise.

With SentiSum, Anders and the team were able to get an objective view of their data, as well as see which issues were consistently showing up as a pain point for customers.

The insights gave Anders the confidence to reprioritize their product roadmap and implement a new customer platform earlier than they had anticipated. This reduced a critical friction point within the customer journey.

As a result, the company reduced one of its top customer issues by 50% in just three months and effectively reduced generic customer inquiries by 19%.

“Insights from SentiSum started becoming the basis for our strategic and product meetings, giving us a sounding board for understanding our customers and their needs outside of customer surveys.”
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- Anders Reckendorff, CEO and Co-Founder at Scandinavian Biolabs

What to Look for in a Voice of Customer Analytics Software [4 Features]

Not all VoC analytics software are created equal, however. Some only analyze feedback from one specific channel, while others give over-the-surface insights.

To get granular, holistic insights, we recommend choosing a tool that comes with all four of these features:

Feature #1: Comprehensive data collection through integrations

Your software should be able to collect data from multiple feedback channels and support platforms into a unified dashboard. 

This gives you a 360-degree view of all customer touchpoints in one place so you can identify trends and take action faster.

Feature #2: Insightful reporting

Your VoC analytics software should analyze feedback and provide detailed reports, dashboards, and visualizations about its findings. 

With features like sentiment analysis and text analytics, your solution can uncover key trends and patterns that reveal what matters most to your customers.

Feature #3: Advanced AI-powered capabilities

AI-powered tools like machine learning, natural language processing, and automations analytics software speed up the process of deciphering customer interactions. 

By analyzing every real-time conversation from multiple channels, your solution can quickly categorize and tag sentiments, reasons for contact, and more, on a large scale. 

Feature #4: Automated workflows

Your VoC Analytics software should integrate with your existing CRM, marketing automation, and customer service platforms to ensure insights can be turned into actionable strategies. 

Look for features such as alerts, workflows, case summaries, and follow-up action triggers that can facilitate data-driven customer experience improvement.

3 Best Voice of Customer Analytics Solutions

We researched the capabilities and unique offerings of numerous platforms and have determined the top three solutions on the market today:

SentiSum - Best for Improving Customer Experience

Overview

SentiSum is one of the only VoC analytics platforms that covers every channel of customer feedback (from surveys, reviews and social media, all the way to customer service calls and chats). In one, simple-to-use dashboard, you get clarity on your customer’s voice across all their touchpoints with you. 

Our superpower lies in our AI capabilities. SentiSum uses machine learning NLP to auto-analyze and tag customer feedback with customer sentiment, reason for contact, urgency, and more.

We also recently launched “Dig-In”, a ChatGPT-like feature for your own feedback data. You can ask any question about your data and get back succinct, summarized answers, so you don’t need to manually read through conversations.

How It Works

SentiSum’s machine learning-based AI uses natural language processing to digest and analyze VoC data from any integrated channel. 

It automatically applies detailed tags on customer feedback based on sentiment, topics, and keywords. 

The customizable dashboard organizes this data and helps parse out the insights that matter most to your business. 

Who It's For

SentiSum is the go-to analytics tool for global D2C and B2C brands. Our client roster includes industry leaders like Gousto, Ticketmaster, Hotjar, and Schuh.

📖 Related read: 3 Top Voice of the Customer Tools

CustomerGauge - Best for B2B Voice of Customer Programs

Overview

CustomerGauge helps B2B organizations develop, analyze, and enhance their Net Promoter Score programs. 

It has the unique ability to connect NPS scores directly to the financial value of each client account so businesses can focus on high-value customers. 

These insights help companies uncover upselling opportunities, reduce client churn, and drive revenue growth.

How It Works

CustomerGauge simplifies the implementation of comprehensive NPS programs. 

It enables survey creation and distribution across multiple channels, including email, SMS, WhatsApp, embedded forms, pop-ups, or telephone agents. 

Then, it tracks and analyzes response rates so companies can gather feedback throughout the customer journey. 

A notable feature is CustomerGauge’s ability to "activate" promoters by notifying marketing teams about potential upsell opportunities or referral requests. It also helps close the loop with detractors through real-time alerts and CRM integrations.

Who It's For

Tailored for B2B enterprises and major consumer packaged goods (CPG) firms, CustomerGauge is used by over 100 renowned CPG brands, including Coca Cola, Heineken, and Anheuser-Busch. 

Medallia - Best for Basic Experience Management for Large Enterprise

Overview

Medallia offers a comprehensive experience management platform that blends industry-leading insights with advanced AI. It provides actionable insights that drive loyalty, increase spending, and promote advocacy. 

Medallia's cloud-based solution captures both solicited and unsolicited feedback for insights that guide decisions across all levels of an organization.

How It Works

Medallia's AI and machine-learning engine help enhance experiences with prescriptive, automated intelligence. This allows organizations to plan out their next-best actions, supported by cutting-edge analytics. 

The scalable and secure platform can easily meet the needs of global enterprises and their various departments.

Who It's For

Medallia is tailored for large enterprises looking for a platform to manage and improve the customer journey. 

Closing Thoughts

This article explained voice of customer analytics: what it is, how it works, and how it helps improve customer experience. We also looked at important features to look for in VoC analytics tools and highlighted three leading tools in the market.

In short, the best VoC analytics software should:

• Integrate with all your support channels
• Have an intuitive visualization dashboard that shows trends and top issues
• Come with an AI tool that answers questions about your data
• Let you build custom AI models and automations

SentiSum ticks all these boxes, offering a comprehensive solution for voice of customer analytics. Book a demo with us below!