Collaboration is Key: ‘Voice of Client’ for Start-ups

Voice of Client for the win.

Once you have established your Voice of Client (VoC) and applied those insights to your marketing strategy, your startup team should look at how you can leverage the work that has already been done beyond marketing.

Many startups have limited budgets, resources, and time to get everything done. That is why it’s so important for departments to collaborate on efforts that can benefit all, namely using Voice of Client.

In this article we look at how your startup company can leverage VoC to serve your entire organization and why this collaboration is key to success.

How VoC serves all

Now that you understand how VoC can help inform your marketing strategy, let’s take a look at the additional benefits VoC practices offer startups just like yours.

Benefits for your clients

We all want to be heard. Including your customers. VoC practices help you understand your client’s needs, preferences, issues, and complaints. It is then your job to ensure you take action to resolve any issues, continue to improve your product, streamline client communications, and keep doing what’s already working.

Because your customers are the ones using your product day in and day out, they have the best sense of new features that will enhance their experience.Taking action on the client feedback, such as incorporating new feature requests into your product, shows them you are committed to their needs. This true approach to “customers first” is what leads to loyalty, advocacy, and retention.

Clients of startups want to be heard. They have the power to shape your product and the offering to best fit them.

Benefits for your customer success team

The insights from your VoC exercise can help your CX team uncover areas of opportunity when working directly with clients. Learn which communication channels (such as weekly meetings, a customer newsletter, kickoff calls) are working well and which need improvement.

By gaining a better understanding of how and why your clients use your product, the CX team can develop thoughtful “getting started” materials for a smoother onboarding process.

Benefits for your product team

As I started above, your clients are the users of your product. Therefore, they are the perfect audience to provide your product team with feedback on what is working, which new features would improve the user experience, which features they could do without, and how they regularly use your product.

This feedback can inform your product roadmap and provide ideas on how to enhance the usability of your product.

Benefits for your sales team

For almost all startups, describing how you’re better than your competitors is commonplace in sales conversations. Understanding how you beat out the competition, directly from people who purchased your product, will provide your sales team with the ammo you need to go head-to-head.

Plus, according to Gartner research, collecting customer feedback can increase upselling and cross-selling success rates by 15% to 20%.

Collaboration is key to success

The thought that comes to mind when I think about successful companies is,"I don’t really care who comes up with the best idea, I just want the best idea.”

A way to interpret that is that high-performing startups take a collaborative approach to getting stuff done.

Think about it. Collaboration across departments is the best way to effectively use your funding dollars. You have limited resources and time so the more you can leverage work that is already done to serve the entire organization, the better ROI you will get from your efforts.

VoC should be no exception. Use it to feed decisions across yours teams. The data can help you serve clients better, grow your business, and improve your product.

One last thought on VoC

To be a successful startup you must understand your clients.

Start small. Develop a process for VOC research that is consistent, structured, and remember that it should be ongoing.

Pick up the phone or schedule a Zoom meeting and talk to your clients. Prepare a list of questions to discuss with all of them; listen to their answers, triage the feedback you get, and look for patterns. You might discover a different way to message your product or another feature that would make the onboarding process 50% faster. There are so many opportunities once you get started.

If you’re looking to conduct your own VoC research, I would love to help you get started. Contact me for a free 30 minute consultation.