Fintechs have been a driving force in disrupting and accelerating financial services. And in an industry where customers expect more and more, keeping those customers happy is vital for success.

Acquiring new customers takes time and money, and the competition to get them is fiercer than ever. For fintechs looking to build their customer base while keeping their existing customers happy, the answer lies in a successful Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.

VoC involves using your customers’ feedback of experiences with your fintech brand to give you insight into what you’re doing well, and not so well. It also gives you a greater understanding of what prospects want. You can make decisions and sharpen your organizational strategy around what you know customers actually want, rather than what you think they want.

PwC research suggests that gaining a deeper understanding of your customers, or “customer intelligence”, is going to be the most important forecaster of profitability and growth. Whether it’s product improvements, better communication, a pivot in marketing efforts, VoC can help steer your fintech in a more profitable direction. 

Best Practices for Your Voice of the Customer Program

Creating a VoC program is how you’ll harness what’s inside your customers’ heads, digging out every piece of information and analyzing it to get the “good stuff”. Once you understand what it is they’re expecting from you, then you can tailor your fintech offerings to match those expectations.

Here are six best practices for building your VoC program to get the most valuable output and greatest ROI:

1. Start in the right place

Before you begin, you need to make sure you’re getting the most valuable data. To do that, you should identify all the critical touchpoints of the customer journey. These touchpoints, where customers interact with your brand in one way or another, are vital places you can shape customer experience (CX).

By understanding where your customers come into contact with the business, you’ll gain much better insights into how they see the service they’re getting.

2. Understand your sources

When you’re collecting VoC data, it will be either reactive or proactive. Reactive data is based on contact initiated by the customer. It could be a complaint, a comment on one of your social media channels—basically as long as the customer has reached out to you, it’s classed as reactive VoC data.

Proactive data, on the other hand, is feedback that you’ve actively asked the customer for. Perhaps a feedback form or survey, or a focus group you’ve set up.

Both types of feedback data are valuable in different ways. Reactive data helps you understand where your customers are seeing issues that are already there. Whereas proactive data can be key to preventing some issues and giving you an idea of which direction your brand should be heading in.

3. Collect omni-channel feedback

To get the most accuracy and depth in your VoC insights, the feedback needs to come from the full range of channels. It can seem most expedient to arrange and collect direct feedback via something like a customer survey, but your customers connect with your brand in so many more ways. And however they connect with you, they’re experiencing your values and your service.

While direct feedback is always helpful, indirect feedback in the form of social media, for example, is just as valuable. Social media is a natural environment for fintechs as well as their clients and prospects, and comprehensive social community management, something that CSTMR can set up for you, can help you see the bigger customer picture.

4. Encourage collaboration

Every employee in every department adds value to collecting and analyzing customer insights. Any customer-facing employee will have awareness of CX at that point in the customer journey, so it’s crucial you actively encourage them to share any feedback they get (and give them a way of reporting that feedback).

Employees who don’t directly interact with customers are also a vital part of the VoC process. While they may not have customer data to share, they’ll be involved in the changes and the solutions at some point down the line. It makes sense that they’re also encouraged to get involved in the program.

5. Consider employee feedback

While employees aren’t the obvious “voice”, their feedback helps put context to customer feedback. IT also gives more insight into the challenges that your fintech might face during the process of putting improvements in place.

All too often, organizations decide on a solution without getting a full sanity check from everyone internally who will be involved in some way. Only to get to the implementation stage and hear “but we can’t do that!”

6. Take action

It might sound obvious, but CX really makes a difference. Research shows that 94% of consumers are likely to purchase more from businesses they rate as having “very good” CX, and 90% say they’re more likely to trust a company with “very good” CX. 

You’re putting the effort into collecting VoC data, so make sure you have a plan for how you’re going to use that data. Let your results shape your future marketing tactics for a sharper, more effective strategy.  

Using VoC Data for a Better End User Experience

In an industry that’s heavy on tech and figures like fintech, it can be easy to put all the focus on the data part of a VoC program, but remember that the end goal is improving your customers’ experiences of your brand.

Working closely with a specialist fintech marketing agency, you can use VoC as a tool to access the customer data that gives you a deeper understanding of what your customers are saying they want, and even sense what their needs will be in the future. 

Turning VoC data into new products, features, and services can speed your brand ahead of the competition, and we’d love to help you achieve that. Schedule a consultation with us  to discover how CSTMR can help you develop a VoC program that unleashes your brand’s potential in 2022.