Your customer is sitting on her couch on Sunday afternoon. The fridge is empty and the pantry is bare. Any other Sunday, she would jump in the car and drive to your store, but not today. Her spouse is out of town, she hurt her back and the kids are in need of a nap.

Today, she is going to place her first online grocery order. She jumps on Facebook and asks friends if they have recommendations for grocers with online ordering and home delivery. With three suggestions in hand, she starts browsing grocery stores to place an online order, including the store where she always shops.

While browsing, she finds the site of a competitor that not only offers online ordering with delivery to her home but also has recommendations for products from folks who shop at the same store. When she’s browsing through the produce section, she finds ratings and reviews posted today by other customers for several items she wants to buy.

As she starts to fill her online cart, she notices a couple of hiccups with adding items to the cart. It’s kind of annoying. However, because a couple of her Facebook friends assured her that this was a great choice for online shopping, she weathers the technical problems and finishes her order. At the end, she is given the opportunity to provide customer feedback.

The shopping cart problems were so bothersome she decides to post a note detailing her difficulties. To her amazement, five minutes later she receives an email from the store director with a sincere apology and a coupon for $5 off her next online order. The order arrives the next day and the produce, just like the recommendations and ratings said, is fresh and at its peak.

VOC, or “Voice of Customer,” has become a widely used term to describe the ability of certain technologies to be customer-centric by capturing individual customer profile information, needs, desires, questions, expectations and likes vs. non-likes.

It is based upon relevance. These tools allow the business and the customer to benefit by identifying in an individual manner what a customer finds important and can build tremendous satisfaction, loyalty and increased business (retention, conversion and brand loyalty).

There are three major categories of customer engagement tools:

• Customer feedback tools allow a customer to easily voice opinions about his or her experience as a client of your business. It gives them the opportunity to comment on products, services, processes or employees.
• Ratings and reviews allow clients to speak to the quality of the goods or services they purchased.
• Recommendations allow customers and the business to advocate for their tastes and preferences by building profiles based upon certain rules.

The grocery industry has traditionally been slow adopters of these technologies. But the addition of these capabilities will increase sales, loyalty, frequency of order and brand awareness as well as increasing customer order value.

A few examples of VOC tools:

• Opinionlab is a customer feedback partner that can tailor your feedback to garner specific information from customers and will allow them to tell you what their needs are, such as, “I need plantains,” and “I like fresh cubed pineapple.” This gets sent right to the merchandising department.
• Reevoo is a ratings and reviews partner that is currently huge in Europe and only uses verified purchasers for their reviews. This means only people who purchased the product can write a review.
• MyBuys is a recommendation solution partner that offers over 100 algorithms to build individual customer profiles as well as connects with customers through email alerts, abandonment alerts and other methods.

If you’re not fully convinced and would like to do some testing with your customers, try it with the social tools your customers already use. If your business has a Facebook page, make sure it’s set to “Local Business” and ask for reviews on the bottom of your cash register receipts. Monitor it daily and respond when customers post. Put a sign above your tomatoes (or any other item) that says, “We’re checking out a new supplier, let us know how these taste. Tweet your review with hashtag #xyzgrocertomato.

These are simple and free and you’ll be amazed to see what happens.

Heidi Chapnick is an associate member of the FreshXperts consulting group, specializing in e-commerce.