- A loyal customer might be praising your product in a forum.
- A frustrated user could be posting a harsh review on a public site.
- An excited partner may have left a comment on your campaign.
- A domain expert might be deconstructing your product.
- A prospect could be inquiring about pricing before ever contacting you.
These conversations are your business's reality in the outside world. However, most businesses rely only on responses from known sources like surveys, support tickets, and emails to analyze their customer experience (CX) stance.
While they are your customers' truths, these direct responses are often limited in terms of purpose. That is, support tickets are limited to specific problems, emails are limited to their specific contexts, and each survey response is limited by its options. These are instances of feedback, but they don't capture the whole CX picture.
For a 360° picture of your CX, you need a setup that gives you insights from both inside and outside your business's purview. That's why in Zoho CRM we introduced the ability to use your
market as a data source in a
previous update, which enables you to associate the module that stores customer reviews as a data source so that customer reviews outside your business are also included in your CX analyses.
However, your customer experience is not limited only to your customers; it applies to anyone who's getting to know your business.
So today, we bring to you the ability to track comments submitted by consumers that are not in your contact list, who we'll call unknown responders.
There are a number of ways you can source these reviews and responses and import them into VoC. The illustration depicts a few:
With these facilities in place, let's understand how tapping into anonymous reviews could help your business using a few use cases:
Understanding the market's pulse: Determine pricing and positioning
Let's say you own a real estate brokerage that deals with premium properties in the Bay area. Before launching a one-of-a-kind property into the market, you'd like to gauge the market's interest while simultaneously assessing their expectations so you can determine your pricing and positioning strategies. Accordingly, you roll out a few mystery advertisements on a video streaming platform and host anonymous surveys on your website.
By subjecting these reviews to CX analyses, you're able to identify market sentiments, common expectations, opinions, and more. This gives you an opportunity to develop the right messaging and positioning strategies even before you list the property.
Give the market what it wants: Curate trending solutions
Or let's say you're a DIY holiday planner that offers a wide range of travel packages. In addition to your seasonal package, you also curate destinations based on conversations and engagement data from your social media handles. You can bring in comments, DMs, hashtags, and mentions from followers who aren't necessarily customers into your CRM, as well as collate suggested locations, identify sentiments and intents, and assess volume to determine what the market wants from your business.
Assess product demand before the rollout date
Businesses can anticipate product demand based on the acceptance the market shows. You can use responses to your campaigns, surveys, blogs, and more to compare the level of purchase intent between your customers and the market. Accordingly, you can plan production, open pre-order reservations, and more.
Between your market and your business lie your prospects—the people that try your product before making purchase decisions. As prospects interact with your product, they develop opinions, and their feedback can introduce insights your business hasn't discovered yet. Compare these findings with those of your customers and market, incorporate fixes in your roadmap, and keep evaluating and enhancing your product's user experience while you convert them into customers.
Analyze brand reviews submitted to resellers, affiliates, or aggregators
Your partners, affiliates, resellers, and aggregators often stand in for your brand in their local markets. You can channel reviews from their customers into your VoC to conduct collective CX analyses.
- Be it a user with a stealth social handle predicting what’s new in your business
- Or, an avid follower contributing business ideas in your social profile
- An exploring prospect curious to try out your product
- A customer that isn't dealing with your brand directly.
These sources offer a wealth of insights that you didn't realize existed in the outer world. By tapping into these reviews, you can:
- Bring your prospects' expectations, concerns, and doubts into your system even before they enter your pipeline.
- Witness how the market compares your business with your competitors.
- Compare how your prospects and customers talk about your business.
- Assess churn risk and forecast outcomes.
- Devise strategies and prevent pitfalls.
All you have to do is to map the module where you store your reviews—regardless of whether you use it in your VoC configuration or not—and choose the review field. VoC will then be able to show insights that include these anonymous reviews.
There–that's all you need to get anonymous reviews in your VoC analyses. At Zoho CRM, we realize the influence customer experience has in the sales pipeline, and to accelerate conversions, we're developing more CX-focused updates as part of VoC. We hope you try them out in your organization and let us know how you like them, as well as what kinds of enhancements you're looking for, so we can improve our VoC portfolio.
Availability: VoC is available in trial mode for organizations in the following editions and DC.

Release plan:
- This enhancement is open for customers in US, IN DCs. Customers in EU, AU, and SA DCs will get this enhancement shortly.
- Resources: Next gen doc | CRM 1.0
That's all for now. See you soon 👋
Thanks and have a good one!
Kind regards,
Saranya Balasubramanian
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