What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

A Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is an important part of successfully managing and developing the customer experience. By understanding the customers’ perspective on the brand, the product or the service and their overall satisfaction, an organization has the chance to make changes that can positively impact performance.

In this guide you will find out about different VoC methodologies, how to gather customer feedback, and what tools you can use to get valuable insights from customer data, as well as reading about how companies are putting VoC programs into practice to meet their business needs.

Contents

• What is a Voice of the Customer program?
• The benefits of Voice of the Customer
• How to gather customer feedback
• Tips for collecting useful customer insights
• Making data work for your organization
• Voice of the Customer case studies
• Closing the loop

What is a Voice of the Customer program?

Voice of the Customer is a way of measuring and collecting a customer’s feedback on their experience of an organization’s products or services. Its aim is to better understand what customers want and expect from a brand, and to gauge what their overall customer experience is like. Implementing a VoC program successfully has these main steps:

• Establish goals for your VoC project
• Select a VoC method
• Collect customer data
• Analyze data to gain actionable insights
• Act upon those insights

The benefits of Voice of the Customer

Inviting customers to provide their feedback on products or services is an extremely effective way to understand how they feel about an organization. By actively listening to this feedback and acting on it, organizations can address customer concerns, improve their offering and therefore boost customer satisfaction levels and loyalty.

VoC can also be a driver of innovation, as the research involved can provide insights into unmet customer needs and pain points. This information can then be used to develop new products or services that differentiate the company from its competitors.

Source: Poll results from All Access Voice of the Customer APAC 2023

It can also have the simultaneous benefit of engaging employees. Making employees part of the process and showing them how their efforts impact customer satisfaction can boost morale, leading to improved customer service.

To gain these benefits it is vital to choose the right method to get useful insights. Below are a few different ways to collect customer feedback.

How to gather customer feedback

• Customer surveys. This is the most popular way to get feedback. Surveys and questionnaires can be done via email, web forms and mobile apps. They typically involve asking structured questions about experiences, preferences and opinions, with a mixture of multiple choice and open-ended questions.
• Customer interviews. In-depth interviews often provide valuable insights. These can take place in person, over the phone, or through video conferencing. As well as the amount of information these provide, they allow for open-ended discussions that reveal nuances in customer feedback. The drawback is that they are time-consuming which can make it hard to recruit interviewees (incentives are usually offered in exchange for taking part).
• Focus groups. Like the above, these are in-depth interviews but in a group setting, with up to a dozen people taking part at a time. As well as offering their individual opinions, enabling participants to talk among themselves can provide interesting, honest insights. Focus groups are sometimes the last step in a VoC program after conducting surveys and interviews.
• Live chat. Companies that have a live chat function can schedule follow-up surveys for customers that have interacted via the chat. It can be used to assess how the call went, but also to ask general questions about the customers’ levels of satisfaction.
• Social media. As Alex Soliman, regional customer care center lead at Ikano Retail (an IKEA franchise), says: “Customers are much more likely to vent frustration on social media and the reach is much further than any other channel.” This means that monitoring social media platforms for mentions, comments, and feedback also serves as a way to collect info on how customers feel about your brand. The downside is that it is harder to convert this into hard data.
• Online reviews. It is worth taking online reviews seriously – according to research, 86 percent of customers are reluctant to purchase from a company that has negative reviews online. Platforms like Yelp, TrustPilot, Quora and Reddit can provide insights into what people think about your brand. To make it easier to read through its many reviews, Amazon recently announced that it will start using generative AI to summarize thousands of comments into a few sentences (with questions raised over how trustworthy this will be).
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. The wonderfully simple NPS is one of the most widely used metrics to determine someone's level of satisfaction. It is based on just one question, ‘how likely would you be to recommend this brand to a friend on a scale of 0 – 10?’ The customer is then categorized as a ‘promoter’ (score 9-10), ‘passive’ (7-8) or a ‘detractor’ (0-6). You then subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to yield your NPS. It is low if it’s below 100, and high if it goes above this number. It has limitations, however. 
• Dedicated feedback forms. It is always a good idea to have a feedback form on your website so that customers can share their thoughts at any time. This means you will be continuously collecting information about your customers’ preferences and experiences, not only at the point where you plan to embark on a VoC project. 
• Website behavior. VoC programs can also include customer journey mapping to help you understand behaviors and pain points. Analytics tools like Google Analytics and Crazy Egg let you see what customers are looking at on your website and how long they stay for. If for example you are seeing a lot of visits on a particular page but people are hopping off immediately, there might be a problem with the site or its content. 

Watch Joe Goldberg, brand strategy leader at Santander, discuss the correlation between brand and NPS at All Access Voice of the Customer 2023

Tips for collecting useful customer insights

There are a few techniques that can make a big difference to surveying methods and their results.

Create your VoC program with the whole organization

When surveys are coordinated across multiple business units, the insights they deliver should be used to cross-pollinate between different divisions. Through workshops and internal planning, business units can together determine survey design that will service the whole organization rather than just parts of it. By taking a bigger-picture view of the survey design there is also the chance to gain a greater, more complex range of customer feedback.

Reinforce your brand message

Surveys should be designed as a two-way dialogue: an opportunity to reinforce the brand message as well as invite feedback. The choice of words and phrasing, combined with the chosen styling and graphics will communicate a certain message to the user, a message which could be different depending on the time and nature of the survey.

Schedule surveys pre and post-purchase

Typically, surveys are executed post-purchase. This is an optimal time to gather feedback but surveys should not be restricted to just this stage. Well designed and executed surveys can also be scheduled pre-purchase or for service-based businesses within the period that the customer is experiencing the service.

An additional option is to schedule a survey that potentially pre-empts a problem, for example, at a stage that other customers have highlighted as a negative part of the customer journey. This proactive move by an organization is a strong CX bonus and can obtain very specific VoC insights.

Typical survey questions

Survey design is a universe of options and opportunities. Organizations have the option to select length, type of questions and the phrasing of the questions. The way these different variables are combined can dramatically change the feedback that is gathered and the insights that can be calculated.

As a starting point, here are some typical questions deployed in VoC projects:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our  company/product to someone else?
2. How easy is it to use?
3. Have you encountered any difficulties using our product/service?
4. Do you feel that we offer good value for money?
5. What improvements would you like to see?

Involve employees

Every technique that is applied to understanding and analyzing the Voice of the Customer can also be applied to an organization’s employees. Employees can also provide unique insights and action points, especially when cross-referenced with the data from the VoC program. This also has the added bonus of boosting employee engagement.

Making data work for your organization

More data is not always the answer to achieving meaningful customer insights. Existing data sets when used well or combined with other existing data can provide insights and answers that are plentiful enough. And gathering the right data rather than all the data means a more efficient data strategy and a better experience for your customers.

Driving information in to the organization is the beginning. Being able to analyze and draw answers from that data is critical. The data that an organization gathers through its VoC exercises should be matched by the internal expertise that are available to crunch that data. By ensuring that there is resource – technical and personnel – to manage the data, the insight gathering process and the impact upon CX is much more effective.

Actioning insights can be difficult for CX practitioners due to the sheer amount of data collected. However, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are making this task easier. These two algorithm-based technologies consistently learn, improve and respond to changes in the material they are given, and both are able to analyze huge piles of data and deliver precise insights about the customers.

These tools can help you get the insights you need from your data:

• Voice and conversation analytics. Software for voice or conversation analytics provides an incredible opportunity to quite literally sample the voice of the customer, which means analyzing customers’ emotions to get more complete insights, something that has historically been a difficult variable to measure.
• Text analytics. Much like with voice analytics, text analytics can evaluate the customers’ choice of language used throughout responses, searching for keywords or phrases associated with specific outcomes. This can be done in the survey environment, and any other written feedback including social media and contact forms. Generative AI like ChatGPT can analyze the qualitative data collected from customer interviews, surveys and social media comments. By identifying common themes and sentiment analysis, it can extract meaningful insights from unstructured text.

Voice of the Customer case studies

Cambridge University Press and Assessments: Building a VoC program from scratch

The academic institution Cambridge University Press and Assessment started building a VoC program from scratch in 2017. “It's really important to have clear customer journey maps and identify touch points to see where you want to add the Voice of the Customer along those touch points,” Vanessa Milan, Voice of the Customer manager, explains.

“It is really key to have very short surveys because customers don't want to go through a lot of questions. Especially if these are relationship surveys. They have to be quite quick to fill in. It is also important to have NPS drivers so that you're not only relying on customer comments to understand the drivers of your NPS. We use primary and secondary drivers.

“Then it's really important to create ad hoc reports for your audience. I'm preparing different reports for different managers, product owners, product managers, as well as customer service, and this has been really key to rouse my colleagues’ curiosity in VoC, so this is a key factor in the success of the program. You need to speak the language of your audience, so that they can listen to you and pay attention to your message about the VoC.”

“It's really important to have clear customer journey maps and identify touch points to see where you want to add the Voice of the Customer along those touch points." Vanessa Milan, Cambridge University Press and Assessment 

Milan says that company culture and staff engagement are also vital. “The key thing that we are finding is really helpful to shift the culture, are VoC huddles,” Milan says. “When we close the loop and we act on feedback, we have these team huddles where we look at the comments, the responses and the drivers, and we look at the ticketing, in particular to the integrated survey that we have in customer service that we run through our ticketing system.”

“It is really important to train your teams in VoC best practices, and when you choose a voice of the customer solution, it is important to have a solution that offers an academy with best practices and how to use the platform we will make your life much easier.

“We also have appreciation awards. We are in the process of improving the range of awards, but this is really key to motivate teams to keep listening and acting on customer feedback.”

Watch Milan discuss developing the publisher’s VoC program at All Access Voice of the Customer 2023

Robert Walters: Improving the candidate journey

At recruitment firm Robert Walters, the approach was to gather feedback from employees as well as customers. “The focus was to create a listening platform both internally and externally,” says Sinead Hourigan, global head of CX. “This allowed us to hear where the challenges lie and identify where the enhancement opportunities were, after which we had to execute some of those and implement change. Then we would be able to establish targets.”

Hourigan explains that they spent three months asking everybody the same questions and recording 250 hours of calls with staff globally. “When we brought it all together, we were able to devise more than 800 initiatives for our global teams, all based on that feedback. It gave us such confidence we were doing the right thing and that we were focusing our interventions on the right areas.”

“We felt that technology and automation had de-humanized the process a little too much, so we wanted to review it and make some positive changes.” Sinead Hourigan, Robert Walters

As a result the company made changes to the candidate journey, in particular when it came to unsuccessful offers of work. “We felt that technology and automation, while valuable in this space, had de-humanized the process a little too much, so we wanted to review it and make some positive changes,” Hourigan says.

“We looked at the whole candidate journey, from the minute they apply all the way through to when we do or do not place them in that magical position that they really wanted.

“It was a big piece of work and involved some changes to some of our tech infrastructure to ensure our automated messaging systems were working effectively and there were some changes to the way we onboard our own people and train them.”

T-Mobile: Building a best-in-class VoC program

Lorna Brown, B2B customer experience manager at T-Mobile, says that the first thing to understand about creating a VoC program is the intent behind it. “For example, if I'm running a bid management feedback type of experience where I'm going to measure customers that were in the proposal stage that we won or lost, we want to know why, really understanding the intent of what those questions are, making sure that you push for a very robust survey. It means you're not just asking the customer for feedback, but you're actually going to do something with that feedback.”

“I'm a huge believer in closed loop feedback with B2B decision makers whether they are happy or not happy,” Brown says. “Are you reaching back out to the customer when they take the time to respond to you? You shouldn't be allowed to game who gets invited to a survey, you really want to be true to intent. Intent is about getting better – you don't necessarily want all 10s, the whole point of the program is to hear from those few that may think something doesn't work well.”

"Intent is about getting better – you don't necessarily want all 10s, the whole point of the program is to hear from those few that may think something doesn't work well.” Lorna Brown, T-Mobile 

Another point to consider is not obsessing over scores. “I find that when people get caught up in a customer experience programme, they start score watching,” Brown says. “The more you and your executives score watch, you start to drift away from the core of the programme.”

Brown adds that a particular challenge tech companies such as T-Mobile face is being aware that something needs fixing that can take a long time. “Sometimes that outer loop can stall because we've identified and prioritised it and we are actually building it. But we'll continue to get feedback that this certain thing is broken. It’s more validation but it's hard when the solution takes a long time to come because it's a continued complaint until it is built.”

Closing the loop

As with all relationships, communication is of a high value when it is a two-way dialogue and when both parties commit to listening. VoC surveying provides that opportunity to brands and organizations, to connect with the customer and to give them the chance to have their say.

By combining improved survey techniques with new VoC strategies and technologies it is now easier than ever before to really understand the customers’ point of view, make critical changes and communicate results.
Responses that are timely and precise mean a lot to customers. When they can see that their feedback has been a driver for change and improvement, it enhances their feeling of partnership with an organization, their satisfaction with the product or service and their loyalty to the brand.

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