What is the Voice of Customer (VoC)?

Voice of Customer (VoC) definition refers to your customer’s feedback about their expectations of and experiences with your products or services. It’s also called Voice of the Customer. Businesses analyze VoC to find the gap between what customers think they’re getting with a product or service and how they feel about their purchase or interaction with the business.

Voice of the Customer initiatives can give you critical insight into the whys behind abandoned purchases. They facilitate two-way communication and greater understanding between the customer and your company, which often leads to increased customer satisfaction and repeat business.

What is a VoC program?

A VoC initiative is a research platform that collects data on your customers’ preferences, needs and experiences related to the products or services you provide. The analytics can serve as a guide to improve the customer experience and product or service offerings.

These programs are increasingly becoming core components of business strategies for companies in a wide variety of sectors. Business functions such as customer success, operations and product development harness VoC data to pinpoint and enhance all stages of the customer’s sales journey.

Why is VoC important?

VoC programs are continually showing their value for enabling more direct customer engagement and capturing critical feedback. Business success hinges on the customer’s perception of product or service quality and customer service. Clients favor companies that communicate, listen to their opinions and make corrections and enhancements accordingly. VoC can reveal:

• Your customers’ interests and behavioral patterns
• What your customers want from your company
• Why they need your product or service above competitors
• Your customers’ pain points and what you can do to address them

Implementing a VoC strategy helps companies strengthen bonds with customers, leading to higher customer retention. It also improves internal collaboration as every employee becomes a customer advocate.

How do I develop a VoC program?

Your VoC program isn’t just about understanding the customer. It starts with clearly defining what your company stands for. Establishing a Voice of the Customer program also requires an organization-wide focus on the customer.

Leadership

Leaders at every level of your organization should be dedicated to cultivating and maintaining a customer-centric culture. Leaders set the tone for their teams to follow, so a strong VoC emphasis must begin at the top and flow down.

Vision

Create and share a vision that everyone within your company can easily understand. Your vision statement should be short and specific to be quickly conveyed, understood and accepted.

System for listening

Customer feedback can come through multiple channels, so your company needs a comprehensive platform to collect it. Your listening program should be flexible to adjust to changes in the client’s preferences.

Employee experience

The long-term viability of a Voice of Customer initiative depends on an engaged workforce. An employee experience program is a tested method for understanding your employees and increasing the organization-wide synergy needed for successful customer experiences.

Focused action

Each department of your business should understand what specific, measurable actions to take to enhance the customer experience. A root cause or driver analysis can help you pinpoint what areas to work on.

Dedication

Cultivating a customer-centric culture is a continual, evolving process. Leadership must remain committed to the VoC program and the vision behind it.

What objectives should a VoC program achieve?

According to Shreyas Sekar, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management: “We tend to think that revenue is the only objective that online retailers care about, but increasingly platforms care about growth and retaining their user base. If a customer gets hooked today, the platform may get to keep them as a repeat customer over and over again.”

Your Voice of Customer program needs to address an overarching question or concern, which will then guide your program’s design and supporting technology. A VoC program will typically deal with benchmarking or continuous improvement. Although some VoC survey vendors say that their platforms serve both objectives, there is a difference in perspective.

Benchmarking

Voice of Customer surveys with a benchmark purpose are heavy on metrics and focus primarily on ratings. Since benchmarking is comparative, it’s important to provide the same questions to all respondents, regardless of their pathway through your website. This will ensure that responses will be brief, relevant and of high quality.

Although benchmarking -focused surveys cannot answer exactly why your scores rank a certain way, they may offer some insight into general causality. For example, an answer of “look and feel” could refer to a host of variables that call for more detailed research to find root causes.

Continuous improvement

If you want to focus on continuous improvement, your objective will be to understand causality. Ratings questions will be more valuable if they include follow-up inquiries designed to uncover why the respondent rated their experience a certain way.

An example preliminary question would be: “Based on why you visited our site today, how positive was your experience?” The next question could be: “Please explain the main reason your experience was positive or not.”

Surveys with a purpose of continuous improvement use more open-ended questions. These require more effort from the respondent, so the questions should be as relevant and to the point as possible. You can customize survey questions to reflect the visitor’s unique experience through your site.

Tailoring questions

Your survey technology must be able to track visitor activity and incorporate those particulars into tailored exit questions. Your questions should show why your visitors react to certain features of your site. To avoid overwhelming the respondent, limit how often you ask for further explanations.

Ideally, tailored questions will reveal what your visitors enjoyed about their experience with your site. Their positive feedback will inform you on:

• What to keep on your site when addressing other problems
• What to expand

What information should my VoC program capture?

Your VoC strategy’s focus ⁠— benchmarking or continuous improvement ⁠— determines the information your program should collect and analyze.

Benchmarking

Survey questions related to benchmarking may be limited by the respondent’s tolerance for questions that seem irrelevant or uninteresting. Data quality may become questionable as some individuals may respond just to get through the questions.

Continuous improvement

VoC surveys with a continuous improvement focus usually provide deeper insight than benchmark-focused questionnaires. In addition to survey questions, continuous improvement programs collect pages visited, categories viewed, tools used and services compared. They also monitor for wish lists, neglected carts and checkout abandonment.

This behavioral data can be used to build experience-specific questions or complete a sophisticated analysis of the respondent’s visit to your site. Your survey strategy lets you meet the diverse needs of work groups such as:

• Executives: Looking for initiative-specific or Net Promoter Score metrics
• Site search team: Looking for specific data on visitor response to page layouts
• Online marketing team: Wondering why visitors responded more or less to a certain promotion compared to another
• Merchandising team: Wanting to know why a certain brand’s conversion rates have dropped

What best practices should a VoC program include?

Omni-channel feedback

Omni-channel feedback tools offer more accurate, detailed customer insights on behavior, preference and satisfaction. They allow you to collect data from wherever customers visit your site so that you can enhance their experiences at every turn.

Company-wide collaboration

Your VoC platform should facilitate collaboration across departments. It should let you tag stakeholders and offer detailed guidance for any team member to enhance the customer experience. Configurable dashboards, alerts and automated actions can be based on behaviors, responses, location, department and other factors.

Voice of the employee

The ability to link employee and customer experiences can help your company see the impact of employee engagement on customer satisfaction or displeasure. Feedback from employees:

• Gives context to customer experiences
• Provides insight into employees’ experience
• Helps spot policy, technology or process obstacles that affect customer experiences

Clear KPIs

A robust Voice of Customer platform will show how your VoC initiative contributes to increasing market share and affects cost and efficiency throughout your business. It will enable you to weigh costs against gains to determine if improvements are financially feasible.

Keep in mind that your customers could obscure what they really feel about your company, product or service, which may also deny your team the chance to work together consistently toward optimizing the customer and employee experiences. A well-designed VoC program will limit negative interactions and quickly solve pain points for your visitors and organization.

VoC definition FAQs

How many questions should VoC surveys have?

Most survey respondents aren’t willing to spend more than five minutes on a survey, so experts recommend limiting surveys to 15 questions. Surveys should be a mix selected from a comprehensive list of at least 40 questions.

What are the different types of Voice of Customer surveys?

VoC survey types include:

• Customer feedback
• Emotional ties
• Loyalty acid test
• Value propositions
• Mobile app UX

What factors should VoC survey questions address?

Your Voice of Customer questionnaires give respondents the opportunity to tell you about:

• Communication preferences: Email, most used social media platforms
• Demographics: Age, gender, income ranges, education status
• Image: What comes to the respondent’s mind when they hear your company’s name
• Competitors: How your company’s offerings compare to competing brands, which company respondents have purchased the most from
• Decisions: What factors are most important when choosing a company’s product or service
• Performance: What a respondent likes best or dislikes about your company