What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

The Voice of the Customer, or VOC, is a process or program used by businesses to collect and take action on customer feedback. The focus of VOC data is on customers’ experiences and the need, to understand them to improve or enhance the product. VOC can help companies in the following ways:

•  Understanding the reasons behind customer feedback;
•  Identifying what customers need and want, as well as their pain points; and 
•  Synthesizing feedback to share in a way that can inform different areas of the business.

Why is Voice of the Customer important?

Customer feedback is vital to understanding which areas of your product are succeeding and which areas need improvement to continue growing. However, it’s all too common for this customer feedback to get lost and not used to its full potential. This is because once the initial data has been collected from various sources, it can be difficult to turn this information into tangible results. That’s where a VoC program comes in. A VoC program helps to take all of this customer feedback and use it to create actionable steps that will help improve your product. By doing this, you can ensure that your product is always growing and improving, which will in turn help your business to succeed.

How to build a Voice of the Customer program

• Set the vision: A VoC program aligns an entire organization with a customer-centric focus. The first step is to invite feedback at every opportunity. Feedback collection should be a part of every team’s mandate, and it should be easy for customers to provide feedback on the product and beyond.

• Prioritize: It’s important to remember that not all feedback is created equal and it shouldn’t be treated as such – especially by customer success managers. Just because a company may encourage input from its customers, it doesn’t mean that every suggestion or gripe should be acted upon. Instead, choose a tool that will help the organization to understand how common certain kinds of feedback are, how important it is to the customer base, and whether or not the team is prepared to take action on it. By doing this, you’ll be able to better prioritize the feedback you receive and act in a way that benefits both the customer and the company.

• Close the loop: Include customers who have provided input to the brand in a feedback loop in order to show that their voices have been heard. Acknowledgment goes a long way for customers – let them know that you’re planning to address their concerns in a concrete way.