Voice of the Customer

What is Voice of the Customer? 

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the proactive practice of going out and collecting, analyzing, and acting on explicit customer feedback to understand what they love, what drives them nuts, and what they really want from your product or service.

If you’ve ever wished you could read your customers’ minds to learn what they want from you, then listening to the VoC is the next best thing. It’s a research methodology that congrigates all the different ways you can proactively go out there and listen to what your users are saying, gathering insights from surveys, reviews, interviews, social media, and more.

The most important thing is that it’s an activity. Unlike general customer feedback management – which we’ll dig into a bit more in a bit – you’re not twiddling your thumbs waiting for the feedback to come. You’re building a process to go and get opinions and feedback and articulated pain points from your users. 

Think of a butterfly farm where each butterfly represents a bit of customer feedback. Now, you could just stand still with your hand outstretched and wait for some butterflies to land in your palm. Some might, and you could grab them, put them in your test tube, and do whatever people do once they capture butterflies. This isn’t Voice of the Customer.

Instead, you can go grab a net and start chasing those butterflies down. That’s a more active approach and more likely to get you more butterflies (and feedback). This is a better representation of the Voice of the Customer.

VoC is a proactive approach of using various ways of collecting customer feedback and turning that insight into action.

Is Voice of the Customer different from customer feedback management? 

At first glance, Voice of the Customer (VoC) and customer feedback management might seem like the same thing. After all, they both involve gathering and using customer insights, right? 

But there’s a key difference: VoC is an active, strategic initiative, while general feedback management is more passive and broad.

VoC vs customer feedback management: Active listening vs just collecting

VoC is the process of actively tuning in to what your customers are saying. You’re deliberately seeking out their needs, expectations, and frustrations at moments during your product discovery process where you feel it’s necessary.

Feedback management, on the other hand, is more reactive. It’s the system you use to collect and organize all sorts of input, be it direct feedback, product analytics, and more, and then turn that feedback into insights to inform future product decisions

Another way to look at it is that your customer feedback management is always on, collecting and managing the feedback you get as it comes in. Feedback management describes your process of turning all forms of feedback into data. 

Voice of the Customer is a deliberate research methodology where you actively decide to go out and gather the insights. 

When should you run a Voice of the Customer initiative? 

So, we’ve established that VoC is a proactive activity you do to learn from your users. When’s best to do it? 

VoC is a foundational part of your end-to-end product discovery process. It’s most valuable at the early stages of building a product or initiative, when you’re trying to uncover and define the real problems worth solving – and to explore how best to solve them.

It’s particularly useful when:

• You’re starting a new product or feature
• You’re entering a new market
• You’re targeting a new user segment that hasn’t been supported before

In these scenarios, VoC helps you gather rich, qualitative insights that can shape your strategy and lay the groundwork for what you’re building.

But VoC shouldn’t be treated as a box-ticking exercise and not something you should do for the sake of it. Running a set number of VoC interviews each week without a clear purpose isn’t just a waste of time – it can cloud your decision-making. Instead, VoC should be tied to specific learning goals or decisions you’re trying to make. If you already understand your users’ needs for a particular feature or area, repeating VoC work may not add value.

Once you’ve collected enough insights to confidently move forward, you can scale back active VoC efforts and shift into a more passive mode of customer feedback collection, keeping a pulse on your users through tools like support conversations or user behavior analytics.

Because once you have the answer, there’s no point in asking the same question again.

Why is Voice of the Customer important? 

If you’re not actively listening to your customers, you’re flying blind. You’re driving a submarine with no sonar. Voice of the Customer helps Product Teams understand what customers love, what frustrates them, and what they really want. That’s so valuable!

When done right, it transforms feedback into action, making customers happier and your products better. Here’s why VoC deserves your attention:

• Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty: When customers feel heard, they tend to stick around. Voice of the Customer helps identify pain points so you can fix them before they turn into dealbreakers. Happier customers mean repeat business, and glowing word-of-mouth recommendations, a key part of the viral growth loop.
  
• Informed decision-making: Stop guessing and start knowing. VoC provides real insights into what customers want, helping you align business strategies with actual needs. Better data leads to smarter product development, marketing, and service improvements.
  
• Competitive advantage: If you’re listening to your customers better than your competitors are, you’ll always be one step ahead. VoC keeps you in tune with market shifts, allowing you to adapt faster and meet customer expectations before they even realize they have them.
  
• Product and service innovation: Your next big idea might already be in your customers’ heads. VoC helps uncover unmet needs and fresh opportunities, ensuring your products and services stay relevant, competitive, and genuinely useful.
  
• Operational efficiency and brand management: Catch small problems before they become big ones. VoC highlights areas where your processes may be falling short, giving you a chance to improve operations and protect your brand’s reputation.
  
• Increased revenue and customer lifetime value: When customers are happy, they spend more and stay longer. VoC-driven improvements not only reduce customer churn but also increase customer lifetime value (CLV), making your business more profitable over time.

How do you collect Voice of the Customer? 

So, if Voice of the Customer describes the proactive ways you can gather feedback and opinions from your users, what are the methods you have in your arsenal? Turns out, quite a lot. 

These methods can be split into two groups: solicited (the feedback you’ve asked for) and unsolicited (the feedback already out there that you’re looking for). Whatever the method, Voice of the Customer is always focused on ways to learn opinions and direct feedback.

Here are some of the methods at your disposal when collecting the Voice of the Customer:

Solicited feedback

🔍 Customer surveys

Surveys are one of the most direct ways to capture customer feedback. Whether it’s a quick multiple-choice form or an open-ended questionnaire, they give you structured insights into what customers love and where they struggle. The key is asking the right questions. Too long, and people drop off; too vague, and you won’t get useful answers.

🎤 Interviews

Sometimes, the best insights come from real conversations. Customer interviews allow you to dive deep into pain points, motivations, and needs that surveys might miss. They take more time but provide rich, qualitative data that can shape better business decisions. Plus, customers appreciate being heard on a personal level.

👥 Focus groups

Want to see how different customers react to your product or service in real time? Focus groups and customer feedback sessions bring people together to share their thoughts, giving you immediate reactions and discussions. They help uncover trends, emotional responses, and ideas you might not have considered. perfect for refining messaging or features before a big launch.

📝 Feedback forms

Not every customer has time for a full survey, but quick feedback forms can capture thoughts at the moment. Whether it’s a post-purchase form or an in-app suggestion box, they make it easy for customers to voice their opinions. The key is making them accessible, short, and relevant to the experience.

🏛️ Customer advisory boards

Your most engaged customers can be your best advisors. A customer advisory board is a select group that provides strategic feedback on products, services, or overall experience. They help ensure you’re making customer-centric decisions while also strengthening relationships with your most loyal users.

📊 Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys

NPS surveys measure how likely customers are to recommend your product or service on a scale from 0 to 10. They provide a quick pulse check on overall satisfaction and loyalty, helping you spot trends over time. A high NPS means you’re creating strong advocates, while a low one signals areas that need improvement.

Your net promotor score is one of many product adoption metrics. Check out our full list of product adoption metrics you can track:

Unsolicited feedback

🗣️ Social media comments and mentions

Customers are already talking about you. Are you listening? Social media is full of unfiltered feedback, from complaints to praise, that can highlight trends in real time. Choosing to monitor and find mentions, and engage with users not only provides insights but also strengthens your brand’s relationship with customers.

⭐ Online reviews and ratings

What people say about you on platforms like G2, Trustpilot, or Google Reviews matters. Reviews influence potential customers and give you raw, public insights into your strengths and weaknesses. Responding thoughtfully to both positive and negative feedback shows you care and can even turn critics into fans.

🏡 Community forum discussions

Customers often help each other before they even reach out to you. Forums, Reddit threads, and online communities provide organic discussions about your product, revealing pain points, feature requests, and workarounds. Tuning in can help you spot recurring issues and opportunities for improvement.

📞 Customer support tickets

Every support ticket is a goldmine of customer insights. Whether it’s a chat request or a help desk ticket, these interactions highlight common frustrations and areas where your product or service could be improved. Analyzing trends in support requests can help you proactively address customer needs.

📧 Email and call center transcripts

Your inbox and call logs hold valuable customer stories. By analyzing email threads and call transcripts, you can identify recurring themes in customer concerns and questions. This data is particularly useful for refining your messaging, improving support processes, and even shaping product updates.

Customer feedback methods that aren’t part of Voice of the Customer

Voice of the Customer (VoC) focuses on proactively gathering feedback and insights directly from your customers. While this approach plays a key role in understanding their opinions, there are other valuable customer insights that don’t fall under the VoC umbrella. These insights can still inform product decisions but don’t directly capture expliciate customer feedback articulated straight from the horse’s mouth, such as:

• Session recordings: While these provide valuable insights into user behavior, they don’t directly capture the customer’s voice or opinions. However, they can complement VoC data by providing context to customer feedback.
• Product analytics: Similar to session recordings, product analytics can find a lot of behavioral data that isn’t direct customer feedback. This can be used alongside VoC data to gain a more comprehensive understanding of customer interactions.
• Internal feedback: Feedback from team members about customers, while valuable, is not directly from the customer and is thus not typically considered part of VoC.

It’s important to note that the distinction isn’t always clear-cut. Many companies integrate various feedback methods, including session recordings and analytics, into their broader VoC programs to gain a more holistic view of the customer experience. 

The key is that VoC focuses on capturing and understanding the customer’s perspective, needs, and expectations, whether through direct feedback or indirect channels where customers express their opinions.

Voice of the customer questions

Want to learn about your customers directly through a survey or interview? Here are some good questions you can ask them to help them shine a light on your product and how they feel about it:

1️⃣ How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?

This one’s a classic. It tells you how loyal your customers are and how much they actually like what you offer. If they’re shouting your name from the rooftops, great! If not, you’ll know where you need to step up.

2️⃣ What specific problem were you trying to solve with our product/service?

Every customer comes to you for a reason, and this question helps you figure out exactly what that is. The more you understand their pain points, the better you can refine your messaging and make sure your product truly delivers.

3️⃣ What do you like most about our product/service?

Think of this as a highlight reel of what you’re doing right. It helps you zero in on your strongest selling points, is great for marketing, and even better for making sure you don’t accidentally mess with something customers already love.

4️⃣ What could we improve about our product/service?

No sugarcoating, this is where customers tell you what’s not working. Their answers help you pinpoint what needs fixing, so you can make real improvements that keep them sticking around.

5️⃣ Did our customer service help you resolve your issue? Why or why not?

If customers reach out for help, they expect solid answers fast. This question tells you whether your support team is nailing it or if there are gaps that need tightening up.

6️⃣ What made you choose our product/service over competitors?

This one gets straight to the ‘why you?’ factor. Understanding what tipped the scales in your favor helps you double down on what’s working and stand out even more.

7️⃣ Have you encountered any challenges or frustrations with our product/service? If so, what were they?

Every product has its issues. This question helps you find yours before they turn into deal-breakers. Spot them early, fix them fast, and keep customers happy.

8️⃣ How well does our product/service meet your expectations?

Ever promised the earth and delivered a globe? This question checks if your marketing and product experience actually match up. If there’s a gap, you’ll know exactly where to close it.

9️⃣ How did you first hear about our brand/product/service?

Marketing teams love this one because it tells you where your customers are coming from. If a particular channel is pulling in the right people, you can double down on it.

🔟 If you could change one thing about our product/service, what would it be?

A no-nonsense way to get straight to the one thing that’s bugging your users the most. Prioritize the biggest asks, and you’ll make the most meaningful impact.

Together, these questions give you everything you need to fine-tune your product, messaging, and customer experience without the guesswork.

Who conducts Voice of the Customer research?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a shared responsibility across multiple teams, ensuring customer feedback drives every aspect of the product and experience. The Product Team and Customer Success Team are the primary players in collecting, analyzing, and acting on VoC insights.

• Product Team: Product Managers take the lead in identifying critical VoC topics, analyzing customer feedback, and turning it into actionable insights that shape the product roadmap. They ensure that customer needs and preferences are reflected in new features and improvements. Additionally, they present key findings to leadership to make sure customer feedback influences strategic decisions and future directions.
  
• Customer Success Team: The Customer Success team gathers feedback through a variety of methods, including surveys, customer interviews, and social media listening. They track pain points, customer needs, and trends, using these insights to refine and enhance the overall customer experience. Their role is also to ensure that all customer touchpoints, from onboarding to support and marketing, are aligned and consistent in delivering a positive, seamless experience.

Your Customer Success teams are a direct avenue to gathering good customer feedback. Make sure that they’re following best practices to get you really valuable feedback: 

Together, these teams collaborate to ensure VoC is more than just data, it actively shapes better products, experiences, and strategies.

Giving your customers a voice

Voice of the Customer is an invaluable practice for any business looking to stay in tune with its customers’ needs and desires. By actively collecting, analyzing, and acting on feedback, VoC helps you understand what customers love, what frustrates them, and what they truly want from your product or service. 

It’s not just about gathering opinions, it’s about turning those insights into tangible actions that can enhance customer satisfaction, drive product innovation, and ultimately boost your business’s bottom line. 

Whether through solicited methods like surveys and interviews or unsolicited feedback from social media and customer support tickets, all these collection methods still involve an active input from you.

Of course, collecting Voice of the Customer is only useful if you act on it. With ProdPad, you can use Signals to track and monitor recurring feedback themes and use that to prioritize Initiatives to make your product match customer needs. You’re also able to easily manage customer feedback in ProdPad – no matter how it’s collected – and tie relevant feedback to your Ideas. 

Make your Voice of the Customer feedback more effective with ProdPad. Try us today – for completely free – and see how easy it is to leverage feedback into your roadmap.