Voice of the Customer (VoC) Examples, Methods, & Programs

You’ve heard it before: customers ask for new features or improvements but don’t explain why they want them. This leaves you guessing, trying to work out what your buyers need. But what if you had a tool to look into the reason behind their requests? A technique that tells you exactly what they’re thinking? That’s where Voice of the Customer (VoC) comes in.

It helps you identify customer preferences, spot areas for improvement, and meet customer expectations. Most importantly, it enables you to personalize customer experiences (CX) at all touchpoints. CX, as you must know, is extremely important, since:

• 49 percent of customers cite poor customer experience as the reason for leaving a previously trusted brand.
• 73% of buyers say customer experience is their top factor when deciding whether to buy from a company.
• Eighty-eight percent of online shoppers will continue shopping on a website if it provides personalized experience.

It’s a fact: happy customers bring in more business, while unsatisfied ones can lead to high churn rates and a bad reputation in the market.

Yet, Voice of the Customer isn’t just about gathering customer feedback — it’s about listening to customer opinions, understanding their pain points, and using that insight to improve your products, services, and overall business plan. You need a strong VoC strategy, the right tools, and a team that knows how to analyze and act on feedback to make it work.

Let’s talk about how to get it right. Our post will discuss the best Voice of the Customer examples, methodologies, and best practices to help you build a great VoC program for your business.

What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) focuses on collecting and analyzing customer feedback to understand customer needs, preferences, and expectations. Unlike a one-size-fits-all approach, VoC prioritizes the individual, acknowledging that the majority's needs might not reflect everyone’s wants. It can be as simple as a pop-up product survey after you finish a meeting on Skype or a post-purchase survey after you’ve bought an umbrella.

Voice of the Customer isn’t limited to one department — it’s a company-wide effort and everybody has to get involved at one point or another. You can collect VoC data using multiple sources, like:

• Surveys – Online, email, or in-app surveys for direct customer insights.
• Interviews – One-on-one discussions or group interviews for detailed feedback.
• Social media – Conversations on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Online reviews – Feedback from G2, TrustPilot, and Yelp.
• Customer service data – Logs from calls, chats, and email records.
• Feedback forms – Post-purchase or in-app forms.

With customers having thousands of options for a single product, VoC is crucial for product differentiation and market positioning. And why ever not? It allows brands to optimize interactions at every touchpoint and leverage customer sentiment analysis to make sense of unstructured social feedback. Companies can then truly understand what customers want, using this information to refine products, improve services, and stay ahead of the competition.

Benefits of Voice of the Customer research

Voice of the Customer research helps you shape your product or service into something customers value, making them want to invest their time and money into your business. When customers like something, you can double down on it. If something falls short, their feedback allows you to understand why and how to improve yourself.

You gain the ability to:

• Spot problems early: Address issues before they escalate.
• Test new ideas: Fine-tune marketing or product designs.
• Increase loyalty and retention: Listen to and act on their feedback.

VoC programs improve customer satisfaction, speed up product development, and facilitate better customer experiences across the entire customer journey. They are a must-have for subscription-based businesses because they provide valuable insights that can retain customers and encourage subscription renewals.

7 Voice of the Customer Methodologies and Ideas

Voice of the Customer methodologies allows you to collect customer feedback about your organization, brand, products, features, and services. You can capture VoC data using customer surveys, interviews, social media listening tools, reviews, customer support tickets, focus groups, feedback forms, community forums, website analytics, and more.

Of course, you should select the method only after establishing clear business objectives. For instance, do you want to improve your product performance or reduce customer churn? The answer to this question will help you select the right VoC technique. It’s a good practice to incorporate a mix of different methodologies in your Voice of the Customer program to reduce sampling bias.

1. Customer surveys

Customer surveys and product reviews are an excellent way to collect structured data on user satisfaction and product usage levels. They can be conducted in real time using channels like SMS or email. Alternatively, if you have a substantial budget and time, you can conduct in-person surveys.

Ideally, surveys should be triggered when a prospect reaches an important milestone in the customer journey — say, making a purchase or renewing a subscription — as this enables one to collect feedback on that specific aspect of the customer interaction. These can then be followed by in-depth surveys to get a more detailed understanding of their behavior online.

Note: Your surveys should always be properly timed and delivered on the right platform, using the appropriate format, such as multiple-choice questions (MCQs) or open-ended responses, to ensure positive response rates.

2. Interviews and focus groups

If you want detailed qualitative feedback, try one-to-one interviews, focus groups, and community discussions. Focus groups involve a small group of people – usually existing customers – who are observed to understand what customers think about your company, a new feature, or an ad campaign. They are asked to share their opinions about a particular aspect of your business and can openly discuss related topics with each other.

Customer interviews can cost between $25 to $250 per respondent depending on interview length and the audience you’re targeting.

Although expensive, interviews are well worth it since they allow you to understand customers on a more personal level. As such, they are widely conducted by organizations – sometimes using emails and phone calls – to gather VoC feedback and improve the customer experience of people sharing common demographics, psychographics, and behavioral traits.

3. Net Promoter Score

Created by Fred Reichfield, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems, NPS stands for the Net Promoter Score. It is a metric that measures the probability of your buyers recommending your product or services to others. This metric is based on one question: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [product, company] to a friend or family member?”

NPS ratings enable you to distinguish between happy and unhappy customers, offering an efficient way to collect customer feedback from your buyers. It’s two birds in one stone; you can measure customer loyalty and implement programs to boost customer satisfaction.

4. Website data

Tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar help you analyze customer behavior on your website. The former lets you identify the most visited blogs, product pages, and traffic sources, while the latter enables you to understand visitor interactions through heatmaps and session recordings.

Live chat logs and chatbot conversations can further be processed to identify customer goals, list pain points, and gather valuable VoC data.

For those who don’t know, live chat is a feature found on most websites that allows website or app visitors to register complaints, ask questions, and get relevant product recommendations. It directly connects you to the visitor, offering a first-hand understanding of their needs and concerns.

5. Online reviews from sites like G2

It’s common sense — anyone who wants to buy a genuine product will look up your business online before making a purchase decision. Over 95% of customers read product reviews before buying, and 58% are willing to pay more for products with positive reviews. Maintaining a positive reputation with your customers is crucial for influencing their choices and building trust in your brand.

Online reviews from review sites like G2, TrustPilot, TrustRadius, or Capterra serve as critical sources of Voice of the Customer data, as users rely on these third-party websites to rate your products and services.

6. Customer support records

Customer support data includes tickets, sales calls, chats, and emails stored in your customer relationship management (CRM) system. This data, along with sentiment analysis tools, can uncover how customers feel about your products, features, or services — whether it’s positive feedback or areas causing frustration.

A great tool for sentiment analysis is Salesforce’s Einstein Sentiment API. It categorizes text into positive, negative, or neutral, helping you group customer emotions based on the words they use.

Phone calls and call recordings are additionally useful for understanding customer emotions in real time. Consequently, historical chat records offer a broader perspective on customer opinions, why they visit your website, and what they hope to achieve with your product. You can additionally interview your customer service and sales teams – don’t forget, they interact with customers daily – to get insights into recurring issues affecting multiple people.

7. Social media listening

Social media is a treasure trove of unfiltered feedback, including opinions, complaints, and positive reviews about your brand or product. It allows you to tune in to online conversations, track viral trends, and engage directly with your customers.

With social media listening tools, you can monitor brand mentions, understand public sentiment, and identify opportunities to improve or promote your offerings. It’s an invaluable way to stay connected with your audience and keep a pulse on your brand’s online presence.

Creating a Voice of the Customer Program: A Four-Step Process

The purpose of a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is to understand your users by collecting feedback, extracting insights, and using those insights to improve the customer experience. A successful VoC program involves four key components:

• Listen: Gather feedback via surveys, questionnaires, interviews, etc.
• Act: Show appreciation for the feedback by acknowledging it.
• Analyze: Evaluate the feedback to track your goals and identify areas for improvement.
• Monitor: Assess the VoC program and find ways to improve response rates.

Listening involves, well, listening to customers. You need to create buyer personas to define the audience you’re targeting. Personas make it easier to find people matching your criteria and asking questions that truly matter.

Your questions need to be as simple as they come, so much so that a fifth-grader can understand them. Always put forth problems you’re committed to solving and include a combination of direct and indirect feedback in your VoC plan.

• Direct feedback received via surveys, NPS, customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), community posts, social media mentions, etc.
• Indirect feedback from transactions, product usage, market research, customer support data, and other behavioral metrics.

Make it a point to combine both types of feedback to fill in gaps and get a holistic view of your customer’s expectations of your company. VoC should be “a closed-loop” kind of communication where you get user feedback and respond to it as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter if this feedback is positive or negative, you must act on it; and tell them you’re grateful for their response.

Next, analyze the data you’ve gathered. VoC insights can be derived from business and outreach analytics. You find answers to important questions like: Are your customers happy with your product? How do they feel about your customer service?

• Business analytics show follow-up response times, NPS trends, etc.
• Outreach analytics metrics present email open rates, bounce rates, CTR, response rates, and unsubscribe rates.

Together, these data points evaluate the effectiveness of your customer outreach and highlight areas that need change. You can monitor and update your VoC methodologies to assess customer satisfaction and discover new channels to interact with customers.

Now that AI technology is here, it has become easier to reach out to thousands of customers, reply to individual queries, and analyze all of this data to generate actionable insights. AI tools can find the right people and ask the right questions at the right time for you.

Build a Voice of the Customer program

You need to pick the right VoC program for your efforts to be fruitful. Although there are a lot of options available, consider these factors before making a decision:

• Budget alignment
• Ease of setup and usability
• Compatibility with existing tools
• Reliable customer support
• Features that meet your needs, like sentiment analysis

After selecting a program that balances these elements, you can begin your Voice of the Customer program.

1. Define the target audience

To start off, define your target audience. Create detailed customer personas to understand key attributes, customer preferences, and behaviors of different customer segments. These personas will help you choose the best VoC methods for collecting feedback and ensure that your program resonates with each audience group.

As different segments respond to different feedback mechanisms, like surveys, interviews, or behavioral tracking tools, confirm that your approach fits their preferences to maximize participation.

You can use our AI persona generator to create data-driven personas for your customers, along with your website, competitor, and social media audiences. The tool takes in your website analytics, social media, and consumer data, then enriches it with 40+ public data sources (VoC data from surveys, reviews, feedback, forums, and news channels) to generate personas for your business.

Each persona gives you data on consumer demographics (age, gender, location, language, job title), goals, challenges, motivations, emotions, personality traits, influencer entities, preferences, communication channels, interests, hobbies, lifestyle, values, content types, and more.

2. Set goals and objectives

Clearly outline the goals of your VoC program. For example, do you want to boost satisfaction, improve customer retention, or address specific customer pain points? Ask yourself these questions before creating your VoC program:

• What business objective do you want to achieve with a VoC program?
• What kind of information do you need to collect and analyze?
• Which VoC or survey tools do you want to use for a smooth VoC program?

Create surveys based on your objectives. For benchmarking purposes, focus on metric-driven surveys with ratings questions to measure performance. It’s a good plan to blend ratings questions with open-ended ones for improvement-purpose surveys; you can use them to identify the root cause of a problem. Just remember to customize them to individual interactions and stages of the customer journey.

Utilize tools that track customer behavior, like pages visited, products viewed, and carts abandoned. You can trigger experience-specific questions during or after these interactions to collect contextual data. Note: Don’t ask repetitive or overly detailed questions multiple times – it can frustrate respondents.

3. Select Voice of the Customer tools

Voice of the Customer tools combined with behavioral analytics can provide context by capturing data on internal customer interactions. They additionally reduce the number of surveys you send out to respondents. So list down the important customer touchpoints you’ll use to gather customer feedback, like free trial sign-ups or demo requests.

Choose the right VoC tools to identify your target audience, compile a contact list, create surveys, and deploy them at the right time. You can use a combination of CRM, sentiment analysis, and analytics platforms to build a successful Voice of the Customer program.

• CRMs combine feedback and customer profiles into a single platform, enabling you to segment customers, track interactions, and manage follow-ups.
• Sentiment analysis tools further process unstructured data, e.g., social media comments, to extract valuable insights.
• Analytics platforms visualize trends, study recurring patterns, and measure the impact of VoC insights on business performance.

Nowadays, generative AI tools tools can analyze textual feedback to gauge customer sentiment and emotions. An all-in-one Voice of the Customer tool like Qualtrics, on the other hand, can analyze data from multiple channels and integrate with most CRM systems.

4. Collect and analyze Voice of the Customer data

Remember what we discussed earlier; always diversify your data collection methodologies to cater to a wide range of customers. Once everything is in place, launch your VoC program. Start analyzing the feedback collected to identify common customer complaints and opportunities for improvement.

To make your work easier, segment VoC data by demographics, product type, features, or services. Identify common themes, keywords, and topics of interest. Leverage a mix of qualitative data, such as textual responses and product usage insights, and quantitative metrics, like customer satisfaction scores or issue resolution times. Compare your results against industry benchmarks or previous VoC program performance to ascertain success.

5. Act on customer feedback

Insights are only valuable if you use them. So, act on VoC insights and solve customer problems. Period. Do not let this information sit there in the back of a room – share it with other people in your organization. Come up with a clear action plan to address the most critical issues and assign a dedicated team to implement changes, track progress, and communicate improvements.

Let your customers know you’re working on their feedback. This transparency builds trust and shows them their opinions matter. After making changes, conduct follow-up surveys to evaluate the impact and further refine your VoC strategy.

Voice of the Customer Examples: DoorDash, Calvin Klein, and Netflix

Top brands always look for ways to improve the overall customer experience, and a big part of that involves gathering and acting on the Voice of the Customer feedback. That said, here’s how well-known brands like DoorDash, Calvin Klien, and Netflix are making the most of VoC to drive user engagement and business growth.

DoorDash enhancing the ordering experience

DoorDash introduced a simple in-app review system that lets customers rate restaurants and gives them the ability to write reviews within the app, eliminating the need to toggle between different apps when searching for restaurant reviews. Users can read feedback from others or share their own.

Another interesting feature is the “most liked” tag, highlighting top-rated dishes at restaurants. After each order, customers can rate their food with a thumbs up or down. The three items with the highest ratings are then displayed on the restaurant’s menu. This feature has been a hit, with over 2.5 million item ratings submitted weekly. The result? More engagement better recommendations for customers, and increased visibility and sales for restaurants.

Calvin Klein and data-driven feedback

Calvin Klein has mastered the art of using data to make decisions, especially when it comes to their digital channels. They use Mopinion’s feedback software to gather inputs that help them understand customer actions.

The brand has placed surveys throughout its website, with a feedback button on every page and targeted surveys triggered by specific actions, like checking out or completing a payment. It uses these surveys to pinpoint issues at critical junctions. For instance, a survey on the Payment page appears when certain conditions are met, letting them address payment issues ASAP. Calvin Klein then analyzes responses to figure out what’s working and what needs improvements.

Netflix simplifying customer ratings

Netflix has always been a trailblazer in using customer feedback to improve its platform, and one of its most notable changes came from simplifying its rating system.

Originally, Netflix used a 5-star rating system for users to rate movies and shows. However, they noticed that users were often confused by the stars, as this system is commonly used to rate products rather than personal experiences. To make things clearer, Netflix switched to a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down system. This small change had a big impact, boosting user engagement by 200%. Theirs is a good case study of how a simple feedback process can lead to better user interactions and responses.

VoC Best Practices, Problems, and Solutions

Let’s face it, running a successful VoC program isn’t always smooth sailing. One of the biggest problems is low response rates. After all, getting people to fill out surveys can be tough. If no one responds, it’s hard to gather meaningful insights. The solution? Sweeten the deal. Offer rewards, discounts, or even a thank-you note to encourage participation. Also, personalize your surveys (use their names?) to make customers feel heard on an individual level — believe us, it works.

Then there’s the problem of managing large feedback data. It can feel overwhelming, but AI and machine learning systems can automate data collection and analysis, making it easier to identify trends and get actionable recommendations.

However, the most frustrating issue may be when companies collect feedback but don’t act on it. It’s a huge letdown and your buyers feel ignored. If a customer mentions a recurring issue, always let them know that you’re working on a solution. Share updates or improvements you’ve made thanks to their feedback – it shows that you genuinely care about their opinions.

Voice of the Customer best practices

If you want to get the most out of your VoC program, it’s all about going beyond the basics. A common mistake is relying on just one or two feedback mechanisms, but that approach can only take you so far. To truly understand your customers, you need a multi-channel strategy. By gathering feedback from various sources — like surveys, social media, live chat, and support tickets — you can paint a fuller picture of what your customers need, their problems, and their behaviors.

It’s important to break down data silos within your organization, what with 54% of organizations stating that it’s their biggest challenge to properly utilizing data. Voice of the Customer data shouldn’t sit in one department; it must be centralized so that everyone — from marketing to customer service to product teams — has access to the same VoC insights. This ensures everyone knows what’s working, what’s not, and how to better serve customers. Involving multiple departments furthermore makes it easier to act on feedback, and turn data into actionable changes.

And please don’t forget to include your employees — especially those in customer service and sales. They talk to customers every day, so they have contextual knowledge about what’s helping or hurting your customer experience. Their input empowers you to spot gaps in your processes that make things harder for your customers.

When sharing VoC data, ensure it’s easy for decision-makers to digest. Using reporting software with clean, logical dashboards can make all the difference. Ultimately, a well-organized report not only lets you analyze data effectively but also makes it simpler to present findings to stakeholders and drive meaningful changes.

Increasing Customer Retention with VoC Data

A strong Voice of Customer (VoC) program isn’t just about gathering feedback — it’s about using that feedback to create experiences that keep your customers coming back for more. When you truly listen to what your customers want and act on their insights, you’re not just improving their customer journey; you’re building loyalty that outlasts the competition.

Customers who feel heard and valued are obviously more likely to choose you over others. Magic happens when they see their feedback shaping your decisions; it builds trust and turns them into brand advocates. So, be proactive and constantly refine your Voice of Customer strategy. This is the only way to increase customer satisfaction, lower acquisition costs, and grow your business.