Imagine you are launching the alpha version of your product, and you’re confident about its new features and design. However, after the launch, sales fell short of expectations. The customer feedback is sparse to negative about critical feature bugs. What’s worse, customers had mentioned these issues earlier, but the feedback slipped through the cracks between departments.
This is exactly where a strong Voice of the Customer (VoC) process becomes imperative.
By correctly utilizing the voice of the customer program, businesses can refine their products or services and create loyal customers for recurring business. Studies have shown that retaining existing customers is significantly more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. However, there is a structured way to create VoC to leverage its full suite of benefits.
In this guide, we’ll understand how to effectively implement VoC into your business strategy to serve your customers better.
What is the voice of the customer (VoC)?
VoC gives you the opportunity to understand how your customers feel about your product, service, or overall experience with your brand. That understanding is important to create irresistible products or services in the future.
Let’s not consider VoC just as a feedback collection mechanism. The process prompts you to listen to your customers carefully, spot patterns, and then act on those insights to improve. This feedback can come from many sources, such as:
- Customer surveys
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) responses
- Online reviews
- Call center transcripts
- Support emails
- Social media comments
- Behavioral analytics (like churn rates and feature usage)
When you bring it all together, it gives you a clearer picture of customer sentiment and expectations.
Why does this matter? Well, as per the research, companies with a formal voice of customer program achieve nearly 10 times the annual revenue growth the annual revenue growth than those without one. And it helps companies cut down customer retention costs by up to 25%.
Now, let’s take a quick look at its benefits to understand how a VoC program can drive meaningful changes across your organization.
Benefits of a voice of the customer program
When you start to take customer opinions seriously through VoC, you gain competitive advantages in so many ways. Here are some clear, practical benefits to look forward to:
1. Reduce customer churn before it happens
Imagine a customer silently switching to a competitor because they felt unheard. Surprisingly, 60%–80% of lost customers describe themselves as “satisfied” before leaving. VoC lets you detect silent dissatisfaction early through subtle cues in feedback. It gives you the opportunity to intervene with timely improvements or support.
2. Discover hidden growth opportunities
Besides highlighting silent customer dissatisfaction, VoC also presents a window into uncharted territory. Customers often suggest new use cases, add-on features, or unmet needs. For example, Slack discovered through customer feedback that its tool was being widely adopted in education and research teams, something it hadn’t targeted before. You can also leverage VoC to discover new marketing angles or product adoptions.
3. Create cross-functional alignment
Sometimes, not all teams are on the same page regarding any product development. Your marketing team may promote a feature that customers find confusing, but your product team may think it’s a hit. A centralized voice of customer programs solves this by sharing consistent customer feedback across teams. When every department is on the same page, it leads to better cross-functional team alignment.
4. Strengthen your brand reputation
With an omnichannel voice of customer program, you always make prompt decisions to solve customer problems. When customers see that their feedback matters, they trust your company. According to a report by Microsoft, 96% of customers feel that good customer service is important to feel loyal towards a brand.
To actually harness all these benefits repeatedly, you need to build a robust voice of customer strategy in the first place. Let’s discuss how to build your VoC strategy from the ground up.
Build your voice of the customer strategy
It’s not a quick process. Many businesses just rush into it without laying any groundwork. They jump into collecting feedback without doing any internal team alignment. That’s where things often go wrong. Let’s understand how to build a strong and lasting voice of customer strategy that turns feedback into real results.
Step 1: Start with strong leadership
A Voice of the customer program needs support from the top. If your leadership team doesn’t see customer feedback as a priority, it’s tough to get others on board.
Potential challenge:
Leaders may focus more on short-term goals and overlook the long-term impact of VoC.
How to avoid it:
Help your leaders see the voice of the customer program as a long-term growth catalyst. Connect VoC insights to tangible business metrics, like a drop in churn after working on NPS feedback. Once your leaders start to see VoC as a decision-making compass, it will gain the traction it needs across the organization.
Step 2: Define a clear vision
To begin with, build your VoC strategy around a single shared vision. Would you like it to improve a specific part of the customer journey or increase loyalty? Make this vision short, simple and easier to get for everyone, including your entry-level staff.
Potential challenge:
If your vision is too broad or vague, teams may struggle to know what to prioritize.
How to avoid it:
Define a measurable goal in plain language, like “reducing onboarding support tickets by 20% in the next six months.” Reinforce it across internal emails, leadership updates and team dashboards. When the vision is clear, employees will rally around the same in the VoC survey.
Step 3: Create a culture of collaboration
Acting on VoC insights requires a collaborative effort from all departments, from sales and support to product and marketing. Otherwise, insights will be trapped in silos and easy growth opportunities may slip through the cracks. On the other hand, when employees feel connected to customers, the whole organization benefits.
Potential challenge:
Expect some cross-team collaboration frictions as some departments may work in silos. This might lead to duplicated efforts or missed opportunities.
How to avoid it:
Hold regular cross-functional VoC sync meetings. Encourage teams to openly share customer findings and propose joint action plans. Make those insights available to everyone through common dashboards or collaboration tools.
Step 4: Listen actively and consistently
To gather customer experiences from different channels, you need a system that helps you collect feedback in a steady, structured way. This includes:
- Surveys (like CSAT, NPS, CES)
- Social media comments
- Support tickets
- Reviews and ratings
- Website interactions
- Direct interviews
Aim to collect feedback from as many channels as possible for trend analysis. Most importantly, do not forget to note customer preference changes. That will be your key to evolving over time.
Potential challenge:
Collecting too much feedback without knowing what to do with it can lead to analysis paralysis.
How to avoid it:
Use customer feedback management tools that help you organize, tag, and prioritize feedback automatically. These VoC tools can consolidate input from multiple sources into a centralized dashboard, making it easier for your team to identify trends and take action without getting overwhelmed.
Roadmap & Idea Portal for Jira Service Management is one such tool.
Step 5: Turn insights into action
Collecting feedback is only half the job. What really counts is what you do with it.
Once you start spotting patterns or recurring pain points, take clear action. Align different teams on the steps they need to take to fix issues or improve experiences. Track the outcomes and keep everyone updated. This helps build trust and keeps your efforts moving forward.
You don’t need to solve everything overnight. Even small changes, when done right, can have a big impact.
Potential challenge:
Teams may gather great insights but fail to act due to a lack of ownership or unclear next steps.
How to avoid it:
Define clear workflows for handling different types of feedback: feature requests, bugs, or user pain points. Assign ownership, set up internal SLAs, and ensure feedback gets routed to the right team automatically. Consider using automation within your project management or ticketing systems to streamline this process.
Step 6: Be patient and stay committed
Creating a customer-focused culture isn’t something you check off a to-do list. It takes time. You’ll have to adjust, test, fail, try again and keep improving.
The most successful companies didn’t get it right overnight. They stayed committed to listening and learning. They kept refining their VoC programs year after year. That’s how they built customer loyalty that lasts.
So, be ready for the long game. With the right mindset and the right steps, you’ll start seeing meaningful results, and your customers will notice too.
Potential challenge:
Impatience or shifting priorities can lead to giving up too soon.
How to avoid it:
Set realistic timelines and celebrate small wins. Use customer stories and internal feedback to maintain momentum and remind everyone why it matters.
Conclusion
If you want to build better products, create loyal customers and grow your business, creating a robust VoC program is the way to go. An effective VoC survey helps you reduce churn rate, discover hidden market opportunities, improve cross-team alignment and drive smarter growth strategies for your business. However, to build an effective voice of the customer strategy, you need to follow certain steps. Just start actively listening to customer feedback, turn them into actionable insights, but stay committed to the process. If you face a challenge automating this whole process, leverage ideal VoC tools. Such tools will help you collaborate with customers, centralize their feedback and come up with a compelling product roadmap with ease.
FAQs
1. What is the voice of the customer survey?
A VoC survey describes your customer’s experience with your product and their expectations of it. So, you get to know their needs, expectations, preferences and experiences to enhance your product or service better.
2. What is the voice of the customer example?
Let’s say you purchased a product from an e-commerce store. After completion of the purchase, you receive an email asking you to rate your overall satisfaction with the checkout experience on a scale of 1-10. That’s a perfect example of how the voice of the customer processes work to collect customer feedback to stay competitive in the market.
3. Why is Voice of the Customer important?
Voice of the Customer helps you see your business from your customer’s point of view. It shows you what matters most to them, so you can make smarter decisions, fix problems early and build better relationships that keep them coming back.
4. What are the four steps of VoC?
The four main steps of a voice of the customer process are to collect feedback, analyse the insights, take action and follow up with customers. This process helps you turn customer feedback into real improvements in your product, service and overall experience.
5. How do you present the Voice of the Customer (VoC) data?
You can present the voice of the customer data using simple charts, dashboards or reports that highlight key trends, common issues and customer suggestions. Keep it easy to understand so your team can quickly act on what your customers are telling you.
