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Voice of the Customer Examples & Business Use Cases

This article showcases some of the Voice of the Customer (VoC) use cases in the real world and how VoC has helped companies grow.

If you’re still not sure how useful a VoC approach is, and how it might apply in practice, read on to discover some real-world examples. We’ll demonstrate that, rather than being an academic abstraction, Voice of the Customer tools provide a practical and thorough approach to data gathering.

In fact, as these examples will show, Voice of the Customer analysis may just prove of the most effective tool for insight into what your customers want, sometimes even before they do. And as a recent Forbes article pointed out, customer sentiment isn’t static, it changes over time, so engaging in this research on a recurring program basis is vital. First let’s make sure we’re on the same page by clarifying what the VoC process actually is.

What are the Top Voice of Customer Examples?

Here are the practical voice of the customer case studies:

1. VoC in Primary Healthcare

More than almost any other industry, healthcare provokes strong emotional reactions – hope, fear, anxiety, confusion, worry, relief, and delight. It makes sense, therefore, that this case study focuses on sentiment analysis, a method of divining emotion from the utterances of customers across different media.

Nahdi Medical is a major healthcare provider in Saudi Arabia with over 145 locations. It’s one of the region’s fastest-growing healthcare companies, offering radiology, oncology, cardiology, and pediatrics.

Nahdi invited feedback from both employees and customers and wanted to run VoC and VoE (Voice of the Employee) analysis on their survey documents and online forums.

Repustate first had to create a bespoke Arabic Sentiment Analysis AI, capturing the nuances, dialects, and linguistic structure of Arabic. This allowed the analysis to be applied to the source language, rather than to a secondary translation.

A two-stage process was adopted for text analytics. First a sampling of surveys was analyzed with NER (named entity recognition) and sentiment analysis. Comments which emerged most frequently were manually clustered into labelled aspects including pricing, quality, convenience, and appearance.

AI and machine learning took over at the secondary stage, analyzing the rest of the data and using the clustered samples as models for automated filtering. The result was a highly accurate and detailed picture of Nahdi’s performance across a range of business concerns, and all achieved directly from Arabic sources.

2. VoC in Non-Profit Service Provision

This case study is about Peña Global, a research company who apply scientific and statistical analysis to consumer surveys, was working with the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), who were designing a new diet plan aimed at elders. They were looking for a partner company to provide sentiment analysis on the open questions often posed in voice of customer surveys .

Open questions can be a problem for automation because the answers cannot easily be quantified and don’t follow a predictable format. Peña Global wanted to ask older people for the pros and cons they’d experienced in existing diet plans, so that the AARP’s plan could avoid common pitfalls. This is where Peña Global needed Repustate’s assistance.

Repustate took consumer responses from surveys and Twitter replies and ran sentiment analysis on them to categorize them into key aspects. These included money, convenience, challenges, recipes, technology, results, and motivation.

Opportunities in technology proved a key takeaway with users responding well to fitness trackers, interactive apps and games that improve motivation. They disliked being sold expensive plans they were unable to cancel at short notice.

An custom sentiment visualization dashboard was created, drawing together the statistical results, sentiment analysis and key learnings. Peña Global and AARP received a more holistic, detailed, and practical analysis that they would otherwise have obtained.

3. VoC in Healthcare Data

Health-Links is a specialized consultancy in healthcare data analytics, based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (KSA). This voice of customer case study in about Health-Links strategical partnership with the KSA’s Ministry of Health to improve overall healthcare within the Gulf Region.

There is a comprehensive and specific Saudi Complaints Taxonomy for healthcare queries, and accuracy is paramount in reporting any problems or concerns. Health-Links were looking for an accurate Natural Language Processing (NLP) solution to run sentiment analysis on various Arabic data sources. Unable to find a local automated solution, Health-Links were experiencing rising costs and delays working manually.

Repustate had already developed Arabic text analytics software and were able to adapt these to take the relevant taxonomy into account. Their sentiment analysis solution was trained on a sample data set and thematic groupings formed around the Ministry’s standard classifications to find Patient Voice .

This holistic approach also managed to unearth new themes and discoveries, amongst the anticipated ones, leading the client to remark that “this definitely will help in providing Healthcare Leaders with insights to what patients are looking for.”

4. VoC in Banking

If there’s one industry that has seen rapid change and disruption in recent decades, it’s banking and personal finance. With digital banks opening up and branches becoming ever more automated, it’s a highly competitive space with a lot of potential for customers to respond emotionally or, in the worst-case scenario, vote with their feet.

Keeping churn rate low is one of the biggest challenges in the sector with banks offering a range of offers and bonuses to retain customers or steal them from competitors. Repustate’s client wanted to get a step ahead of the competition by making this less of a guessing game and finding out what their customers actually wanted.

The Johannesburg bank in question wanted to perform comprehensive sentiment analysis on customer feedback, across both official channels and social media platforms. Their efforts included a hashtag-based campaign to ask customers what they loved and hated about their bank, which generated over two million pieces of text.

Faced with such a volume of data, Repustate had to work methodically. First, we collaborated with the client to create seven custom categories into which to sort comments. For instance, categories were created for fees and charges, branch banking and mobile banking comments.

Then NER was employed to break comments up into constituent parts and allocate a sentiment score (for positive, negative, or neutral emotional response). This allowed the client to identify clear themes within the data as well as provide a statistical breakdown of which areas needed the most intense focus.

From a huge volume of data came a very targeted set of insights, demonstrating the power of Voice of the Customer analysis in action.

5. VoC in the Automotive Sector

In car manufacture, product recalls are not uncommon. However, when there are too many, in too short a space of time, the brand reputation may suffer. This VoC case study is abot a major car manufacturer, that began to worry that its position within a competitive industry might be slipping due to negative perception.

The automotive company wanted to analyze the response to their latest recall on social media, product review, news, and commentary sites, and among ordinary consumers and car aficionados who acted as “tastemakers”.

Repustate were brought in, and fifty blogs and social media sites were identified as data sources. Since this was an internationally recognized brand, text analysis had to be run in a range of languages including English, Arabic, German, and Spanish.

The client and its PR agency were keen to discover if there were differing perceptions across different regions. Repustate ran its multilingual textual analysis several times while the PR agency rolled out campaigns at periodic intervals to reassure the public that steps were being undertaken to address the issues thrown up in their comments.

The results were graphed over time, and for each of the four languages. Remarkably, the different markets displayed different responses to the PR campaigns, with Germans proving most resistant and the English most receptive. The analysis also revealed that the Arabic market wasn’t adversely affected by the product recalls even before the PR campaigns ran.

Clear signals were extracted from the data which helped the client shape its PR strategies across different markets in the coming years.

What is the Voice of the Customer Process?

Before we go into the examples of VoC lets take a quick look into Voice of the Customer (VoC) process is a 4-step task that can be detailed as:

1. Identification of VoC data sources

Data sources can be direct, indirect, and inferred. Direct sources include surveys, call center logs and customer emails. Indirect data sources include social media videos and comments, review blogs and platforms, and news articles and videos. Inferred data sources include website data such as time on the website, time spent on a particular web page, conversion rate, purchase history, etc. Click here to learn more about Voice of Customer data collection .

2. Capturing the VoC data

Once the data source has been identified, it needs to be captured for analysis. We need a video content analysis (VCA) tool for this process that will help us examine all the available data, no matter its format - text, image, or video. This step itself takes place in 4 stages - Audio transcription; Caption overlay; Image recognition; and Text extraction.

3. Sentiment analysis

A machine learning engine processes all the data from the above step through a text analytics API and extracts all the entities and aspects. It then runs them through a sentiment analysis process. In this stage, positive, negative, and neutral sentiments are assigned for the entities and the sentiment scores are arrived at.

4. Data visualization

When all the VoC data has been processed for emotion mining, the insights are presented on a customer dashboard in the form of simple charts and graphs. This helps in focussing on actionable strategies that can be developed based on the findings.

Learn more about the Voice of Customer process.

VoC analysis is critical across a range of use cases, as these examples demonstrate. Whether the client needs a snapshot of how customers feel right now, or wants to track changing sentiment over time, VoC techniques are perfect for digging deep into the data.

Repustate are leaders in the field of Voice of the Customer analytics, working across a wide range of languages and the full spectrum of media. We use our bespoke sentiment analysis API and text analytics API to derive the insight that each client requires. Repustate also understands the need to demonstrate data visually. To this end, we use a variety of dashboards and reporting formats to present the themes and insights our processes generate.

We work much faster than many of our competitors and are always happy to collaborate with clients on new use cases, new methods of working and new languages. Above all, our team relish new challenges.

Join leading companies using Repustate

The implementation was seamless thanks to their developer friendly API and great documentation. Whenever our team had questions, Repustate provided fast, responsive support to ensure our questions and concerns were never left hanging.

We tried many vendors whose speed and accuracy were not as good as Repustate's. Arabic text data is not easy to mine for insight, but with Repustate we have found a technology partner who is a true expert in the field.

We are very satisfied with the accuracy of Repustate's Arabic sentiment analysis, as well as their and support which helped us to successfully deliver the requirements of our clients in the government and private sector.

We were blown away by the fact that they were able to put together a demo using our own YouTube channels on just a couple of days notice. What really stood out was the built-in semantic search capability.

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How to Use Voice of the Customer: 6 Examples from Successful Businesses

Voice of the customer examples are necessary for companies that are struggling to implement it in their marketing assets. 

This challenge is common. It can be tough for businesses to adopt the right tone and infuse it into marketing assets authentically to effectively reach their customers. 

It's so important, though — If you aren't speaking to your customers in a way that they'll understand, how will your message resonate?

Businesses need to review how other companies skillfully master the voice of the customer (Voc) flawlessly before beginning to formulate and implement their own. 

By seeing how their tone works with customers, businesses can extract insights and use them to guide their own voice across all channels and departments.

In this article, we'll highlight six "voice of the customer" examples that feature businesses like yours who have captured their customer's tone and perspective, and showcase it well.

Before we begin, though, let's take a look at how to use the voice of the customer in your messaging effectively.

How to Effectively Use Voice of the Customer

When it comes to the voice of the customer strategy, it's all or nothing.

Businesses need to integrate the voice of the customer into every aspect of their company. The voice needs to be consistent across all channels, assets and departments to ensure it is presented in an authentic, comprehensive way.

86% of customers rank authenticity as a determining factor in their purchasing decisions.

Most people think the voice of the customer is something that only your marketing or social media teams need to worry about. This is a common misconception that will hurt the development of your brand's voice.

Instead, the voice of the customer is something that everyone at your company needs to buy into. As employees talk about and promote your products, they need to represent your company and keep the voice of the customer in mind.

This can pay off in dividends. Companies with a consistent brand across all aspects of their business realized a 33% increase in revenue.

Integrating the Voice of the Customer 

One major failing that happens is that companies will spend weeks and months formulating their voice of the customer, only to have it be haphazardly implemented.

It isn't enough to just craft the perfect voice of the customer. You need to deploy it in all aspects of your business. This should include:

• Marketing/Sales
• Product Development
• Customer Experience

For marketing purposes, the company's voice of the customer should come alive on all marketing materials. These include billboards, commercials, social media content, reports, podcasts and more.

Within the product development teams, voice of the customer should be used when mapping out the product roadmap, naming features and evaluating product performance.

Customer relation teams should answer external customer questions using a similar voice. This will help diffuse situations with irate customers and relay information to existing customers in a way that they will understand.

Knowledge, timeliness and the voice of the customer all contribute to an optimal customer experience.

In addition, customer service teams can help capture VOC data and gauge customer satisfaction by gathering structured feedback about the overall experience. 

They can dive into pain points, customer perception, text analytics and other forms of direct feedback sourced from survey responses. 

This information can evolve the company's VoC effort and align the voice of the customer with customer data.

By implementing your voice of the customer throughout all business units, it will be presented in a more natural, meaningful way.

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6 voice of the customer examples.

Successful companies that have already mastered their voice of the customer are using it in video content such as demos, testimonials and brand story promos. 

In these examples, we'll highlight what has worked for them and how you can incorporate those same strategies into the development of your own voice.

Voice of the Customer Example #1: Upserve

Upserve (formerly called Swipely) assembled a video testimonial compilation of their current customers to share the value they got out of the product.

Miles Gray of Smith Public Trust said the product "helps us do what we do best, which is running a restaurant."

Upserve leads with a version of that statement on their website as their broad positioning statement and website headline. 

It markets their product as "everything you need to grow your restaurant.""

( Image Source )

Conveying your customer's ultimate end goal as a part of your value proposition will help align your messaging with customer needs and wants.

One way to discover this information is to hear it directly from your customers. It's even better if they agree to share their positive experiences with your product in a video testimonial.

With proper VoC data, a marketer can extract external customer feedback from unstructured data. This makes it easier to source a customer insight and evaluate the customer voice.

Collecting customer feedback is a part of any voice of the customer program. Asking your customers to share their feedback in the form of a testimonial brings the message to life.

Customer-rich insights from feedback and testimonials can be integrated into your website, email outreach, social media and content creation.

Key Takeaway: Understand your target customers' end goal and align it with your business' mission. This will be the north star for developing your voice of the customer.  

Voice of the Customer Example #2: ZeroNorth

As mentioned above, your voice of the customer shouldn't just be shared verbally. It's something that you live actively.

ZeroNorth's mission and culture video doesn't waste an opportunity to discuss one of the software's biggest selling points for clients: safety.

The company's founders both highlighted safety as they introduced ZeroNorth and the value that it provided to customers. 

John Worral, CEO of ZeroNorth, mentioned that the company's vision is to help businesses build "trusted software."" The concept of trust is reinforced by three other employees throughout the duration of the video.

Since ZeroNorth's customers will be interested in their solution as a safe, respected software to enhance their security, it makes sense that the company culture is so focused on trust. 

Their customers want a partner they can trust, and ZeroNorth reinforces that ideal as a part of their culture. This is one example of how you can bring the voice of the customer to life.

Customer expectations need to be taken into account when you conduct your VoC research. 

A customer survey or customer interview might be necessary to find out more about what your customers are seeking.

Businesses should focus their value statement around how their product fulfills a customer's high-level need. Then they can reinforce these ideals in their messaging. 

Since there is so much clutter, businesses need to focus on core ideals and tenants of their product that satisfy their customers' major concerns.

Key takeaway: Try to figure out one or two words that articulate what your customers are looking to get out of your product and add them to your messaging. 

Voice of the Customer Example #3: Content Allies

Content Allies invited one of their customers to film a video testimonial for them. 

Not only is this testimonial prominently featured on their homepage, but the way the customer describes the challenges she faced prior to discovering the company made it into their homepage messaging as well.

Loretta Soffe, a Content Allies customer, said she would "still be struggling to get her content out of production." She has been wanting to share her expertise through content "for years."

Content Allies focuses on the time-saving benefit of their service. On their homepage, they position content as "the one thing you never have time for" and highlight it as something that "always drops to the bottom of your to-do list."

It's important for companies to understand the problem they are solving for customers. 

This can make your voice of the customer more empathetic and relatable. It helps customers connect to the business if they understand where they are coming from.

Key Takeaway: Bring your target customers' pain points to life through your messaging. Empathize with them and show how your product can deliver the solution.

Voice of the Customer Example #4: Bitdam

Voice of the customer should be relayed through product videos too.

Bitdam's product video provides interested customers with an overview and brief demo of their product. 

Their focus, though, is on how Bitdam can easily integrate with a countless number of software that their customers are already using. This is a reinforced, recurring theme in the video and their company messaging.

The video highlights that Bitdam is available in the Azure marketplace for Microsoft Teams users. In addition, the video highlights all the integrations the customers can add in "just a few clicks."

This helps the customer understand how your product can fit into their existing tech stack, making it easier for them to implement it in their systems.

Key Takeaway: Explain how your product will fit into your customers' world. Once they begin to visualize how it will work with their tech stack, they will be one step closer to purchasing.

Voice of the Customer Example #5: Explainify

Customers won't purchase if they're left in the dark. 

You need to make it apparent that you're forming a partnership and will be there to help their business.

Explainify realized this and brought it to life through a video testimonial and messaging on their website. In the video testimonial, their client Dana Opperman highlights the specific advantages of using Explainify. 

She mentions that trust and partnership was a deciding factor on why her company selected Explainify. 

She thought she could trust Explainify to tell her company's story, so she signed on as a client. 

Explainify's subhead reinforces the idea of trust by touting that their customers "always get the VIP program."" 

In addition, Explainify showcases an extensive portfolio of B2B and B2C clients that Dana was intrigued by. They also offer an entire FAQ page on their website to outline the process and what to expect.

Explainify simplified their messaging, knowing that their customers were seeking a simple way to articulate their own business into an easy-to-digest video.

Key Takeaway: Don't just tout past work. Show customers your process, so they feel comfortable working together with you.

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Voice of the customer example #6: darwin apps.

Dream big and let your vision come alive. When you implement your voice of the customer, make sure to capture their excitement and plans for the future in your messaging.

Billy Fink, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VTS, loved working with Darwin Apps due to their ability to pass them anything to build and have it come into fruition. 

He called them a "true long-term partner that is an extension of our team."

Darwin Apps' web copy is aligned with how they view their partnership with customers. 

Balancing the responsibilities between ideation and execution, Darwin Apps' website header says, "You concept the incredible. We build the impossible."

Darwin Apps is challenging customers to envision their teams working at their very best. This aspirational approach to their messaging reinforces the value Darwin Apps provides. 

Simply put: they can make their clients dreams come true.

Key Takeaway: Elevate your customers' questions by pushing them towards where they've always dreamt of going. Blend practicality and visionary messaging together to satisfy immediate client needs, while forming a relationship with them for the long-term.

Your voice of the customer needs to be interwoven through all aspects of your company. If it's done right, your messaging will be effective for engaging new customers.

There are many strategies you can deploy as you implement your voice of the customer into your marketing, product and customer experience.

Focus on your customers' end goal and distill down the ideals or values your customers are seeking.

 Bring your customers' pain points to life and showcase your product as a solution. Depict how your product will fit into their world. 

Be transparent, practical, yet aspirational to fulfill customer wants and inspire customer desires. Outline your process to gain trust.

By doing all of these tactics, your message will resonate with your prospects and turn them into customers at an accelerated rate.

Bring your voice of the customer to life through high-quality company videos by reaching out to Testimonial Hero today.

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12 Voice of the Customer Methodologies To Generate a Gold Mine of Customer Feedback

Published: March 08, 2022

If you want to improve your bottom line and get more repeat business, then you have to listen to your customers. You need to empathize with their concerns and hear the Voice of the Customer (VoC).

By creating a strong Voice of the Customer (also called Voice of Customer) program, you can find out:

• Why your customers need you
• What you can do to help your customers
• What your customers are looking for
• What their interests and behavioral patterns are

First, let’s go over the basics. What is Voice of the Customer?

What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a research method that's used to collect customer feedback. A VoC program can help you capture how your customers feel about your business, product, or service, giving you insights that can help you create a stronger customer experience.

Do you know the difference between successful and unsuccessful businesses? Successful companies pay close attention to what their customers are saying. They know that business metrics like revenue and churn tell only a part of the story.

In order to understand why customers make certain decisions, they know it's critical to understand the customer's perspective.

That’s where Voice of the Customer comes in. Businesses study VoC to visualize the gap between customer expectations and their actual experiences. Customer-perceived value is correlated to higher retention and more sales because customer-perceived value looks at how businesses are advertising their products or services.

Implementing Voice of Customer within your business functions will strengthen your customer success , operations, and product development teams. These groups use this research to identify and improve all stages of the customer's journey by working together to enhance their products and services.

Applying a Voice of the Customer program will help companies develop a closer bond with their customers, and improve their internal collaboration as well.

Most importantly, VoC helps businesses increase customer retention and create an army of customer advocates .

To create a VoC strategy, you’ll need:

• An objective and overarching question, e.g., Why did customer retention rates drop for a particular product in the last quarter? Or How do customers feel about the recent changes to a specific offering?
• A tool to collect VoC data, such as a dedicated customer feedback software or a survey provider
• VoC feedback and data
• A team to analyze the feedback and identify patterns

How Voice of the Customer Impacts Your Business

According to research by Qualtrics, offering a strong customer experience is all but guaranteed to improve your sales. 94% of consumers

report that they are likely to purchase more from a company with “very good” remarks or feedback from the customers.

However, without knowing how your customers actually feel, you can’t offer a strong customer service experience.

By capturing VoC, you can connect and engage with customers at every touchpoint in the customer journey and programmatically improve their experience with your company. This technique helps you:

• Spot early warning and potential brand crisis
• Evaluate new concepts, ideas, and solutions
• Customize your products, services, add-ons, and features to meet the needs and wants of your customers
• Increase customer retention
• Serve your customers the solutions they need

Voice of the Customer Methodology

The Voice of the Customer methodology is the way businesses collect customer feedback about their products, brand, and service. Interviewing customers, sending feedback surveys, hosting focus groups, and reaching out via social media are all part of a Voice of Customer methodology.

Reaching out to your customer is the bulk of an effective VoC strategy. A successful methodology will provide you with all the insights you need to understand customer preferences, problems, and complaints.

Before choosing a method or technique, you should first outline a question and an objective for your program. If you start gathering data without an objective in mind, you won’t know how to use the insight to improve your business.

The question can be related to previous metrics, trends, and new customer behaviors. Here are a few examples of what that can look like:

• Only X% of customers made a repeat purchase in Q2 of last year, a drop from a previous year. What changed? How can we improve?
• How many of our customers feel loyal to our brand? What can we do better?

Note: These are only meant for you and your stakeholders. Here are examples of a few questions you can use in a VoC survey or study.

Now, it’s time to establish an objective: Either gauging current customer service performance or improving a specific business function or product.

• Gauging current performance: For many businesses, it’s worth launching a Voice of Customer program to set a baseline to compare future results to. When you make this your objective, you usually ask the same questions during each iteration.
• Improving a business function or product: Companies use VoC strategies to understand their customers’ needs and to improve their products or services.

After identifying a question and objective, you might naturally choose a VoC technique to capture the data.

For example, if you’d like to know how customers feel about your service team, you’d choose to survey previous contacts in your CRM who’ve contacted your service department.

Don’t know how exactly you’d reach out? Here are some techniques and methodologies you can use for your Voice of the Customer analytics program.

VoC Techniques

• Customer Interviews
• Online Customer Surveys
• Social Media
• Website Behavior
• Recorded Call Data
• Online Customer Reviews
• In-Person Surveys
• Net Promoter Score®
• Focus Groups
• Dedicated Feedback Form

It’s a well-known fact that it costs organizations five times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. The value of retaining existing customers over acquiring a new one can’t be overstated.

Understanding your customers and building a solid customer relationship is a methodical, insightful process. There are certain techniques that you can follow to get reliable answers. Companies often use a mixture of different techniques to ensure they're getting the most from their research.

Let’s take a look at some of the Voice of the Customer methods that you can use to collect data.

1. Customer Interviews

Customer interviews are one of the traditional techniques to collect VoC data. It is commonly used to understand a particular customer’s point-of-view regarding product or service issues, attributes, and performance measures.

You can choose to perform this for either a particular customer or for a group of customers with some common attributes. This is usually executed in person, on the phone, or through email.

While the cost of in-person interviews is the highest among all forms of interviews, it is still considered to be the most useful form for building trusting customer relationships. This is because customers perceive this type of interaction as more personal.

2. Online Customer Surveys

Another great way to capture VoC is by conducting online customer surveys. These surveys help you in understanding your customers and addressing the issues they face.

However, if you don't ask the right questions with the help of the right platform, you may never get reliable answers. That's why you need to put in a lot of thought while designing your surveys. With platforms like VWO or SurveyMonkey , you can choose from the different types of surveys available, such as multiple-choice surveys, drop-down surveys, and open-ended surveys.

HubSpot’s customer feedback software is an excellent tool for setting up online surveys. With this tool, your respondents are automatically connected to a specific contact in your CRM, which requires less manual work from your service or VoC team.

3. Live Chat

According to a study by ServiceBell , more than 60% of consumers are more likely to return to companies that utilize live chat.

Having a live chat option on your website is an incredible method for collecting real-time customer feedback. It also reduces the possibility of your customers feeling unsatisfied with your customer service efforts.

The use of live chat is not limited to listening to customer complaints and resolving them. It's also a good tool to capture Voice of the Customer data. For this, you can schedule a follow-up survey of all the customers connecting with you through a chat.

Not sure how to start? You can use HubSpot Live Chat to get live chat up and running on your website.

4. Social Media

Social media is a potent ingredient of the feedback cocktail, as it provides you the opportunity to have two-way communication with your customers.

On any of the most commonly-used social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, you can tap into relevant ongoing conversations, connect with those customers by actively participating, or quietly listen (while taking notes).

The core strength of social media is that it allows you to have a more direct and real-time conversation with the people using your products or services.

While this is a good way to gather feedback, look for trends, and create stories, it may be more challenging to turn this into hard data. But the upside to this is that you're hearing unfiltered feedback directly from customers.

5. Website Behavior

Your website is a great place for you to capture Voice of Customer data. Besides chat and online surveys, another way to collect this data is by analyzing your customer behavior on the website. You can do it by leveraging tools like heat maps.

You can opt for a platform like CrazyEgg , which will allow you to track behavior patterns on your website and A/B test potential changes.

6. Recorded Call Data

If you're planning to leverage historical data, recorded calls might come in handy. Recorded calls with your customers can give you a broad overview of how they perceive your brand, what sort of objections they have, and what else they expect from the company.

Though this technique requires an upfront time investment, it is always advisable to do this regularly. It will also help you train your customer support team with better objection handling, thereby enhancing your customer service.

7. Online Customer Reviews

Your online reputation isn't just the result of what you generate at your end — it includes all instances in which your business appears online, including online reviews. 90% of consumers read a review before making a retail purchase, and 72% read multiple reviews.

While online reviews may feel intimidating, they’re a goldmine of Voice of the Customer data. On online review sites like G2 Crowd , Finances Online , TrustRadius, TrustPilot, and Capterra, you can begin collecting VoC data without needing to reach out to individual customers first.

It's also essential to understand the impact these sites have on your business and how you can use reviews to enhance your online reputation. 86% of visitors hesitate to purchase from a business that has online negative reviews. With such statistics, it becomes crucial to not just ensure positive reviews, but also handle negative reviews.

8. In-Person Surveys

Opting for an in-person survey is yet another method to capture the Voice of the Customer. Although this may not be a popular method for large business setups, it's leveraged by lots of medium-sized businesses when conducting customer research — and it can be done using a tool as simple as Google Docs.

9. Net Promoter Score®

Net Promoter Score (NPS®) is a management tool that is used to measure the loyalty of a company's customers. Fred Reichfield, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems created and developed this customer loyalty metric.

NPS gives you quick and reliable feedback from customers. The way the system works is easy. Customers need to answer this simple question on a scale of 0–10:

"How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or a colleague?"

HubSpot’s customer feedback software is an easy way to get NPS scores, allowing you to keep a pulse on customer sentiment and loyalty.

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10. Focus Groups

In a focus group, eight to twelve customers meet in a room and are asked to share their perceptions, beliefs, and opinions about your product or service. The group participants are free to openly talk with one another.

This data collection method is used to gain insights into customers' prioritization of needs, or to test concepts and get feedback. Focus groups are sometimes used in addition to interviews and surveys as the last step to further investigate and understand the Voice of the Customer for each of the company's touchpoints.

This method can be as informal or as formal as you want it to be. You can send highly personalized emails to particular customers or create a template that can be used for the entire target. You also have the option to either ask for feedback as a response to your email (which might be unstructured and time-consuming) or add a link in the email body to one of your surveys.

12. Dedicated Feedback Form

The last option is to have a dedicated feedback form on your website — and this is more of a mandate than an option. No matter which other methods you plan to choose to capture VoC, you cannot skip having an online feedback form.

Allow your existing customers and website visitors to share their feedback at any point in time. Don't make them wait until the moment you feel that there is a need to capture their voice.

The majority of these techniques will help your team derive qualitative information from your customers. That means you'll need to ask thought-provoking questions that motivate participants to provide insightful answers.

However, keep in mind that it's not the customer's responsibility to provide you with any feedback, let alone productive feedback.

If you're not getting the results you're hoping for from your VoC techniques, then you may need to reassess the questions that you're asking your customers.

Here are some of the best VoC questions to ask that get effective survey results:

Voice of the Customer Questions

• What characteristics do you look for in a company/product?
• What matters most to you when selecting a company for [product or service]?
• What comes to mind when you think about [company/product]?
• How can [company name] improve your customer experience?
• Name a competitor you would prefer over our product or service and explain why you would choose them.
• Would you recommend [company/product] and why?
• Which company have you purchased the most [product] from in the past 12 months?

Let’s go over each of these.

1. What characteristics do you look for in a company/product?

This question is a great starting point for a survey or questionnaire.

It removes your company from the conversation and directs the attention to the customer's interests. By asking this type of question first, you give the impression that your interests are more customer-driven.

Pay attention to the vocabulary that your customers use when responding to this question. Even if the responses are similar, the vocabulary that's used can indicate different audience characteristics.

For example, if you receive responses that use slang or shorthand, then you can deduce that this feedback is coming from a younger, more casual audience. This will help your team when making big operational decisions like changing a product or restructuring your pricing.

Should you ask this question as multiple choice or open-ended?

Open-ended. That way, you can get to know your audience with much more detail and depth.

2. What matters most to you when selecting a company for [product or service]?

This question is an excellent way to find out what your customers care about the most. Whereas the previous question asks about general characteristics, this question helps your team learn what influences the final purchasing decision.

Is it quality? Price? Availability? Sustainable production? Customer service? Free shipping? Or express shipping regardless of the price?

This question can help you launch an audit of your services and products to ensure you’re meeting customer expectations. Even more importantly, it can help you deduce whether your current business practices are getting in the way of the customer experience.

Most customers won’t reach out and tell you what they prefer when choosing a brand, and some questions skirt around the topic. This question will get straight to the point and give you a clear, actionable directive.

Multiple choice. Because most of us make purchasing decisions on common factors such as convenience and price, there’s no need to leave it open-ended. Consider giving customers the ability to choose up to three answers (preferably in order of preference).

3. What comes to mind when you think about [company name/product]?

This question provides your team an immediate customer reaction about your company or product.

This essentially serves as an approval rating that lets you know how customers feel about your business at the moment. You can monitor responses to see how they change over time to determine whether your company is actually addressing the feedback.

One area where this is exceptionally helpful is during crisis management. If you're not sure whether a crisis is resolved or not, you can use this survey question to get a general feel for how your business continuity plan is affecting your customers.

If you're still seeing negative comments toward your company, then you know that you need to continue working to resolve the crisis.

Open-ended. This is a highly subjective question and every customer will answer differently.

4. How can [company name] improve your customer experience?

Admittedly, this question probably won't yield many groundbreaking ideas. No matter how loyal your customers are, they might not understand how your business operates, nor might they fathom how hard it is to implement even small changes to the customer experience.

Making changes takes time and costs money — two assets that most businesses will be hesitant to put at risk. So, why do we see this question included in nearly every survey we take?

The answer is customer loyalty . Successful companies recognize that their most valuable customers spend more on each purchase than first-time buyers.

So, when they're sorting through responses to this question, they use their CRM to pinpoint feedback that's left by their most valuable customers. This way, companies are assured that these customers are included in every business decision.

Either/or. A multiple-choice question can have common answers such as “Offer free shipping,” “Offer chat on the website,” or more, depending on what you feel your brand needs to improve. This can help you get clear answers on what you should prioritize without having to sift through paragraphs of writing.

On the other hand, the customer experience varies from customer to customer, and an individual’s bad experience may be a catalyst for a major and important change in your organization.

To strike a balance between the two, you can add a text box where customers can elaborate.

5. Name a competitor you would prefer over our product or service and explain why you would choose them.

This question gives you two pieces of information. First, it tells you who your direct competitors are, or at least who your customers believe your competitors are.

This difference is important because your customers may be using a competitor that you're currently unaware of. For example, customers may be supplementing your product or service by using a competitor who's in a completely different marketplace.

The next piece of information that this question provides is why customers would switch to a competitor. It could be because of price, functionality, style, etc. Whatever the reason is, knowing why customers may prefer a competitor can help you address any weaknesses that exist in your products or services.

Open-ended. That way, you can find out who your customers think you’re competing with, thereby offering greater insight into where your product lacks.

6. Would you recommend [company/product] and why?

One way to determine customer satisfaction is to see if customers would recommend your company to others.

Customers trust other customers and won't advocate for your product or service if they don't like it. That's because if they recommend a bad product or company, they risk ruining a personal or professional relationship in their own lives. If customers are hesitant to recommend your company, you may need to assess how your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts are affecting the customer's experience.

A good addition to this question is to ask to whom they would recommend your product or service. This not only gives you an idea for potential lead opportunities, but also helps you gauge how invested customers are in your company.

For example, if a customer said they would recommend a product to their boss or potential lead of their own, you know that your product is significantly meaningful to that customer. If they would only recommend it to a peer or acquaintance, then there may be an opportunity to enhance the customer experience for these users.

Both. For the recommendation part, you can create a multiple-choice section with simple answers like “Yes” or “No.” Afterward, include the option to elaborate with a text box.

7. Which company have you purchased the most [product you offer] from in the past 12 months?

This is a great question to find out who your strongest competitors are.

It’s similar to number five in that it also mentions your competitors, but this question tells you who your customers have done business with, not who they would do business with. Both are important pieces of data but offer slightly different insights.

After gathering answers for this question, you’ll know who is stealing your business, which can help you bolster your competitive analysis efforts. If you get repeat answers, you can take a closer and much more thorough look at that particular competitor to see what they’re doing that you’re not.

Multiple-choice. This makes it easy for customers to choose from your competitors. Don’t forget to include giants such as Amazon or Walmart if you offer a product that can be purchased from those retailers. Last, include a write-in option.

These questions will help you gauge how customers feel about your brand, product, or service, and tell you in what instances they would do business with your competitors.

Now that you have robust data to work with, it’s time to analyze it all and create an action plan.

Voice of the Customer Analytics

A Voice of the Customer analytics program is a systematic method by which companies examine the data from VoC surveys. The purpose of a VoC analytics program is to identify and track trends in customer sentiment, resulting in an action plan to improve the customer experience.

The most important step in a Voice of Customer program is analyzing the data that you’ve gathered.

With the techniques and questions we listed above, you’ll be sure to have some valuable insights. Now, it’s time to analyze all of that data.

Here‘s how to get started.

1. Measure the success of your program on the number or percentage of responses.

If you sent out 200 surveys and only received 30 responses, it would be worth taking a second look at the methodology that you used. If you target a young audience, for example, they might prefer social media outreach instead of surveys.

2. Identify trends and common themes.

Do most of your customers wish you offered a chat service? Are most customers happy with the responsiveness of your service team? It’s important to know what percentage of people agreed because that way you can prioritize initiatives.

3. Consider adding your findings into a simple reference document (such as a Google Doc).

After analyzing the feedback for trends in consumer behavior and preferences, add these new insights into your buyer personas . This helps you gather a more complete picture of your target audience.

4. Visualize these trends and compile them into reports.

You can visualize trends using simple tools such as Google Sheets or a more dedicated reporting software such as Lexalytics . Don’t present these reports just yet.

5. Create an action plan.

The look of your action plan will differ, depending on the themes and trends you may find. If you received responses requesting a live chat widget on your website, your next step would be to look into investing in live chat software .

6. Present your report and action plan to your team.

It’s important to leave the presentation last. That way, you have an improvement plan, rather than discouraging your team with negative insights.

By pairing these results with an action plan, you can ensure your team will understand the actions they should take.

Now, let’s take a look at the tools you can leverage as you create a VoC program.

Voice of the Customer Tools

Creating and implementing VOC strategies can be both time- and resource-intensive. Thankfully, there are tools available to help in streamlining the process.

Best for: Mid-sized to large enterprises

HubSpot’s customer feedback software empowers companies to take the customers' pulse and ensure they’re capturing critical KPIs. From pre-built NPS, CES, and CSAT surveys to customizable VoC templates, HubSpot has everything you need to truly hear your customers. HubSpot’s VoC system is connected to its CRM and service software, helping you create a seamless customer service experience.

2. Medallia

Best for: Large companies and enterprises

Medallia makes it easy for companies to capture customer signals, route them where they’re most useful, and make sense of large data volumes with robust analysis and prediction.

Medallia’s VoC software has multiple layers for employees and customers. For instance, employees can receive an in-depth review of a customer’s sales experience and their journey into purchasing said product or service. Medallia also lets you group customers depending on behaviors and contributing factors (i.e. coupon, discount, social media click, etc.) to analyze how the customer’s experience is.

3. InMoment

InMoment provides in-depth VoC data for the customer experience as a whole. It also lets your team drill down into users’ in-app experience to provide a more holistic view of how they’re interacting with your brand — and where there’s room to improve. Their VoC system is all about unifying what the customer, employee, and business needs.

InMoment has a new program called ‘Experience Improvement’ which combines data, technology, and human behaviors to improve the “human” experience at your business. Indeed, their motto is to “bring back the human aspect in businesses”.

4. Clarabridge

Clarabridge is all about conversational analytics that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to capture multi-touchpoint consumer data, in turn providing both depth and nuance to customer sentiment and experience analysis.

Clarabridge uses AI to enhance customer experiences through what can be heard via calls, surveys, email channels, chat rooms, and more. Their AI creates data- and solution-based results tailored to customers’ specific experiences. By actively listening to what customers are saying, you can track customer loyalty and emotions while they are in the process of purchasing. You can therefore reduce churn rate and increase revenue from repeat purchases.

Verin’s software focuses on going beyond surveys to collect unstructured data across all customer touchpoints. Verint’s solution also offers automated analysis to help connect data silos and reduce the risk of missing key consumer data.

Verint sees how customers are shopping online, which is crucial because their experience is a factor in their purchase decision. So, with their VoC tools, you’ll be able to create tactical but humanized solutions that will help you increase customer loyalty and boost KPIs. Verint has real time triggers and alerts that will help you understand the customer experience and predict future behaviors.

6. SentiSum

Best for: Mid-sized to large businesses

SentiSum looks to minimize consumer friction across channels by providing categorization and analysis for customer support conversations. Equipped with accurate, granular, and real-time data, companies are better positioned to identify and resolve key customer concerns.

SentiSum uses NLP (National Language Processing) to help organize and understand the specific emotions and problems that customers are having. They also use AI that tailors to your specific business. By looking at specific and broad tags, SentiSum comes up with solutions that make it easier to handle errors and alleviate customer concerns.

7. AskNicely

Best for: Small to medium-sized businesses

AskNicely is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) based software that allows businesses to collect customer feedback via SMS, email, or web responses. Create customized surveys and get feedback in real-time with the ability to publish to your team’s preferred channels like Slack. It can be integrated into an existing CRM or used with another support program.

Best for: Medium to large enterprises

Feedier not only allows users to collect information from customers, but also will help you organize it with a variety of built-in reporting tools. Once collected, you can automatically assign ownership to a particular feedback-triggered task, create workflows and generate “close the loop” reports. Integration with Trello and Jira makes it easy to direct actionable items from feedback received.

9. CustomerGauge

Best for: B2B customer experience

CustomerGauge’s Account Experience solution helps B2B companies capture and distribute feedback from your accounts in real-time and are aimed at helping prevent churn. Their “close the loop” tools make sure client concerns don’t fall through the cracks and the built-in reporting tools are customizable to suit your needs.

10; MonkeyLearn

Best for: Enterprise businesses

MonkeyLearn helps you capture the Voice of the Customer by analyzing what the customer wants and visualizing the data. The tool allows you to organize customer feedback and then segment the positive and negative feedback into subcategories. That way, you know what to focus your attention on. MonkeyLearn also shows you how your customers are making purchase decisions across all of your products or services.

MonkeyLearn analyzes CSAT (customer satisfaction) by looking and finding weak links in business processes or strategies and gives data-driven results to strengthen them. It analyzes surveys, chats, and email experiences to come up with better solutions for the ultimate customer experience. The tool also tracks trends and behavioral habits so that recurring issues can be solved in an efficient manner.

Voice of the Customer Template

To make the most of your VoC efforts, you need a reliable template that generates predictable results. A good VoC template helps you outline how to set goals for your customers. In this template, you’ll be able to outline:

• What did the customer say;
• What does the customer need; and
• How can your company provide the solution for the customer’s needs?

Tools like HubSpot’s customer feedback software can help with these efforts, but there are also some basic template guidelines worth following, no matter how you choose to create your VoC.

First, make sure your template is clear, concise, and to the point. VOC efforts are all about understanding your customers — they’re not exercises in marketing or customer conversion muscle. Make sure your questions are clear and get to the needs of the customer.

Speaking of questions, some of the most common include:

1. Where have you heard about [product or service] in the last six months?

This question helps companies understand if their marketing strategies are working or if they can be improved. When a customer explains how they learned about you, it reveals the channels and platforms that will give you the highest ROI.

2. Which social media platforms do you use every week?

Customers are always sharing opinions; you just need to know where to look to find them. Knowing where your customers are posting can help you collect VoC data in the channels your customers use most.

3. How does [brand or company] compare to the competition?

This question tells you where you rank alongside other businesses in your industry in your customers’ eyes. This is a great question to ask when trying to understand what you can improve to outshine your competitors.

4. How appealing are [specific services or products] to you? (offer a rating scale)

Ask prospects what matters most when selecting a company or service and offer choices such as price, experience, and branding. Offer a rating scale for each of these options, or allow customers to fill in a free-form text field. This question gives you insight into what your customers value most when they’re buying products.

5. How satisfied are you with [current product or service]?

The goal of this question is to understand the customer’s experience at an overarching level. Was it good, bad, terrible, or just “meh”? This gives you an idea of how much they enjoy your product and how likely they are to recommend it to others.

6. What do you like best about [current product or service]?

The goal of this question is to understand what your product does well. This may sound like the previous question, but it gives customers the opportunity to dig into the specifics of the product. Be sure to ask about unique features so you can get actionable answers.

7. What could be improved about [current product or service]?

Use this question to figure out how you can generally improve your product. You can only learn so much from your internal knowledge, and your customers’ perspective can round out your understanding. The feedback you receive can help you make your product better for its intended audience.

8. Would you like a follow-up from [company]? What form of communication do you prefer?

If you’d like to follow up with your customers, give them the option to choose the communication medium they prefer. This question is great because it gives the customers the opportunity to opt out of additional surveys if they’d like.

The goal here is to keep your VoC surveys focused: If you’re targeting customer service, ask questions that provide data relevant to this metric. If consumer experience with products or services is the priority, design your survey to reflect this aim.

Here are a few more free templates to help you get started.

VoC Templates

2. InVision

Visual collaboration platform InVision makes it easy to create your own VoC survey and organize the feedback you receive. Centralize all of the insights you get in one place and easily share them with your team.

Similarly to InVision, Miro’s template takes a more design-friendly approach to VoC feedback and surveys. Their template utilizes a sticky-note table layout and allows others from your team to collaborate.

4. QI Macros

For a more bare-bones approach, QI Macros has a template that can be used in Excel. In this template, you’d place customer statements in the far left column and rank them by importance using the top right section.

Still not sure what VoC can look like for your company? Let’s take a look at some of the best examples of VoC analytics strategies in the industry.

Voice of the Customer Examples

If you're still not sure how your business can benefit from the VoC methodology, then it may help to look at some real companies that benefited from following this method.

Below, we highlight several businesses that profited from applying VoC to their organization.

Subbly is a SaaS e-commerce platform that entrepreneurs and marketers use. To capture the Voice of the Customer, it added a feedback page to its website and set up a feedback monitoring system for its Facebook page. Now users can comment on others' feedback that's posted to the company's website and vote on ideas that they like best.

Subbly's CEO, Stefan Pretty, believes that "between all these methods of collecting the voice of the customer, [they] harness their [opinions] on the best way to run Subbly, to shape [their] product roadmap and the features [they] roll out." Pretty notes that this approach has paid off too, as the company has become much more customer-centric and has even rolled out two new features based on the voice of the customer.

2. Plainview

Plainview is a B2B SaaS company that offers software for strategic planning and resource management. It regularly hosts meetings called "Inner Circles" where customers participate in interviews and attend focus groups. Since 2006, Plainview has hosted about 40 sessions and has met with over 1,000 customers from 300 companies.

This VoC approach helped the company make a major design change to its product. Plainview's CMO, Brian Urioste, discussed how the "Inner Circles" pointed out flaws in the software's navigational design, which was preventing customers from achieving their goals. Urioste noted that "even though the feedback and changes extended [their] product development cycle, [they] ended up with a product that better served the needs of all of [their] customers."

3. Convertize

Convertize is a content management software that lets customers A/B test their content when publishing it to their website. They benefited from the VoC methodology by gathering feedback during product releases and using that criticism to improve their new products.

For example, when they released their persuasive notifications feature, they also sent out surveys and sought out reviews to see how users felt about this product. Some users reported issues with the feature blocking important content on their site and had to remove it because they could not adjust it.

After seeing these reviews, Convertize moved quickly and resolved the problem two weeks after it was first reported. Convertize's CRO Project Manager, Benjamin Ligier, highlighted that not only did this feedback "solve the customer's immediate problem, but also gave [them] a much-improved feature."

4. Cox Communications

In the span of 18 months, telecoms company Cox Communications was able to reduce customer churn, identify key customer experience (CX) trends and improve their Net Promoter Score across multiple channels . By collecting data from customer touchpoints including sales, retail, call centers, and field service, Cox has made VoC a central function of business operations, in turn driving increased ROI.

5. Sky Spain

By implementing a robust VoC program, Sky Spain created end-to-end customer journey maps that helped identify key issues and pain points , analyze customer preferences to create targeted content, and additionally provide locally-relevant insights to help facilitate the transition of this UK-based company into the Spanish market.

6. SharkNinja

Struggling to connect reliable housewares products with robust customer service, SharkNinja implemented a comprehensive VoC plan to bridge the gap. Now equipped to collect and analyze consumer insights, the company has reduced call handle time by 15%, decreased the total operational costs of customer service, and improved communication across the organization.

7. Associated Bank

With gaps and inconsistencies in VoC data collection and analysis, Associated Bank needed a new approach. By creating and deploying a holistic VoC program, the company was able to reduce the time required to generate actionable customer feedback from six weeks to real-time and saw a 6-point jump in overall customer experience scores.

8. Ohio Mutual Insurance Group

Looking to differentiate their business, Ohio Mutual Insurance Group created an end-to-end VoC program to both capture customer preferences and gain a competitive edge. The approach worked: the company saw a 25% increase in customer email survey response , decreased survey response time from weeks to days, and developed a unified approach to CX across all customer channels.

To better understand its buyers and improve overall customer service, Volvo dove into the VoC process and discovered that customers preferred shorter surveys with open-ended questions. This allowed the company to generate more in-depth responses to survey questions, in turn helping the carmaker identify top-performing staff, drill down to specific customer concerns, touchpoints, and prioritize issues at dealerships that require immediate resolution.

For all these companies, a Voice of Customer program was critical in their improvement and growth. The bottom line is to be highly customer-centric to engage and retain your existing customers.

A Voice of Customer Program Will Lead To Business Growth

Implement a Voice of the Customer program to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can be a pathfinder and hero in the industry by investing in products, enhancements, and services that will make your company stand out and grow better.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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How to use voice of customer data to grow your brand

Written by by Annette Chacko

Published on  May 17, 2023

Reading time  11 minutes

Voice of customer (VoC) data is a collection of your customers’ feedback based on their experience with your brand during the customer journey.

Digital and social media have changed the way consumers interact with a brand. This has resulted in tons of feedback in the form of social media comments, reviews, posts and videos. Analyzing this user-generated content gives you in-depth insights into your target audience and emerging market trends. Yet, it can be challenging to gather VoC that is relevant and timely, manage customer data and get accurate insights.

In this article, we’ll share how to overcome these hurdles, optimize your customer experience (CX) data and draw critical insights to impact business growth.

What is voice of customer (VoC) data?

Voice of customer data refers to all customer feedback that a business gathers from its customers through social media comments, reviews, chatbot data and survey responses to understand brand perception and sentiment. Insights from this feedback can positively influence product roadmaps, customer experience, sales strategies and marketing campaigns.

Types of VoC data

VoC data comes from different sources (more on this below) and in three types: direct, indirect and inferred.

Direct data

Direct voice of customer data is gathered directly from customers. This could be through social media comments, questionnaire and survey answers, interviews, customer care calls or focus groups.

Gathering direct VoC data requires advance planning to craft effective social media or email surveys and meaningful questionnaires that lead to productive customer conversations.

Indirect data

Indirect VoC data comes from sources other than those you use to directly get in touch with your customers.

This type of data can be collected from review websites such as Google My Business or G2 and articles in online publications, as well as social listening from videos and comments on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms that mention your brand.

It’s worth noting that indirect data can come from prospects and the general public, so some may not be your customers or target audience. This means it’s best suited for a more comprehensive view of your brand perception in the market.

Inferred data

Inferred VoC feedback is behavioral insight into how a customer interacts with your brand throughout their journey. This includes their purchase history, app downloads and website behavior such as clicks, scrolls, time spent on a page or conversion rates.

All three types of VoC data are important on their own but become far more effective when combined to provide powerful, nuanced insights for data-driven marketing strategies.

What are the benefits of voice of customer data analysis?

When analyzed effectively, voice of customer data provides valuable insights to influence product innovation, improve customer experience, increase sales performance and drive other advantages. Let’s get to know them more.

Product and service innovation

Voice of customer data can significantly influence your product development or market launch decisions by helping surface frequent customer requests, complaints or praise.

Machine learning and AI models help you summarize key elements and extract hidden insights so you can better prioritize your product roadmap.

Brand reputation management

Social media and review websites are great for generating brand awareness and increasing customer engagement but can also be a minefield for negative comments that damage your reputation.

Voice of customer analysis helps with real-time brand monitoring so you keep a pulse on any spikes in negative comments and monitor customer issues using keywords and hashtags. Timely intervention for effective resolutions helps you avoid escalations and build a better brand reputation .

Lead generation

Knowing your customers deeper means getting insights into their buying behavior and triggers that will boost sales campaigns. VoC insights help you develop personalized marketing campaigns and invest in ideas that attract more qualified leads.

Comprehensive market research

When you combine direct, indirect and inferred voice of customer data, you conduct comprehensive market research at a fraction of the cost and time traditional research requires. Since social listening and online data can be analyzed in seconds with an AI-powered tool like Sprout Social, you also get real-time insights along with an accurate insider’s look into historical data from inferred data such as web and purchase histories.

Customer experience

AI-driven comments analysis tools give you targeted insights into how you can be more customer-centric. They help you prioritize customer needs such as faster responses to queries, a better store ambiance or an improved user interface for your website.

How to collect, analyze and apply voice of the customer data

1. establish your objectives.

The sea of VoC data you gather will give you a number of insights but not all of them will serve your purpose. That’s why it is important to establish your business goals for the project.

Are you looking for ways to improve your revenue and sales? Do you want to build a better loyalty program? Do you want to diversify your products and offerings? Are you interested in emerging industry trends that you can leverage? The answers to these questions will help you decide your data acquisition strategy, like choosing whether you want to use only social listening data or also gather data from reviews and surveys.

Knowing what specifically you want to address will also help you streamline the conversations that will arise once you get your VoC data analysis results.

2. Collect VoC data from relevant sources

Once you have decided your approach, you must focus on pulling data from the sources that are most relevant to your business. Here is a list of data sources that you can use.

Social media listening

Social listening analyzes conversations and trends happening around your brand and industry as a whole. Social VoC data is great for monitoring brand sentiment, understanding your customers’ needs and keeping an eye on your competitors—all of which will enable you to make better business decisions.

Social listening aggregates data around key topics and trends, giving you the context to layer meaning and relevance onto what your customers tell you. Listen to learn why, where and how conversations are happening about your brand, and what people think when they’re tagging or mentioning you directly.

If you use a tool like Sprout, you will see how aggregated social data gives you an exact picture of how people are experiencing your brand.

We’ve all experienced surveys in some form—whether it’s the dreaded YouTube survey that pops up when you want to view a new video or the email survey you get after a purchase.

Surveys can be one of the most difficult ways to collect VoC data because the results depend a great deal on how targeted the questions are, the participants themselves and responses that may be either too broad or cryptic. But when done right, survey responses inform how to build better loyalty programs, boost quality leads and revitalize a stagnating business.

When surveys contain a mix of quantitative metrics (such as star ratings) and open-ended questions like in the example below, it might be difficult to extract cohesive and valid insight from responses. Intelligent tools like Sprout use natural language processing (NLP) and semantic clustering to overcome this barrier and extract precise information from various responses.

Online customer reviews

Knowing how to ask for customer reviews is the first step to leveraging this data source for business insights. Online reviews from customer and product forums such as Yelp, G2, Capterra, Google My Business, etc. are a great place to find the pros and cons of your products and offerings—including unexpected ones.

Live chat and chatbots

Live chats and chatbots help you understand recurring customer queries and issues, and also collect feedback on how helpful the experience was or where there’s room for improvement.

In Sprout Social, you can build chatbots to create automated answer flows for common questions and customer care issues such as tracking orders or finding locations. These chatbots integrate with Sprout’s Smart Inbox so team members are alerted when human assistance is needed.

Website behavior and purchase history

Website analytics give you data on how customers and prospects are landing on your pages and interacting with your web content: time on page, visit history and other events like conversions.

These metrics guide you to improve your web user interface, develop engaging content for better conversions and work on your search engine rankings.

Similarly, insights from your customers’ purchase history help you build personalized ads, emails and relevant offers.

Sales calls and call center data

Sales calls provide information about what prospects are looking for in your product and where you stand compared to the competition. Similarly, listening to customer service calls that are recorded for quality assurance give you a good idea of the common issues your customers face (and what you can do to improve their experience).

Emails sent to customer service are often a gold mine of pertinent information you can use to improve customer satisfaction. Customers may write about issues they are having with logistics, returns and warranties, product inadequacies or even to thank you for a job well done.

All these messages are important, and if you’re using an efficient machine learning model, you can easily isolate key topics and themes that give you guidance for improved operations.

Once you’ve zeroed in on which data sources are the most relevant to you, you must make a list of important hashtags, keywords, phrases and topics to get fine-grained results. Sprout enables you to build queries to match what you want to cover, so the results are tailored to your brand’s needs.

3. Analyze the data for insights

To extract VoC insights accurately, you need to take into account qualitative and quantitative metrics. Here’s a rundown of what these may look like.

Quantitative metrics

Net promoter score (NPS) Your NPS measures how likely a customer is to recommend your business to a friend or colleague. It is usually collected through customer surveys and interviews where respondents choose a rating on a scale of 1–10.

Respondents are segmented into three categories: promoters (those who scored 9 or 10), passives (who scored 8 or 7) and detractors (who scored 0-6). Your final NPS is the percentage of customers who are promoters minus the percentage of detractors.

Customer effort score (CES) CES measures the effort the customer has to make in completing a transaction to their satisfaction. Respondents select a rating on a scale from one to seven (strongly disagree to strongly agree). The final score is calculated by the percentage of customers that land in the middle and “somewhat agree.”

Social engagement metrics Likes, dislikes, post shares, number of comments and retweets, all are key social media metrics that tell you how well your brand is performing. Use social analytics to improve post-engagement rates and increase your share of voice. This helps you build a stronger brand presence and increase customer satisfaction by improving upon issues highlighted by your customers.

Qualitative metrics

Voice of customer sentiment analysis Sentiment analysis is an AI-powered data science technique that measures how positive, negative or neutral customers are towards you. Sprout Social’s sentiment analysis capability automatically captures topics, themes and aspects from thousands of social listening data in seconds to give you buried insights.

You can view emerging market trends as well as sentiment scores based on time periods and sources (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.). This breaks down how your brand perception differs from one data source to another and what are the contributing factors.

Sprout’s Topic Summary feature gives an overview of traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) like volume, potential impressions and engagements to quantify what conversations are occurring. You’ll also find sentiment, calculated by the percentage of positive, negative or unrated messages for your Topic.

Our Conversation Tab aggregates conversations, keywords and hashtags that are frequently mentioned with your Topic. The word cloud feature visualizes which keywords are the most prominent, so you know where to focus your efforts.

You can create specific filters for those keywords, clear qualitative data and use the insights to make new menu decisions. You can also create filter functions for locations, demographics, message types and more, to get granular and sharper insights.

4. Take action on VoC feedback

There are many key ways to use VoC insights to strengthen your marketing strategy, such as the following:

Build buyer personas

Voice of customer analytics help you categorize customers based on their buying behavior. Use this to build buyer personas and zero in on the types of content that will appeal to them the most, what networks they trust and what pain points they face. This insight will strengthen your sales strategy and lead to better conversions.

Identify issues

Identify recurring issues that affect your business processes, website experience, logistics and supply chain. Then take corrective action.

Prioritize product roadmaps

VoC data insights help you prioritize high-impact product decisions and course-correct when needed to better meet your customers’ needs and expectations.

Build targeted marketing campaigns

Chalk out your paid and organic marketing efforts with VoC insights. Build relevant ads that bring in an impressive return on investment, choose the right platforms to publish them on and create a robust SEO strategy.

Adjust brand messaging

VoC data gives you insights into customer sentiments related to your brand messaging including your ad creatives. This helps you adjust your messaging according to market drivers and be in tune with cultural sensitivities in a global environment.

Choose brand ambassadors

Social media metrics also inform which social influencers are the best fit for your brand. Monitor their content based on hashtags and keywords to ensure your brand ambassadors stay aligned to your brand.

Revamp loyalty programs

VoC insights give you the opportunity to build better, more relevant brand loyalty programs by tailoring them to customer demographics and priorities.

Three voice of customer examples to learn from

1. inspire medical systems enhances customer support using voc insights.

Inspire uses Sprout’s social media management tool to reach out to millions of people who suffer from sleep apnea but are unable to use traditional treatments. Customers have thousands of queries and need prompt assistance. This need saw a significant increase during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To meet this challenge, Inspire used Sprout’s COVID-19 Inbox Rule Template to identify relevant messages to enable their team to provide customers with critical support that was timely and efficient. By listening to customers and understanding their common concerns, Inspire was also able to develop new assets and response scripts covering telemedicine and patient safety.

2. Lowe’s Hotels identifies opportunities to drive business efficiency

Hotel company Lowe’s uses customer feedback to deliver exceptional services to its customers. With Sprout’s Smart Inbox, Lowe’s monitors keywords, hashtags and locations to discover unique opportunities to improve their service and increase customer engagement.

The company also employs VoC insights to discover valuable business intelligence and improve its business processes, creating time efficiencies and building deeper customer relationships.

3. Allegiant Air transforms customer care strategy by listening to VoC

Allegiant Air uses voice of customer data to alleviate its customer service volume, retain customers and build brand loyalty. With Sprout’s Tagging system that features rules built around keywords, Allegiant quickly identifies a customer’s need and responds to it. They have been able to build smoother team collaboration, identify areas that need more focus and found new ways to put the customer first.

Start listening to your customers’ voices today

Customer satisfaction is crucial to having return customers and a superior brand reputation that boosts your financial performance through recurring revenue.

An intelligent social media management tool like Sprout helps you do this and more. Gather and analyze large amounts of VoC data quickly and accurately to surface business-critical insights, from hidden market trends to customer preferences, and implement those insights into your social strategy in one platform.

Take advantage of our free trial and find targeted ways to improve your business.

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The Essential Guide to Voice of the Customer

Listening to your customers and taking action to solve their challenges is the first essential step to Customer Success.

Listening to your customers and taking action to solve their challenges is the first essential step to Customer Success. That’s why Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a critical component to driving company-wide efforts to deliver value and happiness to clients. VoC consists of initiatives designed to capture customer insights, close the loop on feedback, and prioritize improvements to produce happy and successful clients.

What is voice of customer.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is exactly what you think it is: listening to your customers. Voice of customer encompasses the process of gathering and understanding customer feedback so customer responses directly improve the product and customer experience. You’re probably thinking, “But this isn’t anything new! Businesses have been listening to customers for years,” and you’re right… sort of.

Collecting customer feedback has historically been a fundamental part of growing a business. But the Voice of the Customer shifts the focus from collecting aggregate data to individual data. It stresses the importance of “closing the loop” or responding to customers with proof that their feedback has been incorporated into the products and services. An ideal Voice of Customer program will provide business-wide structure for addressing and utilizing customer feedback. VoC establishes a strategy that involves the entire company so all departments can work together to resolve the problem. This results in a coordinated approach to improving the customer experience, solving challenges, and driving growth for your business.

Why is Voice of the Customer important?

Voice of Customer helps businesses hone their product or service into something that customers truly want and will continue to invest time and money into. Instead of just collecting data, VoC focuses on understanding it. Why? Because if you know customers are having problems, it should be your goal to get to the root of it. On the flip side, if you know where customers are finding enjoyment in your product, you should want to find out why so you can expand on it.

There’s more to Voice of the Customer than sending out a survey and hoping for a good response. If you have dreams of becoming a champion gymnast and pay a coach top dollar to train you, you’d expect them to tell you when your form is off, right? That’s because constructive criticism is necessary for improvement. VoC best practices stress that you ask probing questions and not just set yourself up to receive positive remarks (which can still be useful, but we’ll touch on that in a sec). Are customers unhappy with the price point? Do they have trouble using your product? Does your service actually make life easier or does it just stress them out? While the responses may not be all smiles, they reveal insights that drive change.

“If you had some magic power and were able to discover exactly what customers are craving, and if you also knew how to produce their dream product at a low price, then you would be guaranteed to get rich! Therefore, capturing the exact Voice of the Customer is like striking gold.”

A business that is truly invested in a VoC program will listen to every customer, act on their responses, and analyze the data to improve processes. By being attentive and responsive, you can mitigate rough patches for future customers and get immediate value from customers with positive feedback. Without a VoC strategy, businesses miss out on valuable opportunities to leverage happy customers and assuage dissatisfied ones. The former can create new business opportunities and the latter is paramount for reducing  churn . Customers are very responsive to positive and negative treatment, and a little can go a long way for both. A  study by Oracle on the impact of customer experience  states:

• 46% of consumers were pleased when an organization responded to a customer’s negative comment.
• 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.
• 24% of consumers who had unsatisfactory service interactions shared their experiences through social networks in 2010.

What is Voice of the Customer’s role in Customer Success?

If your VoC program isn’t tied to Customer Success, you’re doing it all wrong . Customer Success is meant to help your customers achieve their desired outcome while using your product. The customer feedback generated through VoC programs dictates these desired outcomes, making it a crucial component in  Customer Success  strategy. This  article on the value of VoC  notes that best-in-class VoC users experience:

• 10-times greater year-over-year increase in annual revenue
• 55% greater customer retention rates
• 23% decrease in year-over-year customer service costs
• 292% greater employee engagement rates

A Voice of the Customer program can also greatly enhance the  effectiveness of your Customer Success  team. The individual approach to gathering customer feedback garners valuable information that helps Customer Success Managers (CSM) perform their job more efficiently. Ask questions like:

• Is our product easy to consume?
• Are we truly creating value?
• How do you define success?
• Are we helping you achieve that definition?

The answers to these questions can help Customer Success Managers (CSMs) set priorities on an individual, prescriptive basis and establish a dialog. CSMs get a clear definition of what success means to each customer and can strategize ways to help them achieve it. Customer Success is a company-wide initiative and VoC fits into the same narrative. It’s important that all departments understand the importance of both Customer Success and VoC. It takes an entire company, from sales to marketing to product development, to give customers a satisfactory journey from start to finish.

The Basics of Voice of Customer Programs

Voice of customer programs can include a wide range of tasks, from collecting data, to extracting insights, to putting them to work in your customer lifecycles. We’ve created a simple, three-step strategy upon which you can build your VoC program. Following this framework will give you the power to act quickly and drive significant impact from your VoC efforts.

• Listen:  Capture insightful feedback by giving your customers frequent opportunities to submit feedback.
• Act:  Follow up promptly so customers know that they are heard. Quicker response to customer feedback results in a greater impact.
• Analyze:  Assess progress against goals and measure improvement to keep the program on track.

Technological advances have drastically streamlined Voice of Customer processes. Software with VoC capabilities can automate many daunting tasks, such as reaching out to thousands of customers, addressing replies en masse, aggregating data, and much more. When used alongside Customer Success software, VoC data can be a powerful storyteller. It can help to identify trends, create individual customer health scores based on responses, and much more.

3-Step Approach to Capturing Your Customer’s Voice

This concise approach to Voice of the Customer expands on the three core components to reactively close the loop, proactively improve consistency, and predictably deliver value.

The information gathered in this stage will determine the success of your entire VoC program, so while it sounds like we’re exaggerating when we say, “This step is super important,” we mean it. Gathering useful, actionable feedback depends on three things: asking the  right person  the  right question  at the  right time .

Finding the right person

Before you go sending out surveys left and right, VoC best practices suggest creating customer personas. Building standard personas help to easily define who is involved with your product and the level of their interaction. This will take the guesswork out of finding the right person to answer your questions. You wouldn’t ask a project manager how the sales cycle was, just as you wouldn’t ask a CEO about the ease of use of a product they don’t frequently interact with.

Asking the right question

Once you’ve built your personas, it makes asking the right questions a lot simpler. A good rule to keep in mind is to only ask a question that you’re ready and willing to take the initiative to solve. There are two main types of feedback we’ll be focusing on:

Direct feedback:  Feedback received directly from clients, commonly through surveys. Some examples include NPS scores, lifecycle Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, transactional CSAT scores, community posts, etc.

Indirect feedback:  Feedback generated by the ways clients are engaging with your product. For example, usage data, support data, and other behavioral metrics.

Combining direct and indirect feedback gives you a holistic look at an individual’s perception of your product. They work together to fill in the blanks that would be left if you only relied on one type of feedback. For example, someone could send indirect feedback in the form of a negative NPS score, but not give any other feedback explaining why they chose that answer. Taking a look at their indirect feedback, you notice that they have multiple support tickets that concern a particular aspect of your product. You can infer that their unhappiness is a result of the trouble they’ve had with that part of your product and start a dialog based on that.

Finding the right time to ask

When you reach out for feedback is just as important as who you reach out to. Your timing can directly affect the answers you receive. Align your surveys with important milestones along the  customer journey . This also ensures you don’t let an unhappy customer stay that way for too long. For example, a critical juncture in a customer’s lifecycle is right after they’ve completed implementation. Send out a survey within a few days of the end of their implementation to get their current sentiments about the process and how comfortable they are now that they are on their own. Another common practice is following every support ticket with a one-question survey to close the loop. Asking if they’re satisfied with the support they received lets you know whether or not you need to reach out and offer additional help.

You’ve created personas, decided what feedback you want, and identified ways to ask for it. Before we send you off to the next step, there’s one last thing to keep in mind: the bane of VoC—survey fatigue. This can happen when you send too many surveys in succession or fail to set accurate expectations for the amount of time your survey will take. Using your personas, establish a cadence for your surveys so you can be confident that you’re reaching out to the right people at appropriate intervals. If a survey is longer than one question, write out how long it’ll take so people know what they’re getting into. Fail to follow both of these best practices and your customers may ignore your surveys, leaving you with nothing to show for it.

Step number two focuses on providing value for your customers. Value doesn’t need to be a three-year long process that has to go through multiple approvals and plopped onto an annual plan. When it comes to Voice of Customer, value happens immediately and at a grassroots level. It requires a quick response, strong tactics, and a shared company mindset to truly show customers that you are listening and adapting.

Act on feedback immediately

Voice of Customer best practices stress a “closed-loop” form of communication, meaning that all customer input should be addressed and resolved ASAP. Don’t wait until Step 3 to close the loop! Respond quickly to make the most of the situation, whether it’s positive or negative. An unanswered positive response is just as wasteful as its negative equivalent. In  NPS terms , these Promoters are valuable advocates for your product. The longer you wait to thank them and stoke the fire that is their advocacy, the greater chance they may slip into becoming Passives or worse, Detractors.

Using a high-touch/low-touch model can make customer outreach more digestible. This  blog post by Lincoln Murphy  does a great job of explaining the difference between high-touch and low-touch and the benefits of this bilateral approach. High-touch customers, important accounts that require a high level of communication, tend to receive one-on-one attention. Low-touch customers, smaller contracts that may not require as much attention, can be effectively reached through one-to-many (1:Many) communications.

Provide resources that help close the loop at scale

Reading about VoC is one thing, carrying it out is another. And we get it—spending your whole day getting berated by unhappy customers is nobody’s idea of fun. Motivating team members to do that all day can be equally grueling. That’s why we suggest creating VoC playbooks, or a set of best practices that your team can use to streamline how they address customer feedback. This is a highly effective way of standardizing customer outreaches that can grow with your company.

Strengthen your playbooks and outreach strategies by providing team members with as many resources as possible. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a valuable tool with myriad capabilities. For your outreach team, it reveals insights about a customer’s health which can then be used as talking points. Instead of having to rely on their own instincts when mediating situations, pre-populated emails give team members confidence and save them time. Keeping support documents organized and easily accessible enables team members to quickly share them with customers in need.

Create a culture that values feedback

In order for feedback to become reality, your entire company, from sales to services to product development, needs to view VoC as a priority. This can be a challenge for established companies, but it’s necessary. Encouragement from management is key for this mindset shift to happen. Departments need to realize the importance of feedback and feel the motivation to act on it. Once this realization occurs, standards can be set and feedback can flow smoothly.

Now that your feedback loop is closed, you should have a good bit of data to work with. To simplify things, we’ve divided this step into three buckets:  business analytics ,  outreach analytics , and  program insights .

Business analytics  includes all the metrics you want to track and benchmark against. It’s for internal use and will give your teams something to report on and be held accountable to. Data in this bucket can include NPS trends and follow-up response time. For example, track your NPS score to see how it trends quarter over quarter.

Outreach analytics  reflect the performance of your customer outreach attempts. You can take these metrics and use them to optimize your outreaches against industry benchmarks. Examples include the performance of surveys, the number of recipients, the number of emails sent/bounced/clicked, and unsubscribes. Combine direct and indirect feedback to create a  holistic health score  across subjective and objective measures. This health score will give you a high-level view of customer health and enable you to easily identify at-risk customers.

An important metric to keep an eye on is the number of people who didn’t respond to your survey. Unless this number is jarringly low, it’s sometimes overlooked. Don’t ignore it. Instead, dig deeper. Maybe you need to change your messaging, or perhaps certain people aren’t interacting with your product at all and you need to find a way to engage them. Outreach analytic data is powerful and tells a story, all you need to do is look at it at different angles to glean a wealth of insights.

Program insights  are gleaned from both business and outreach analytics. Use these insights to identify strategic priorities to improve your overall strategy. For example, text-based answers can be extremely valuable but hard to analyze at scale. Some software, like Gainsight, have  analytics tools  baked in that help to extract tone and intent. Using this technology, identify themes in feedback to get a better overall view of your customer experience. Then, apply these learnings to your strategy and track your results.

What makes Gainsight different for Voice of the Customer?

Gainsight offers more than just a survey builder, instead, we supply you with an entire suite of applications that enable companies of all sizes to close the loop, act on feedback, and work towards proactively and consistently delivering a great customer experience. We like to say that  Gainsight’s Voice of Customer solutions  are the first steps for building a mature Customer Success strategy. We built them to align with the three stages we mentioned earlier: listen, act, and analyze.

Listen:  Gainsight combines visual journey orchestration with powerful automation to trigger personalized outreach at scale, drive higher response rates, and capture more insightful feedback.

• Pair your CRM data with Gainsight’s  visual journey orchestration capabilities  to ask the right people the right questions at the right time.
• Drive impact by pre-planning human and digital actions that dynamically change based on survey responses.
• Create and send a variety of surveys including NPS, CSAT, and more with our  Survey Builder . Attain higher response rates with in-depth personalization and in-email question formats.

Act:  With Gainsight’s cross-functional Playbooks, your team can quickly close the loop with customers to drive improvements in customer satisfaction and retention, as well as take advantage of upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

• Gainsight gives visibility to field teams by bringing customer feedback into the CRM they already use, encouraging them to review and respond  directly from your core platform.
• Powerful cross-functional workflows in the form of automated CTAs and Playbooks take the guesswork out of customer outreach.
• Email Assist  provides field teams with pre-populated email templates so they have the capability to close the loop consistently at scale.

Analyze:  Powerful reporting capabilities let you identify trends in your business, optimize feedback programs, and prioritize strategic investments.

• Dashboards report on the completion of Calls to Action (CTAs) from a business perspective to provide executives insight into internal outreach efforts and team members with goals and benchmarks.
• NPS text analytics provide a deeper understanding of the sentiment towards recurring themes within your NPS survey and uncovers data that would otherwise be lost.
• Our feedback funnel analytics allow you to see survey performance data, allowing you to quickly determine opportunities to improve feedback request processes.

Customer Showcase: Adobe Uses 3-Step Voice of Customer Strategy to Improve Onboarding Processes

“With Gainsight we go up and down the food chain delivering value. It gives us confidence to make bold decisions.”

The onboarding stage is a pivotal moment in the customer journey. Having a weak onboarding process, or none at all, is like giving your customer unassembled furniture with no instructions. The pieces are there, but when they’re left with a wobbly table, they start to doubt why they bought it in the first place. Adobe wanted to make sure their customers ended up with the sturdiest tables they could. But their large customer base made tracking customer sentiment difficult—they weren’t sure if customers finished their onboarding process feeling confident, or if it just left them with a pile of useless particle board. That’s why they turned to Gainsight and created a Listen, Act, Analyze strategy that boosted their VoC efforts and improved their onboarding strategy. You can  find the complete case study here .

• Gainsight’s Survey Builder and Advanced Outreach features enabled Adobe to automatically send every customer a CSAT survey upon completion of the onboarding phase.
• Adobe used the data in Gainsight’s survey response reports to prove that survey length was impairing response rates and reduced their survey questions from six to four.
• Gainsight assigns CTAs and playbooks based on customer’s CSAT responses. For example, if a customer replies with a low CSAT score, the owner of that account get assigned CTAs that follow a re-engagement playbook.
• After a customer’s concerns are addressed, a follow-up survey is sent through Gainsight to close the loop and ask if improvements were made since initial CSAT.
• The Adobe executive team was given easy access to onboarding CSAT data in a Gainsight Dashboard. This visibility helped them understand the success of new initiatives and led Adobe to justify an investment in fully-automated onboarding.
• Adobe A/B tested this approach and Gainsight VoC data confirmed that the fully-automated segment was still responding with a high degree of satisfaction. These results gave the executive team the confidence to proceed with fully automated onboarding for their small business segment, where the customers resonate with easily available, self-serve and 1:many resources.

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Customer Feedback

Definition of Voice of the Customer (VoC)

The benefits of a voice of the customer program, how companies are changing the business landscape with voc, building a successful voice of customer program, 3 questions to answer before building your voice of customer strategy, voice of customer program best practices, focus on the customer, see how xm for customer frontlines works, what is voice of the customer (voc).

22 min read In today’s era of immediacy, consumers are more demanding than ever. To keep up with customer expectations, brands are increasingly investing in Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs that employ a closed-loop process.

Ask any CX, research, or marketing executive, and they will tell you that gone are the days when the customer marketing landscape was represented by a one-way dialogue for engaging prospects. Today, market leaders are shifting their listening and response mechanisms faster as VoC programs represent a huge opportunity for driving loyalty and increased sales.

Poor customer experiences result in an estimated $83 Billion loss by U.S. enterprises each year because of defections and abandoned purchases, and people are twice as likely to talk about a negative experience than they are a positive one.

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The Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the capture of what customers are saying about a business, product, or service.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a term that describes your customer’s feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. It focuses on customer needs, expectations, understandings, and product improvement.

By listening to the Voice of the Customer, businesses can better understand and meet customer needs , expectations – and improve the product and service they offer. A Voice of the Customer program gives insight into customer preferences, problems, and complaints. These VoC programs identify and respond to the Voice of the Customer to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Businesses capture the Voice of the Customer to use the data to improve how a customer experiences all interactions with the business. VoC is best understood using technology that includes text analytics and sentiment analysis because this ensures you can find meaning in the customer feedback data .

VoC programs have gained traction over the years and are fast-growing segments of a core business strategy for organizations. They work exceptionally well for brands as customers demand more direct engagement with a firm and because capturing and acting on customer feedback is critical to understanding a prospect’s complex decision-making process.

Businesses capture the Voice of the Customer to use the data to improve how a customer experiences all interactions with the business. VoC is best understood using technology that includes text analytics and sentiment analysis because this ensures you can find meaning in the customer feedback data.

By listening to the Voice of the Customer, businesses can understand and then meet their customers’ needs. A Voice of the Customer program gives insight into customer preferences, problems, and complaints, putting businesses in a better position to identify problems and opportunities so they can take the appropriate next steps.

Customer perceived quality and above-average customer service have been proven time and again to be leading drivers of business success. When your customers share their voice in real-time with your organization, they expect you to listen, act and report back to them on progress.

To win the war on customer loyalty you must have a single line of sight into your customer, market, and employee groups.

Zappos is known for having exceptional customer service and they measure it by asking how the interaction with the employee made the customer feel. Zappos wants to know how the brand and customer experience emotionally resonates with customers.

Additionally, the company empowers their customer service representatives. Zappos employees are allowed to give “wow gifts” to customers. For instance, when one customer called to return shoes after her mother had fallen ill, the employee on the phone sent her flowers. The woman was shocked that Zappos actually cared about her personal life. That’s how they build lifelong customers.

Capture your customer feedback with our free customer satisfaction survey template

Before you jump in and begin building a step-by-step plan for achieving customer experience maturity, you’ll want to set the stage. Too often people rush into building a program without aligning all the necessary factors to move forward with creating a customer-centric organization.

By focusing on the following six factors, you can successfully establish organization-wide customer centricity.

ebook: How to build a best-in-class VOC program

Strong leadership

Establishing a customer-centric culture starts at the very top. Without executive-level buy-in there is a low probability of creating maximum impact for any customer-centric initiative. You’ll also want to garner the support of lower level leaders to truly move the needle on improving the customer experience. Leaders set the tone for their teams, so if a leader decides that the customer is important, their direct reports will follow suit.

Vision and clarity

Your vision for VoC needs to be specific so that everyone within the organization can easily understand the common goal. Start by focusing on the language and messaging you’ll use to convey your vision. We recommend a short and simple vision statement to help you increase understanding and buy-in from leadership.

Engagement and collaboration

An engaged workforce is vital for the long-term success of a customer-centric company. And as employees become more engaged, cross-functional collaboration and synergy will create more impactful and successful customer initiatives. To truly engage your workforce, you have to understand them. The most tried and true method for doing so is by implementing a formal employee experience program.

Listening and learning

A systematic method for monitoring and collecting customer feedback is key to improving the overall experience. Because customer feedback can be gathered via multiple channels it’s important to build any listening program on a robust platform that can to pivot with customers as their feedback preferences change.

Alignment and action

Alignment means that all members of a company are marching towards the same vision, and each workgroup defines what action they must to take to help realize that vision. Generally speaking, action refers to the measurable steps taken to improve the customer experience. A properly designed root cause or driver analysis will help you identify what areas to take action on.

Patience and commitment:

As much as it pains companies to hear this, building a world-class customer culture is not an overnight exercise – nor is it one that can be completely outsourced. Like it or not, the most successful customer-centric organizations in the world are built in an iterative fashion over a number of years. Customer culture is slowly altered, collection practices are refined, analyses are increased in complexity, and action becomes widespread and aspirational. All along this journey, leadership must demonstrate patience and commitment to the process and vision.

Free Download: The Ultimate Voice of the Customer (VoC) Starter Kit

When deploying a voice of the customer (VoC) program, there are three critical questions to ask. These questions can guide your program design and the technology you need to support it. The questions are:

• What business objective do we want to achieve by deploying a VoC program?
• Given our strategic intent, what do we need to capture?
• Given our objectives and our information needs, what survey technology should we use?

Starting with the first and most important VoC question:

1. What business objective do we want to achieve by deploying a VoC program?

Your answer to this question dictates the other key questions you ask. VoC programs typically serve one of two distinct strategic objectives:

• Benchmarking
• Continuous improvement

Answer A: Benchmarking

Some survey vendors claim that their models serve both objectives, but you need only look at what they do (how they structure their surveys) rather than what they say. Benchmark-purposed surveys feature a multitude of ratings questions and the whole approach is metrics-heavy. One provider we’ve seen uses the first 13 questions to exclusively serve the need for benchmarking, and it is not uncommon to find a survey with perhaps one open-ended question in a 30- or 40-question set.

Because benchmarking is a comparative exercise, it is essential to have an “apples-to-apples” approach to the survey experience itself. This means serving up the same set of questions to every survey respondent, regardless of their actual pathway through the website. When done poorly, this can make for a long and not necessarily relevant exercise for the respondents. Brevity and relevance dictate response quality, so the longer and less relevant the survey questions , the lower the likely quality of the responses.

The value your benchmarking surveys deliver, therefore, point to comparative performance. Why your scores rank as they do will likely remain unclear, except at the level of general causality – “navigation,” for example, or “look and feel.” “Navigation” involves a multiplicity of variables, so you still need to conduct additional, granular research to get to the root cause.

Answer B: Continuous improvement

If your strategic intent is continuous improvement, your tactical objective is to understand causality. Ratings questions are useful, but their value rises exponentially if they are linked to follow-up questions designed to understand why the respondent rated that aspect of the site or visit as they did.

“Based on why you came here today, how successful was your visit?”

Followed up with:

“Please help us understand the main reason you were unsuccessful [or successful].”

Continuous improvement-purposed surveys, therefore, exhibit a much greater balance between ratings questions and open-ended questions. Answering an open-ended question takes much more effort on the part of the respondent, so the question set needs to be as concise and as relevant as possible. In other words, continuous improvement surveys should be tailored to the individual respondent, so that the questions reflect the visitor’s particular pathway through the site and take into account the visitor’s unique experience.

This ability to “customize” each set of questions to the individual respondent depends on having a survey technology capable of tracking visitor behavior and incorporating those details into a set of tailored exit questions.

“We noticed that you viewed the ‘What’s New’ section in Handbags. How appealing did you find our new designers?”

“Please help us understand why the new designers struck you that way.”

There is obviously a limit to the number of times you can ask a respondent to elaborate on an answer, so be judicious about where, when, and what you ask for regarding explanatory information. In pursuit of continuous improvement, responses that help you understand why your visitors react to the various aspects of the site experience are gold. They provide a detailed, granular understanding of causality, and by identifying the root cause of a problem, you can fix it permanently.

Even though the shortest route to improvement is to eliminate common problems, it is also valuable to understand why visitors like positive aspects of their experience. Positives tell you:

• What to emphasize and expand
• What not to break when you go about fixing other problems

The second VoC question to ask is:

2. Given our strategic intent, what do we need to capture?

If your VoC strategy is aimed at benchmarking, the answers to this question are limited by the survey takers’ tolerance for responding to questions that may or may not be of much interest or relevance. Those questions yield trending metrics and ranking data parsed into as many sub-components as the survey can reasonably ask before the quality of the data comes into question (people responding mindlessly to the questions, just to get through the survey).

VoC teams focused on continuous improvement, however, have an opportunity to serve the interests of their internal customers at a much deeper level than can the benchmark providers. This is why we use the term “capture” rather than “ask” in how we phrase the second question. Intelligent survey technology can capture far more than the answers to survey questions. In the background, it can collect the pages visited, the categories or brands viewed, the products compared, or the tools used; it can monitor for events, such as abandoned carts, the creation of a wish list, or checkout abandonment.

This abundance of behavior can be used to trigger the type of experience-specific survey questions referenced above or to provide a full, detailed picture of the respondent’s site visit. The addition of behavioral data allows for much more sophisticated analysis, since the questions asked of the data can be triangulated via metrics, verbatim responses, and actual behavior. These analytical benefits can, to some extent, be replicated by integrating survey data into web analytics data. Since that is a post-processing data merge, however, it obviously precludes the ability to ask behaviorally-triggered questions during the survey itself. Post-process data merging therefore loses the “in the moment” contextual value of capturing the visitor’s reaction when it is immediate and at its most vivid point.

The ability to capture almost every aspect of a respondent’s visit opens up a vista of possibilities for your internal clients. Once you remove the constraints of “dumb” survey technologies, your clients are free to ask for data to address their real business challenges. Your survey strategy will allow you to accommodate needs as diverse as the client groups you serve.

• Executives typically want top-line visibility, such as trending data for NPS , systemic problems, or initiative-specific metrics.
• The online marketing team wants to know demographics associated with the primary acquisition vehicles; they want to know why visitors responded better to one promotion than another.
• The site search team wants to know specifics about visitor response to the reorganization and layout of the results page.
• The merchandising team wants to know why a brand favorite no longer converts at its previous high rates.
• The site architects want to understand how the new taxonomy in the Sale section is working for returning visitors.
• The Checkout team wants to know why conversion dipped when they added a Guest Checkout option.

The variations are endless. Yet the beauty of adding behavioral capability to your surveys means that you can enjoy the best of both worlds. You can capture contextual data that provides exceptional value and insight to your internal customers; at the same time, you can utilize that behavioral data to minimize the number of questions you ask of your respondents by asking them only questions relevant to their immediate site experience.

Your “master survey document” might have 50 questions (perhaps 10 common and 40 variable) and 30 behavioral events to monitor, but no survey respondent will ever see more than 20 questions. The question mix could be different for each one. You achieve sufficient volume of answers to the variable questions through experimenting with invitation rates.

The third VoC question you ask is:

3. Given our objectives and our information needs, what survey technology should we use?

The answers by now are obvious. If your VoC purpose is benchmarking, your need is simple and your survey technology can be basic, too. If, however, you embrace continuous website improvement and an obsession with understanding causality, your VoC strategy will best be served by a sophisticated platform, one with the ability to capture the entire visitor experience and frame each survey accordingly.

The Voice of the Customer provides early warnings and direction for your success, directly from the people who really matter—your customers. Employ these five “must-haves” to realize continuous improvement in your VoC program.

Connect feedback across data channels

Many organizations rely on one or two channels to measure and optimize their interactions with customers, which limits the accuracy and depth of customer insights . Without an omni-channel feedback tool, voice of the customer programs offer incomplete information about customer preference, behavior, and satisfaction. Additionally, leading brands and organizations want to collect customer feedback everywhere their customers are so they can create a more seamless customer experience.

Collaboration across departments with action planning

To create an effective VoC program, multiple departments must be involved in collecting, analyzing and acting on the insights. It should be easy to collaborate across departments using action planning tools — Qualtrics allows you to tag owners, set deadlines, and even supply step-by-step guidance to enable everyone to delight their customers.

Incorporate the voice of the employee

Connecting the employee and customer experiences gives any organization a complete picture of what is really going on and why. Understanding this connection will help your organization understand the impact of employee engagement on the bottom line.

Employees’ feedback does three essential things when it comes to customer experience. It:

• Provides context for customer experiences
• Helps identify process, policy, and technology hurdles that hinder experience delivery
• Gives insight into the quality of employees’ experiences.

Use dashboards and reports to surface insights to the right people

A true Voice of the Customer tool allows you to make sense of what’s going on in your business. You’ll want a platform that allows you to configure dashboards for every role and provides relevant insights for the right people to see.

Qualtrics allows you to create automatic actions and alerts based on location, responses, behaviors, department, role, and more. You can also loop in the right stakeholders automatically based on the feedback received from the leadership team to the frontline.

Deliver clear ROI and business results

Any successful customer experience program needs to deliver returns back to the business, so it’s essential to go in with an ROI mindset and focus everything from your measurements and metrics to the actions and improvements you put in place on what they’ll deliver back to the business.

ROI is not simply reporting on the VoC metrics like  Net Promoter Score (NPS) , Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) , and Customer Effort Score (CES) but instead tying improvements in these metrics back to a financial metric.

That means focusing on:

• Market share — this includes optimizing market penetration by widening your appeal within your target market, increasing share of wallet by getting your customers to spend more with you than they do with your competitors and boost category spending by taking what your customers are spending in other areas and getting them to spend it with you instead
• Cost — every activity has a cost, so understanding the costs to serve, acquire and retain and weighing them up against the projected gains of any increase in those areas is an essential component. An improvement in one area may see an increase in retention, but if the cost of that activity is greater than the projected improvement on the bottom line, it’s not worth doing.
• Efficiency —  typically a function of time which is whether it’s the total number of man-hours required to complete a task to satisfaction or the total amount of time from beginning to end.

As a result, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) has become the premier financial metric in customer experience. This takes into account a whole range of individual metrics from share of wallet and market penetration to cost of acquisition and customer retention to provide a robust metric of ROI.

Focusing solely on a single metric like customer acquisition doesn’t take into account the other factors at play — for example an increase in your churn rate, nor the fact that at the start of the lifecycle, a customer is typically a cost to the business, meaning you won’t turn the cost to acquire into profit for the first 12 months.

Related:  Learn everything you need to know about collecting customer feedback

The customer should be top of mind in everything you do and you can’t assume you know what your customer wants. In order to stay ahead of the competition and meet your consumers where they are, you have to listen to what customers are saying to you and about you, then act fast. And you can do that by establishing a proven Voice of the Customer program that collects, understands, and shares the Voice of the Customer knowledge your organization needs to make confident, customer-focused decisions .

Get started with a VoC program with our starter kit linked below or request a demo of our leading Voice of the Customer Software today.

Other Customer Feedback Resources:

• Customer Feedback – What to Collect and When
• Omni Channel Customer Feedback
• 7 Ways to Boost Customer Survey Response
• User Testing 101: The Complete Guide

Download The Ultimate Voice of the Customer (VoC) Starter Kit

Related resources

Customer feedback 30 min read, closed-loop feedback 9 min read, customer complaints 14 min read, feedback loop 13 min read, user testing 101 14 min read, social media feedback 8 min read, request demo.

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What is Voice of the Customer? Templates, Examples & More

The Team at CallMiner

April 22, 2020

As businesses race to define customer needs in ever greater detail while aligning their own market offerings to better cater to them, the importance of gathering intelligence from customers grows significantly.

Voice of the Customer  or “VOC” is a technological approach to  gaining insight into consumers’ collective interests . More specifically, through the use of Voice of the Customer technology, organizations can identify customer needs and organize them by relative importance.

Voice of the Customer technology helps in establishing operational courses of action and defining crucial elements of product/service design early on. Through its use, business decisions can be closely matched to verified customer needs.

Such a process yields excellent results for businesses that harness it correctly; however, there are numerous ways to go about  implementing a VOC strategy  within an organization. To better understand how VOC processes work and precisely how you can set them in motion within your own company’s systems it helps to have examples and structural resources at hand.

Below, we describe the VOC process in detail and provide you with a few useful templates and examples of the functions that comprise such a system.

Voice of the Customer Functions

To deploy a comprehensive Voice of the Customer system, organizations should aim to implement each of eight distinct functions. These functions are essentially stages in the VOC information handling process, leading from target setting to ongoing study. They are as follows:

Establishing Customer Focus

This phase of the VOC process marks the starting line by working out the “why” and “what”.

In addition to defining exactly who your customers are and defining their profiles, companies should use this opportunity to define the inner workings of their own product development team. Defining decision makers early can help in ironing out the rest of the VOC process.

Collecting Information

Here, various tools are chosen and put to use in  collecting information from customers . It is important to decide on the kind of information you need to collect  in addition to the ways in which you intend to go about collecting it. The two major types of data you will encounter in VOC are qualitative and quantitative (descriptive labels and numbered metrics).

One collection tool that helps in narrowing down target customers to interview is a  VOC matrix . This tool is essentially a series of fields that you can select based on your project’s goals. Once selected, these fields combine to form a clear description of your target audience. Specialized software can offer the same functionality as a traditional hole-punched VOC matrix if your organization keeps accurate customer profile data in digital formats.

Interpreting Information

Although the information captured during the collection phase of the VOC process is labeled, it might not be particularly usable until it is accurately interpreted.

Interpreting collected data involves translating raw customer input into actionable language. Once done, designers, developers and project leads can assess the information and take immediate action. Specifically, desires expressed by customers should be translated to long-term needs to gain a clearer perspective on a project’s ideal developmental roadmap.

Structuring Information

Achieving a usable data structure boils down to minimizing redundancies and grouping related information intuitively. AI-based VOC sorting solutions can prove to be tremendously helpful for such purposes.

For information on ways to measure the voice of the customer, download our white paper,  Measuring Voice of the Customer .

  A clear example of the way in which data might be intuitively structured for later use is a simple  tree diagram . This diagram arranges information in connected levels of branches to give context to each bit of data.

Quantifying Information

At this stage of the VOC process, structured information should be rated by its importance or end-user utility. This allows for insignificant data to be dropped in lieu of data representing more pressing concerns.

Verifying Information

Cross-referencing data sets occurs at this stage. Doing so ensures the veracity of any conclusions your team may reach after analyzing the information your VOC system yields.

Deploying New Strategies

At this point, the Voice of the Customer data has been collected, organized and verified, but must be weaved into your organization’s development plans to be of use. This may involve setting specific technical requirements for product designs, establishing varied pricing models for subscription services, etc.

Tracking Trend Changes

Keeping up with sudden shifts in market sentiment should be a top priority and actively interpreting new VOC data makes this possible. Changes in customer needs over time can be worked into future development goals to keep your offerings closely tied to their intended markets.

Voice of the Customer provides businesses with unique insights that can be used to imbue future development goals with premeditated purpose. By using VOC technology, your organization can not only listen more attentively to its clientele, but respond to their requests and suggestions in meaningful, profitable ways.

How has your business leveraged Voice of the Customer technology?

Product Demo Videos

Additional resources you might like:.

Beyond Surveys: Building a Modern VoC Program

Inner Circle Guide to the Voice of the Customer

Measuring Voice of the Customer

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Home » Blog » Microsoft Dynamics 365 » How to use Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to get Customer feedback

How to use Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to get Customer feedback

Microsoft has been making quite a few changes to its online platform over the last year or two, including everything from ERP-style application suites to better integration and usability of existing features.  Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is an example of the latter, representing an important step forward for how customer feedback is sought after and processed.   

Customer Voice builds on its predecessor, Forms Pro, by focusing on tighter integration with both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft’s Power Platform applications. This integration means the app is much more intuitive to use. Users can leverage the knowledge of Microsoft’s other Power Platform products, especially Power Automate, into producing highly robust and scalable surveys. 

A common use case for Customer Voice is to send surveys to customers after a customer service interaction, usually upon resolving a case in Dynamics 365. Let’s look at how this is done with the new Customer Voice experience. 

• Install Customer Voice in the desired Dynamics environment. There are a few different ways to do this, but one of the most straightforward is to navigate to the Power Platform Admin Center ( https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com ), then click on Resources > Dynamics 365 Apps.  
• From here, click on “Dynamics 365 Customer Voice” and click the “Install” button. 
• Note: This step requires System Administrator permissions, as it involves modifying the Dynamics instance.

• You may be asked to select an environment and confirm the installation; simply choose the appropriate Dynamics 365 environment and click Install. 

• Once the solution is installed, navigate to  https://customervoice.microsoft.com . This is the home base of Customer Voice, where all projects and surveys are managed. Click on the New Project button, and we can look at how straightforward it is to set up a survey. 

• When creating the survey, you may be asked for the location and/or environment. Simply choose the same Dynamics 365 environment used in an earlier step. 

• Upon creating the survey, we can see it has already populated some basic information, including a header and questions with different types of answer formats.  All these assets are easily configured; modifying a question’s text or adding a new answer option just requires clicking on what you would like to change.   
• For example, in the screenshot below, I clicked on question 2.  This brings up a simplified editor like the email tool in Dynamics 365, allowing me to add or remove options individually.  I can even specify whether the answer is required for the survey to be submitted or allow customers to choose multiple answers. 

• Once the survey is set up to your satisfaction, we will need to set up the trigger behavior for making sure surveys are being sent to customers. Click on the Send button, where we can see a few different options.  We will use automation here, as this is what allows us to trigger based on Dynamics behavior via Microsoft’s Power Automate tool.

• Once Automation has been clicked, Customer Voice will provide you with some common templates, as well as the ability to create entirely customized behavior. In this case, we would like to send a survey when we resolve customer service cases in Dynamics, so we will choose “Send a survey when a case is resolved in Dynamics 365”.

• This step will ask you to confirm which connectors will be used for automation. Suppose this is your first-time using Power Automate with this Dynamics environment. In that case, you may need to just confirm your credentials, which you can do by clicking the ellipsis next to the connector and clicking the blue “invalid connection” link.

• Once the connectors are validated, click Continue then Create. This will set the automation up based on the template without requiring any advanced setup.

• In this screenshot, you can see that a user has responded to my survey:

• An excellent feature in Customer Voice is the ability to see visualizations of the data coming in on your survey. By clicking on “Case resolution survey” under “Reports,” we can see that the survey is linked with Power BI analytics right out of the box:

Conclusion:

Overall, Customer Voice is a major step forward in Microsoft’s Power Platform infrastructure.  Surveys are straightforward to create and integrate well with Microsoft’s entire product stack, allowing users and system customizers to spend more time on survey design and the customer experience rather than data management and complicated configuration.

If you have any question or queries, do not hesitate to  reach out to us ! 

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10 Techniques for Collecting Voice of the Customer Data

Success in today’s business world comes down to understanding your customers. Companies that cultivate a strong understanding of who their customers are, what they love, and what they struggle with find themselves miles ahead of their competitors.

That’s where Voice of the Customer research comes into play.

What is Voice of the Customer?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a research method businesses use to better understand their customers. It helps you get to know your customers’ behavior, struggles, preferences, and needs on a deeper level, enabling you to better serve and communicate with them.

Conducted through a variety of methods, VoC data informs nearly every aspect of the modern business:

Support teams use VoC to anticipate and proactively solve customer problems.

Sales teams learn how to effectively speak to customer pain-points and objections through VoC.

Product teams build roadmaps for product development by tapping into VoC research to identify customer needs, perceived product value, and gaps between the two.

The growing emphasis on Voice of the Customer research parallels the transition to customer-centric businesses — it’s a vital tool in helping businesses increase revenue, retain more customers, and reduce costs for operations like support.

In fact, Aberdeen Group found that companies implementing best-in-class VoC practices saw nearly 10x the annual year-over-year revenue growth of those with less capable VoC programs. That’s due, in part, to 55% higher customer retention .

10 ways to conduct Voice of the Customer research

There are a lot of ways companies can approach conducting Voice of the Customer research. You can choose from a variety of individual methods — which we’ll detail below — and you may often choose to draw on multiple research techniques to ensure a holistic picture of your customers.

1. Interview customers

Customer interviews are one technique you can use to gather VoC data. While interviews are inherently time-intensive, they often glean some of the most valuable feedback.

By going directly to the customer and conducting an in-depth interview, you open the door to really personalized, in-depth research. You can conduct ad hoc customer interviews, survey a representative sample of customers, or hone in on a particular customer segment to interview.

Whether in person, over the phone, or through video chat, interviewers have the opportunity to dig into the customer’s responses and pull out additional insights that other VoC research techniques may miss.

For example, if a customer indicates they struggled with a particular aspect of your product, the interviewer can dig in there and gather more specific details about what the problem was, why it happened, and how your company might fix it.

Plus, customers often view this type of engagement as the most personalized, meaning it can be an opportunity to nurture individual customer relationships, too.

2. Survey customers

Customer surveys are one of the most flexible methods for gathering Voice of the Customer data:

Surveys can include three questions posed immediately after signup.

They can be in-depth, 100-point questionnaires sent to your most engaged customers via email.

Or they can be everything and anything in between.

Surveys are also an eminently scalable option for VoC research. Once the questionnaire is built, you can use it to survey as many customers as you can get to fill it out.

To that end, they can serve as a useful filter for identifying which customers you want to get more details and feedback from, via another, more in-depth VoC technique (like interviews or focus groups).

Plus, surveys are one of the best techniques for gathering both quantitative and qualitative feedback — you can easily include quantitative ratings along with open-ended qualitative questions.

Increase your response rates by adding surveys to your user experience

Research has shown that incorporating feedback loops into the user workflow can lead to better response rates than standard email surveys. Luckily, several tools on the market can help you take this type of approach.

For instance, with Help Scout’s microsurveys feature, you can:

Keep it short. Capture customer sentiment in a matter of seconds with one of six microsurvey types, including NPS®, multiple choice, or a simple thumbs up or down.

Meet customers where they are. Place a Beacon — Help Scout’s engagement widget — anywhere on your website or within your app to incorporate feedback opportunities directly into your user experience.

Be in the moment. Collect richer insights by surfacing a microsurvey at key moments in the customer journey vs. following up with an email after the moment has passed.

Whether you go with Help Scout or another solution, make sure you find survey software that enables you to capture quality Voice of the Customer data that lends to actionable results.

3. Pay attention to social media

As a way to communicate with customers, social media can be invaluable to the VoC process. Connecting over social media often allows for a more informal, two-way, and real-time conversation versus email or phone calls.

Social media also opens up the opportunity for social listening. While customers may regularly engage with your brand on social media — and those interactions are a valuable source of VoC data in their own right — the more potent source comes from social listening.

By monitoring how customers talk about your brand and your product when they aren’t speaking directly to you, you can get a more honest, unfiltered view of their feedback. Similar to surveys, social listening can help you identify customers you wish to conduct more involved VoC research with.

And social listening isn’t limited to the popular social media platforms. You can also find valuable feedback on online forums and communities and websites like Reddit and Quora.

The Complete Guide to Getting Started with Social Media Support

Discover the benefits of supporting customers on social and get the tools you need to set a social media support strategy in motion.

4. Listen to recorded customer calls

Whether they’re sales calls, demos, customer support calls, or something else entirely, any calls your team has with customers are a gold mine for Voice of the Customer data. Wherever customers invest in your brand by actually spending time on the phone, you’re likely to find really helpful feedback.

Customers who get on the phone with you are usually one of three things:

Very interested in your product.

Very happy with your company.

Very unhappy with your company.

In all three of those situations, you’re looking at (usually) detailed, one-on-one conversations with engaged, passionate customers.

Reviewing these conversations offers both macro and micro information. You can identify broader trends across customer complaints, objections, and successes — then, in the same process, you can get more granular feedback and details from each call.

Plus, since you likely record customer calls anyway, you can gather VoC research based on data you already have.

5. Monitor customer reviews

Monitoring your brand’s reputation on the web is vital to winning new customers — and it’s also a good option for Voice of the Customer research.

Depending on the venue, online customer reviews can include everything from a basic 5-star rating to ratings breakouts for individual aspects of your product and company to lengthy open-ended reviews. These are a rich vein of customer feedback .

Reviews are one of the most effective ways to tap into both positive and negative feedback. Plus, reviews on third-party websites are the most direct way to find unsolicited customer opinions — meaning you can find out how customers really talk about your brand out in the wild.

Third-party review sites vary from industry to industry, but here are a few options to get you started:

For general reviews: TrustPilot , Facebook , and Consumer Reports .

For software companies: G2 , Capterra , and TrustRadius .

For travel, food, and hospitality businesses: Yelp , Google My Business , and TripAdvisor .

For home services businesses: Angi and HomeAdvisor .

6. Measure your Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score is a common metric for gauging customer loyalty that simply consists of asking customers how likely they are to recommend your business or product to someone.

While you won’t get a ton of contextual VoC data directly from an NPS survey, you can:

Get a broader understanding of engagement within your customer base.

Identify customers likely to be open to more involved feedback requests.

Find detractors who may have some vital negative feedback to share.

If you aren’t familiar with Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a company, you’ve likely seen it as a consumer. It looks something like this:

Customers who respond with a number under 6 are known as “detractors,” those who respond with 7 or 8 are called “passives,” and customers who choose 9 or 10 are your “promoters.”

7. Conduct focus groups

Focus groups, similar to customer interviews, are often done in person. The primary difference is that focus groups involve a small group of customers, instead of being conducted one-on-one.

The group of customers is gathered together along with a moderator. From there, the moderator presides over a (often free-flowing) discussion about the brand, product, or industry.

As a source of Voice of the Customer data, focus groups are one of the best ways to conduct more exploratory research — in their discussions, groups may often touch on things your company may never have thought to ask about.

Plus, the back and forth between customers can help to draw out consensus and deeper details that other research techniques may gloss over.

Focus groups can also be useful when the feedback required is more specific: seeing how customers perceive a particular new product, for example, or gauging their reactions to a rebrand or advertisement.

8. Offer a feedback form

Regardless of whether you’re actively seeking Voice of the Customer feedback or not, it’s a good idea to have a form available where customers can share their feedback at any given time. This is separate from your Customer Support operation, and it can be an invaluable way to keep a pulse on how customers feel about your brand and product.

Often hosted right on your website, a feedback form allows customers to share their thoughts whenever they arise. That’s useful because it provides unsolicited feedback — meaning each customer who submits a form was inspired to do it, whether by positive or negative experience.

Feedback forms can also help you catch emerging trends on the Voice of the Customer, even when you aren’t actively looking for them.

9. Talk to customer-facing employees

With all the emphasis on going out and soliciting customer feedback, it’s easy to forget that you have employees within your team who are already well-versed in the Voice of the Customer. Team members who talk with customers regularly are often your best window into the customer mind.

That includes, most notably, your Support team, who spend the majority of their time with customers. When problems arise (like a software glitch or a product deficiency), your Support team will often be the first to know and the first to identify widespread problems from isolated issues.

Other teams, like Sales, are also on the front lines of listening to customers’ needs and trying to match them up with what you offer. They can offer invaluable details on customer pain points, objections, and why deals may be lost to competitors.

Try the customer support platform your team and customers will love

Teams using Help Scout are set up in minutes, twice as productive, and save up to 80% in annual support costs. Start a free trial to see what it can do for you.

10. Map customer behavior and UX

Distinct from most of the previous methods we’ve covered here, this technique is more about understanding the customer experience from an analytical perspective.

Here, you want to understand how customers behave versus what they say or perceive. After all, what customers say they want and how they behave don’t always match up.

By using tools designed for website analytics (e.g., Google Analytics ), product analytics (like Amplitude and Mixpanel ), and user experience mapping (like Crazy Egg ), you can get a sense of how customers move throughout your website and, where applicable, your product.

You can also measure how changes to your website or product affect customer behavior. For example, if you see that customers fall out of the ideal customer journey at the same touchpoint, you can identify points of friction and test to find the best solution.

Listen to the Voice of the Customer

Today’s most successful businesses have one thing in common: they’re customer-driven. Business leaders focus on creating products that solve customer problems, streamlining the customer journey, and improving the overall customer experience.

The best way to do those things effectively is to tap in to the voice of your customers. If you’re willing to listen, they’ll tell you just about everything you need to know.

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Kiera abbamonte.

Kiera is a a content writer who works with SaaS and ecommerce companies. Located in Boston, MA, she loves cinnamon coffee and a good baseball game. Catch up with her on Twitter or KieraAbbamonte.com

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Create a project

• 4 contributors

A project is a container that consists of surveys, satisfaction metrics, email templates, Power Automate flows, and reports. You can create, distribute, and analyze a survey by creating a project. You can create a project by using a ready-to-use template or by using a blank template to create the project from scratch.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice offers ready-to-use survey feedback project templates. Each project template includes survey questions, preconfigured satisfaction metrics, email templates, and Power Automate flows for Dynamics 365 business applications. The available project templates are:

Periodic customer feedback : This template is based on Forrester Research customer experience best practices and includes questions to collect customer sentiment at regular intervals. It also consists of a preconfigured email template and the following satisfaction metrics:

Customer sentiment : A sentiment metric that helps you to identify customer sentiment.

Customer satisfaction : A satisfaction metric that helps you to measure the level of customer satisfaction.

Order delivery : This template includes questions to collect timely feedback after an order is delivered. It consists of a preconfigured email template and the following satisfaction metrics:

Net Promoter Score : An NPS metric that helps you to measure customer loyalty.

Product sentiment : A sentiment metric that helps you to identify customer sentiment.

The Send a survey when an order is fulfilled in Dynamics 365 Power Automate flow is created automatically when you create a project from this template. The survey is sent to the customer when an order is fulfilled in Dynamics 365, and the response is automatically integrated with the order and customer records. To see the flow, go to flow.microsoft.com and select My flows in the left pane. The flow is created in the inactive state. You must turn on the flow to use it. You can also customize the flow as per your requirement in Power Automate and then turn on the flow to start using it.

Service visit : This template includes questions to collect timely feedback following a customer visit scheduled with the Dynamics 365 Field Service application. The feedback is automatically integrated with the customer visit record in Dynamics 365, so you can get insights including trends and specific follow-up actions to make sure customer issues are addressed in a timely manner. It also consists of a preconfigured email template and the following satisfaction metrics:

Support : This template includes questions that provides an out-of-the-box, end-to-end solution for measuring customer satisfaction for your Dynamics 365 case management process. It consists of a preconfigured email template and the following satisfaction metrics:

The Send a survey when a case is resolved in Dynamics 365 Power Automate flow is created automatically when you create a project from this template. The survey is sent to the customer when a case is resolved in Dynamics 365. To see the flow, go to flow.microsoft.com and select My flows in the left pane. The flow is created in the inactive state. You must turn on the flow to use it. You can also customize the flow as per your requirement in Power Automate and then turn on the flow to start using it.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice also includes a Blank template you can use to create a survey from scratch and configure it in accordance with your requirements. This template doesn't contain any preconfigured survey questions, workflows, or satisfaction metrics.

Projects, email templates, and satisfaction metrics are primarily based out of Microsoft Dataverse. Refreshing data on Dataverse environment with another will break Customer Voice projects and surveys on the refreshed environment.

Create a project from a template

Creating a project from a template helps you quickly get started with little or no customization. The templates include survey questions that are based on industry best practices and have been curated by subject-matter experts.

Sign in to Dynamics 365 Customer Voice .

On the All projects tab, select New project .

The Project template page is displayed with the available project templates.

Select the required project template, and then select Next .

On the Survey location page, select an environment to create the project in. To see all environments, select See all environments .

In the All environments window, select the environment you want, and then select Select and close .

On the Survey location page, select Create .

The project will be created with survey questions, satisfaction metrics, and Power Automate flows. You can further configure the survey to meet your needs, or send it as-is .

Create a project from the blank template

Creating a project from the blank template gives you the freedom to choose survey questions, create satisfaction metrics, email templates, and Power Automate flows.

On the Project template page, select Blank .

Select Next .

The project will be created with an empty survey. You can now add questions and customize it the way you want.

Create a survey Manage surveys Manage projects

Submit and view feedback for

Additional resources

Voice of the Customer Analysis for a Multinational Medical Device Company

Evaluate global market opportunity through the voice of the customer.

The Voice of the Customer is the hallmark analysis for Strategy Inc, with >3,000 performed over the past 15+ years. Each Voice of the Customers garners insights from one-on-one interviews of, on average, 15 – 30 physicians or other selected key decision makers.

In this case, a multinational medical device developer and manufacturer retained Strategy Inc. to perform a Voice of the Customer for a potential product line under consideration. The objective was to confirm market need, understand clinician preferences, and to evaluate market opportunities for their emerging medical technology. Such efforts are also often used to support forecasting and revenue projections.

Strategy Inc. Proven Processes

At the direction of the company’s marketing team, Strategy Inc. developed a participation strategy, incorporating the Voice of the Customer analysis with answers to a wide range of strategic queries designed to help formulate the executive commercialization strategy for this emerging clinical area.  This Voice of the Customer designed to evaluate clinician needs and preferences, sought also to understand trends, required clinical parameters, the clinical value of specific parameters, and the likelihood for technology adoption within the target clinical market. Strategy Inc. obtained primary data from one-on-one interviews with 30 leading and in-the-trenches physicians, including Intensivists, Anesthesiologists and Emergency Department physicians, in addition to Critical Care Nurses, with half of the participants based in the US and half from Europe.

Strategy Inc. Generates Results

Strategy Inc.’s analysis provided the company with actionable data and insights to frame end-user interest and clinical needs.

Learn more about a Strategy Inc. Voice of the Customer .

Other Projects for Similar Clients

Other projects that have been executed for similar clients seeking market opportunity insights or data for revenue forecasting include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Valuation of a novel thrombectomy catheter that does not require thrombolytics, aspiration or suction
• Market Analysis for an orthobiologic hemostatic agent for use in cardiothoracic, abdominal or spinal procedures
• Market Analysis of an Israeli developed prep-less colonoscopy technology used adjunctively with standard colonoscopies

How to Create and Use Variables in Dynamics Customer Voice

Introduction.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice (formerly known as Microsoft Forms Pro) is a one of feedback management application that allows us to easily keep track of the customer feedback that matters most to our business. In this blog, we are going to see how to use variables in the Dynamics Customer Voice.

If we want to send a Survey to the respective contact record to get their feedback regarding the services which we are providing to them. So the Survey which we are going to send with an Email template, in that if we want to add the name of the “Contact” dynamically to whom we are sending the survey, in that case, we can use Variable to achieve the same.

Below are the steps that need to follow to create and use Variable in Dynamic Customer Voice:

Step 1: Create a new Project in “Customer Voice ” and add your questions in the same.

Step 2: Create a new Email template and then create a new Variable as shown in the below screen clip:

Step 3: After clicking on “New Variable” below window will get appear:

We can see the newly created Variable in the Email Template as shown in the below screen clip:

Note: In the Email Template we have two default variables i.e. First Name and Last Name , which we can also use in a flow as per our requirement.

Step 4: Once the variable created after then we can use it in our Email template as per the requirement. In my case I have used it as shown below:

Once we are done with the above steps we need to create a Power automate Flow, using which we are going to send our Survey to the respective Contact record.

Follow below steps to use Variable in Power automate flow:

Step 5: To send the Survey to the Contact record I have registered the flow on “When a record selected ” triggering action of “Power automate Flow” . And used the “Send a Survey” action to send the survey to the selected Contact record as shown in the below screen clip:

In the above screen clip, we can see that the arrows are highlighted in front of the required fields that need to be filled to send the survey to the respective user with our Email Template.

After selecting the Email template we can see the variable name which we had created as shown in the below screen clip:

So now here, we need to assign/set the “Full name” field of CRM’s Contact entity to the “ContactName” variable as shown in the below screen clip:

Step 6: Save the Power automate Flow and execute the same on the Contact record and check the result. Below is the screen clips for your reference:

We can create variable(s) and use the same as per the requirement in the Email template/Flow using Dynamics Customer Voice.

• AI Use Cases
• Blockchain Use Cases
• Conversational AI
• Data Cleaning
• Data Collection
• Digital Transformation
• Quantum Computing
• Process Mining
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Synthetic Data
• Recommendation Engines
• Proxy Services
• Shortlist Vendors
• Claim Your Solution
• Identify Top Channels in Your Domain

50 ChatGPT Use Cases with Real-Life Examples in 2023

General chatgpt use cases.

• > Textual Applications
• > Coding Applications
• > Audiovisual Applications

Business-function-specific ChatGPT Use Cases

• > Customer Service Applications
• > Data collection
• > Educational Applications
• > Marketing & SEO Applications
• > HR Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly one of the most popular and advancing technologies of recent years. Generative AI models are facilitating numerous tasks, enabling efficiency and automation. Currently, ChatGPT is the prominent generative AI Large Language Model (LLM) storming the internet. According to Similar Web, it has reached 1.8 billion visits by April 2023 since its release in November 2022. 1

ChatGPT has various applications useful to people, companies and various industries. In this article, we explain the top 40 ChatGPT use cases. If you are looking to use your own company’s data for generative AI, you can look into training or fine tuning LLMs .

> Textual Applications

ChatGPT, as a language model , can be used for a wide range of text-based use cases. Some of the most common use cases of ChatGPT include:

1- Content creation

ChatGPT can be used to generate high-quality content for websites, blogs, or social media platforms in a few seconds. This includes creating content like: 

• Product description
• Social media post
• Draft for a business idea
• Long form content like entire articles

It can also be used for creative writing applications, where it can help users generate unique ideas, brainstorm plots, and even write entire stories.

Figure 1. Example of a content creation using ChatGPT with the prompt “Once upon a time”

To learn more about generative AI in copywriting , check our article.

2- Translation

ChatGPT can be used for translation services, where it can automatically translate text from one language to another.

3- Conversational AI

ChatGPT can be used to create intelligent chatbots that can converse with users in natural language. These chatbots can be used for customer service , sales, or support to produce human like responses, as well as for personal virtual assistants .

Learn about the differences between traditional chatbots and ChatGPT .

4- Knowledge discovery

With retrieval augmented generation , businesses can feed relevant information to ChatGPT from their databases. With this data, ChatGPT can inform employees using that company’s private data, helping them discover business information using natural language.

> Coding Applications

5- writing code.

ChatGPT can write code for simple or repetitive tasks, such as file I/O operations, data manipulation, and database queries. However, it’s important to note that its ability to write code is limited and the generated code may not always be the accurate, optimized or desired output.

Figure 2. ChatGPT writing code for a comment

6- Debugging

ChatGPT’s bug fixing abilities can also be a valuable tool for programmers. It can assist in debugging code by proposing possible causes of errors and presenting solutions to resolve them.

Figure 3. ChatGPT helping with debugging code

7- Code completion

ChatGPT can aid in code completion by anticipating the following lines or segments of code based on the context and current code. This can be particularly advantageous for programmers who may not recall all of the syntax and functions of the programming language they are using, saving time and effort.

8- Code refactoring

ChatGPT can recommend methods to enhance and refine the code structure, readability, and performance. Refactoring entails modifying existing code to improve its quality without altering its behavior. ChatGPT can offer suggestions for renaming variables, removing repetitive code, and other enhancements that can make the code more effective and more accessible for other programmers to understand.

Figure 4. ChatGPT refactoring a code it provides as an example

9- Code documentation

When a programmer enters their code into ChatGPT, it can propose suitable documentation templates based on the programming language and the kind of code being documented. For instance, if the code is a function, ChatGPT can propose a function documentation template that includes parameters, return values, and a description of the function’s objective.

Figure 5. ChatGPT providing an example code documentation for a Python function that sorts a list of numbers in ascending order

10- Code snippets generation

ChatGPT has the potential to produce code snippets in multiple programming languages based on user input and requirements. A code snippet is a brief piece of code that exemplifies a particular feature, function, or technique in a programming language. Code snippets can be helpful in illustrating how to execute a specific task or resolve a problem in code and can serve as a foundation for more intricate programming projects.

Figure 6. ChatGPT provides an example code snippet

11- Explaining coding techniques and concepts

ChatGPT can provide explanations and examples of programming concepts, a software product, syntax, and functions, which can be helpful for learning and understanding programming languages. This can be particularly useful for beginner programmers who may be unfamiliar with programming concepts or experienced programmers who are working with a new programming language.

Figure 7. ChatGPT provides an explanation for the question “What is object-oriented programming and how does it work?”

> Audiovisual Applications

In September 2023, OpenAI rolled out multi-modal capabilities to ChatGPT including image processing. 2 Therefore, ChatGPT can perform visual use cases like:

12- Classify images

13- identify objects in images.

Audio use cases include:

14- Transcription

15- text-to-speech, 16- speech-to-speech, > customer service applications, 17- multilingual customer support.

The multilingual support provided by ChatGPT for customer service involves leveraging the large language model’s capabilities to offer assistance to customers who speak different languages. ChatGPT can be trained on a range of languages, and it has the potential to translate messages from one language to another, enabling effective communication between customers and businesses in different languages.

Figure 18. An exemplary multilingual customer response generated by ChatGPT

18- Personalized responses to customer queries

ChatGPT can be trained on customer data, such as:

• Past purchases
• Chat history
• Customer feedback

to create a personalized profile for each customer. When a customer sends a message, ChatGPT can use this profile to provide relevant responses tailored to the customer’s specific needs and preferences.

19- Quick responses to customer inquiries & complaints

ChatGPT can be trained to detect and reply to typical customer complaints, such as problems with product quality, shipping delays, or billing errors. When a customer submits a complaint, ChatGPT can evaluate the message and offer a response that acknowledges the customer’s concerns and presents possible solutions to address the issue.

20- Creating emails for customers

ChatGPT can design custom email templates for specific customers using provided customer data. When a company needs to send an email to a customer, ChatGPT can utilize a template to create an email that is personalized to the customer’s specific interests and requirements.

Figure 19. ChatGPT providing an email template for a certain customer problem

21- Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is used to identify customers who are unhappy or dissatisfied with a product or service, and to take steps to address their concerns before they escalate.

ChatGPT can be trained to recognize a wide range of emotions, including happiness, sadness, anger, and frustration. When a customer sends a message, ChatGPT can analyze the message to determine its sentiment and provide a response that is tailored to the customer’s emotional state.

22- Replying to customer reviews

When a customer leaves a review or comment on online review platforms or your website, ChatGPT can be used to generate a response that addresses the customer’s concerns and offers potential solutions or assistance.

23- Answering FAQs

ChatGPT can be trained on a company’s FAQ page or knowledge base to identify and respond to frequent customer inquiries. When a customer submits a question, ChatGPT can examine the message and offer a response that addresses the customer’s inquiry or guide them to additional resources that may be useful.

To learn more about ChatGPT in customer service , check our article.

> Data collection

Web contains the largest dataset and ChatGPT facilitates web data collection. Use cases include:

24- Generate code for scraping websites

25- clean extracted data, 26- process extracted data.

For more, check out ChatGPT use cases in web scraping .

> Educational Applications

For teachers:

27- Course content creation

ChatGPT can assist teachers in developing innovative ideas for lesson plans, activities, and projects that are in line with defined educational goals and curriculum guidelines. Teachers can employ ChatGPT to produce and organize instructional content, including but not limited to:

• Presentations
• Quizzes (Figure 8)
• Other educational materials customized to meet their students’ individualized requirements

Figure 8. ChatGPT creates a quiz for a class

28- Grammar and writing check

Another application of ChatGPT for educators involves utilizing its natural language understanding capabilities to aid in the assessment and enhancement of written work. This can be implemented in various ways:

• Proofreading and editing
• Providing feedback to students
• Teaching writing skills

29- Grading

ChatGPT can help teachers with the grading of student essays by evaluating the content, structure, and coherence of the written work. The AI can offer feedback on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and syntax while also assessing the quality of the argument or analysis presented. Nonetheless, it is vital to avoid solely relying on ChatGPT for grading purposes. Instead, teachers should have a critical process and employ ChatGPT to create the rubric used for grading.

30- Designing syllabus outline

Incorporating ChatGPT in their teaching approach, educators can harness the AI’s potential to aid in the creation, organization, and structuring of course content in a coherent and efficient way (Figure 9). Some ways in which ChatGPT can help include:

• Developing course objectives and goals
• Generating topics for the course
• Planning lessons
• Identifying and assembling relevant resources and materials for the course

Figure 9. ChatGPT creates a course design on cellular biology

For students:

31- Help with homework

ChatGPT can be useful for students in many aspects of their homework, such as:

• Answering questions (Figure 10)
• Problem-solving
• Concept reinforcement
• Improving writing skills

Figure 10. ChatGPT explains some key concepts for a high school student

32- Research assistance

ChatGPT can be an asset in supporting and streamlining the research process for academic projects, assignments, or personal interests (Figure 11). It can assist in many steps involved in the research process, such as:

• Topic selection
• Background information about the topic
• Identifying relevant resources
• Organizing research
• Citation assistance

Figure 11. ChatGPT provides creative ideas for a term project

33- Language learning

ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for language learning, offering translations, grammar explanations, vocabulary practice, and conversation simulations to help students practice and improve their language skills. Also, it can help students to schedule a program for improving their language skills (Figure 12).

Figure 12. ChatGPT creates a weekly schedule for language learning practices

> Marketing & SEO Applications

34- content creation for content marketing campaigns.

AI-generated texts has numerous applications in marketing beyond the generation of business ideas, including:

• Content creation such as emails, social media posts, blog articles etc. for content marketing
• Scriptwriting and storytelling for advertising goods and services, creating compelling stories and persuasive messages (see Figure 13 for an example)

Figure 13. An example for an AI generated content for advertising a new electric car model by using ChatGPT

35- Personalization of customer experience

By leveraging its natural language processing ( NLP ) capabilities, ChatGPT can generate personalized content for customers that takes into account their preferences, past behavior, and demographics. This enables businesses to create targeted content that connects with their audience on a more personalized level, resulting in higher levels of engagement and conversion rates.

36- Audience research

Audience research involves collecting information and insights about the target audience to gain a better understanding of their interests, preferences, behaviors, and requirements. This helps companies with more effective marketing.

ChatGPT can be used to analyze customer data such as: 

• Search queries
• Social media interactions
• Past purchases to identify patterns and trends in customer behavior

37- Writing product descriptions

Product descriptions are a fundamental aspect of marketing that furnish potential customers with information about a product’s features, benefits, and value. ChatGPT can assist in crafting engaging and informative product descriptions that align with the interests and preferences of the target audience.

38- Chatbot for customer support

Indeed, ChatGPT can be incorporated into a chatbot to deliver prompt and personalized customer support. Chatbots in marketing can address customer inquiries, offer technical support, and troubleshoot issues, among other things for marketing purposes.

39- Creating customer surveys

ChatGPT can help with creating customer surveys :

• Question generation
• Organizing survey structure
• Making surveys multilingual with its translation ability
• Survey analysis

To learn more about ChatGPT in marketing , check our article.

40- Generate topic ideas for content writing

ChatGPT can be used for generating topic ideas for SEO content writing (see Figure 1) by utilizing its language processing capabilities to:

• Produce relevant keywords and phrases
• Analyze competitors’ content to identify gaps in coverage
• Suggest topics based on current trends and user search queries

41- Conduct keyword research

Integrating relevant keywords into content is a vital component of a successful SEO strategy as it assists in identifying the words and phrases that potential customers utilize when searching for products or services associated with the website’s offerings.

ChatGPT can perform functions in keyword search optimization such as:

• Generating keywords (Figure 14)
• Identifying keyword trends

Figure 14. Keyword ideas for B2B marketing content

42- Find the right titles

ChatGPT can aid in crafting captivating and SEO-friendly titles by blending its language generation abilities with its knowledge of SEO best practices (Figure 15). It can produce SEO-friendly titles by guaranteeing that the titles are:

• Descriptive and clearly convey the topic of the content
• Capable of incorporating relevant keywords that are related to the topic
• Concise and to the point, typically falling within the 60-70 character limit for optimal display in search engine results pages.
• Eye-catching and likely to attract clicks, which can help improve click-through rate (CTR) and ultimately, SEO

Figure 15. ChatGPT SEO-friendly title suggestions for content in B2B marketing

43- Group search intent

ChatGPT can assist in search intent grouping by analyzing search queries and categorizing them based on the user’s intended goal or purpose, thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. This can help businesses and marketers understand the intent behind specific search terms and optimize their content and strategies to better meet the needs and expectations of their target audience.

For more on how to use search function of ChatGPT effectively, check our article.

44- Create content structure

ChatGPT can aid in designing content structure by producing outlines and suggesting organization methods for a given topic. This can be advantageous for SEO optimization since a well-structured and organized content not only offers a superior user experience but also enables search engines to comprehend the context and significance of the content.

Figure 16. ChatGPT creating the structure of a content

45- Generate meta descriptions

Meta descriptions function as a form of advertisement for a page, enticing users to click on the link and visit the page. Hence, meta descriptions are a significant factor in SEO. ChatGPT can assist in creating effective meta descriptions by generating content summaries that precisely and concisely depict the primary topic of a page.

After you’ve written your blog post, you can ask ChatGPT to write the meta description: Prompt: "Write a unique meta description for a real estate marketing blog about "'The Role of SMS Marketing in Real Estate Branding'" pic.twitter.com/WqM9NcqK2w — Alex Garcia 🔍 (@alexgarcia_atx) January 9, 2023

46- Create sitemap codes

ChatGPT can be used in generating sitemap codes producing an XML file that lists all the pages and content on a website. 

Figure 17. Example of a simple sitemap code

To learn more about ChatGPT in SEO maximization , check our article.

> HR Applications

47- creating job interview questions.

HR departments frequently require a series of questions to ask job candidates during the interview process, which can be a time-consuming task. AI can be utilized to produce interview questions that pertain to the job position and evaluate the candidate’s qualifications, abilities, and experience.

Figure 20. ChatGPT creates a set of interview questions for a job position

48- Generating onboarding materials

ChatGPT can be used to generate onboarding materials for new employees, such as training videos, handbooks, and other documentation.

49- Job description generation

ChatGPT can be used for creating job descriptions that accurately reflect the required skills and qualifications for a particular position.

50- Answering employee questions

By finetuning ChatGPT with your company’s policies, you can have it answer employee’s questions about HR policies.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI, designed to engage in natural language conversations. ChatGPT leverages machine learning techniques to offer a wide range of applications, ultimately providing substantial benefits to businesses and users alike in today’s dynamic and interconnected world.

If you have questions or need help in finding the right vendors, we can help:

External links

• “ chat.openai.com Traffic Analytics & Market Share | Similarweb ” SimilarWeb . Accessed 20 May 2023.
• “ ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak “. OpenAI . September 25, 2023. Retrieved October 1,2023.

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month. Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider , Forbes, Washington Post , global firms like Deloitte , HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission . You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple. Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization. He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider . Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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Gpt & sustainability: 4 use cases & best practices in 2023, chatgpt code interpreter plugin: definition, 4 use cases, limitations.

Cem Thank you for the ideas. I retired from software QA and now mentor young people in software and IT. I am new to ChatGPT and was casting about for ways to integrate it into my work. Somehow I never thought of using ChatGPT to suggest debugging. I am teaching a jr. high student Python and will work it into our sessions.

Another person was laid off from a management position in manufacturing and is looking at career changes. I have been funneling ideas and information to him, encouraging him to get on board with ChatGPT.

Best wishes. Joel

Sounds great Joel!

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Voice of Customer Strategy, Template & Examples

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#Best Practices

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The advent of the digital era, social media, and other technological innovations are changing the way people connect with the world around them. It’s changing the way people connect with their loved ones, handle their banking, travel the globe, find new restaurants, and do their shopping.

And if understanding our customers is one of the key tenets of any successful business, how do businesses understand their customers’s needs and wants in a quickly changing world? How do businesses keep track of what they can do for their customers, what their customers need from them, and what their customers are going to be interested in in the future?

The answer is simple: Voice of Customer.

What is Voice of Customer?

Voice of customer (VoC) is an analytic method used by businesses to better understand the needs and wants of their customers. 

You can break down VoC into two primary categories:

• Customer Needs: VoC can provide a comprehensive look into what your customers want out of a company, service, product, etc.
• Company Strategy : VoC will allow you to analyze valuable data and information to make informed decisions about business strategies at every level of the corporate hierarchy.

While Voice of Customer might seem like a fairly simple method, it’s executed in a flexible, diverse, and multi-faceted manner. 

There are a number of techniques that companies can employ in gaining information on their customers’ needs and behavior, and all of that data can be utilized in a variety of ways to make smart, data-informed business decisions.

Businesses, for example, can utilize their data for rebranding campaigns, better product design, bolstering their customer service strategies, marketing, advertisements, and offering new or improved services. 

So what kind of strategies can companies employ to learn about their customers’ needs and wants?

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Voice of Customer Methodologies

Voice of Customer methodologies refers to the variety of approaches that businesses can utilize to accrue data and learn more about their customers. The key is to apply as many techniques as practically possible to ensure you’re approaching your customers from every angle. 

Here are some key Voice of Customer methodologies you can utilize today.

• Surveys : One of the most trusted and oldest ways of learning about people, surveys are a great way to help you understand your customers and the kind of issues they’re facing. To achieve the best results, make sure you’re asking the right questions, keeping your survey concise and easy to understand, and coming up with targeted questions that reveal important aspects of your business.
• Live Chat: Live chat has become one of the fastest growing and popular ways for customers to ask questions or present issues to customer service representatives. While using live chat is important to make sure customers are satisfied, it’s also a great way for you to learn about the issues your customers are faced with. You can also present surveys at the end of every live chat dialogue.
• Social Media : Social media is a great way to gain direct and non-direct forms of data and information. Customers can message you directly through your social media pages, which is a great way, like live chat, to learn about their concerns. But you can also follow what’s trending, what people are liking and sharing, and the kind of comments and conversations that take place surrounding your product, industry, and company.
• Customer Reviews: Another tried and tested method for learning about your customers’ experiences is through direct customer reviews. These tend to be more helpful because customers will typically go out of their ways to write a customer review if either their experience was really positive or really negative, which can give you a good idea of what’s working and what isn’t.

Voice of Customer Template

You should have several Voice of Customer templates on hand for a variety of scenarios, and you should be constantly updating those templates in order to understand the changes in the market and your customers’ needs. 

Like the VoC methodologies and application processes, there are a number of Voice of Customer templates you can utilize that will allow you to learn different aspects of the customer experience. The efficacy of these templates also has a lot to do with how they provide a common language and form that you can distribute to every department in your company. 

Some of the most common Voice of Customer Templates include:

• VoC Matrix through Excel : A VoC matrix is a useful chart that allows you to assess the things your customers least or most value.
• VoC Table: A Voc table is a very simple way to translate customer reviews and responses into concrete actions.
• VoC Data Charts : In order to make your data and information readable and easily understandable, you’re going to rely on data chart templates to simplify your findings. Utilizing charts, tables, and graphs to identify what your data is saying about your customers will allow all of you to distribute your findings to the rest of your company.
• VoC Surveys : Voice of Customer Survey templates will translate surveys into easily readable models that communicate what a survey is saying about customer satisfaction and what businesses can do with that information.

Voice of Customer will allow businesses to get closer to their customers as consumers and people. In a quickly changing world with quickly changing industries, companies need to utilize VoC to understand their customers’ needs and adjust their strategies accordingly. 

Gladly’s software has revolutionized the way businesses do customer service. Companies are far too often seeing their customers as assets, missing the bigger picture that customer service is about connecting with people. Place your customers at the center of your customer experience platform with Gladly.

About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies who want to maximize the lifetime value of their customers. Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or case to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered around people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more revenue.

The world’s most innovative consumer companies like Godiva, JOANN, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences. 

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