Why run a formal Voice of the Customer programme?

Asking a group of customers for their unfiltered opinions of your business can be a daunting prospect. But while the idea can be a little uncomfortable, it’s one more business leaders and marketers should embrace.

Customers have never been more demanding, discerning and diverse. Trying to second guess what they think of your business, what their priorities are and where they need help most is both a significant and unnecessary risk.

Markets are increasingly competitive and, as a result, more businesses are investing in listening and response mechanisms to help drive loyalty and revenue growth. Some are implementing more formalised ‘Voice of the Customer’ (VoC) programmes to gather key insights directly from their prospects and customers - ensuring strategic go-to-market decisions are more informed.

The purpose of a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme

A VoC project will help you find the common trends across many different areas, such as the real buyers’ journey, typical vendor selection criteria and their prevailing experiences with your brand. Such customer insight will help you validate assumptions and provide vital evidence to drive stakeholder consensus as to the best ways to find and serve customers. It will often provide some breakthrough revelations too, which can help you move the dial in your favour, such as finding new opportunities for competitive differentiation or diversification.

But it’s not just about discovering new opportunities. VoC can also help you avoid costly mistakes. With the millions invested in product or value proposition development, marketing programmes, customer experience (CX) initiatives and sales development, gut feel is not enough to guide your thinking in each of these areas. It’s now essential for the true voice of the customer (VoC) to shape decision-making - because there is simply too much at stake.

As Jim Davies, Research Director at Gartner suggests, “VoC is now being viewed as a must-have strategy. From a corporate perspective, the focus on understanding customers by listening to them and using that understanding to market differently, sell differently, support differently, redesign processes and change the product, is becoming more and more important.”

When to use a VoC programme?

There are many benefits to running a VoC project, but it can be particularly advantageous if you are about to embark on one (or more) of the following initiatives:

• Developing your value proposition
• Repositioning or launching your brand
• Creating a new marketing and/or content strategy
• Understanding levels of customer satisfaction
• Entering new markets or categories
• Building account plans & ABM strategies
• Seeking greater understanding of your buyers’ journey
• Analysing won and lost sales opportunities
• Assessing your approach to sales/business development/marketing
• Devising a customer experience strategy

A VoC programme should be tailored to the main outcomes you are looking for, but there is certainly scope for you to garner insights that can inform and guide multiple initiatives.

Running a VoC programme: The research phase

The first step in any formal VoC programme is to identify exactly what you want to achieve from the VoC process. Do you want to uncover the real reasons why you’ve been unsuccessful with lost prospects? Do you need to understand what problems really matter to your customers? Do you want to learn how your business is perceived by the market?

Once you’ve decided your primary focus, you’ll need to create open-ended interview questions designed to reveal these insights. Typically, a minimum of 10 VoC interviews lasting 30 minutes each will provide just enough information for you to gather trends and key insights.

There is merit in increasing the number of interviews, but you can reach a point where new insights become less frequent and the findings are all the same. VoC should be seen as a pragmatic alternative to the bottomless pit of market research, which can be expensive and take too long to complete.

It’s important to note that the approach being advocated here is qualitative and interview-based. This gives you the opportunity to dig deeper into individual interviewee responses on the fly and adapt the conversation.

There are VoC listening tools available that can be used to scale your programme to a much wider pool of contacts, but this approach will limit you because only the same standard questions can be asked each time. If such tools are to be used, they should be deployed following the initial qualitative process, to validate whether the insights you’ve discovered are indeed common across your wider customer base.

Running a VoC programme: Selecting the right interviewees

The next step is the critical selection of candidates for your VoC programme. The underlying ethos for VoC is best articulated by the well-publicised quote from Bill Gates, ‘Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.’

Less than satisfied customers or prospects who’ve not bought from you give you the one thing that happy customers won't - the opportunity to see where there are issues in your business. Generally speaking, happy customers are just that - happy. And while it’s reassuring to hear them speak favourably, they will mostly tell you everything is fine, which means you won’t really learn anything insightful.

Keep this in mind when selecting a cross-section of customers, ex-customers and recent prospects. Don’t confuse VoC with a customer satisfaction survey or Net Promoter Score (NPS). These are valid exercises in their own right, but they are fundamentally different. VoC is not designed to measure customer success - it’s a vehicle for learning where opportunities exist for you to improve and evolve your business.