What is voice of the customer (VoC)?
Voice of the customer (VoC) is the practice of capturing what customers say about their experience, reading it for patterns and acting on it. A VoC program brings scores and comments from many moments into one view that every team can use.
VoC in one idea
The voice of the customer is what customers say about what they need and how their experience went, gathered on purpose and read as a whole. A single survey hears about one moment. A VoC program listens across the moments that matter, such as buying, getting help and renewing, and asks the same way each time so the results compare.
The term comes from product development, where teams wrote down customers' needs in their own words before designing anything. Today it covers the whole relationship and serves product, marketing, support and operations, each reading the part of the experience they own.
Every program has the same parts: collect feedback at key moments, read it into a few clear themes, share what it says with the teams that decide, and close the loop with customers. Most programs stall at the reading, when hundreds of comments a week pile up in a spreadsheet nobody has time for.
- Also called
- VoC, customer listening program
- Draws on
- Survey answers, comments, support conversations, reviews, interviews
- Common metrics
- NPS for the relationship, CSAT for moments, CES for tasks
- Usually owned by
- Customer experience, shared with product, support and marketing
How a VoC program works
A VoC program repeats one cycle, and each turn should end with a change customers can notice. A program that only collects becomes a report nobody reads.
- Collect: ask at a few key moments, in the channel where the customer is
- Read: sort comments into themes and follow the scores over time
- Share: put findings in front of the teams that own each part of the experience
- Act: fix what comes up most and give each urgent answer an owner
- Close the loop: tell customers what changed because they answered
Voice of the customer methods
Each source hears a different part of the story. Surveys give you numbers you can follow and comments you can sort, so most programs build on them and add the other sources where they help.
Whatever the mix, read every source with the same list of themes. Then “delivery delays” means the same thing in a checkout survey, a support case and an interview.
| Method | What it captures | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Surveys at key moments | Scores and comments | Following the experience over time |
| Open questions | The customer's own words | Learning why scores move |
| Support conversations | Problems customers raise | Spotting issues early |
| Reviews and social posts | Public opinion | How others see you |
| Interviews | Depth and context | Understanding a need before building |
How to start a VoC program
Start small. A purchase or sign-up, a support case and a regular check-in on the relationship cover most of what customers go through. Give each moment one metric and one open question, and add more moments once these run on their own.
Agree on the themes before the first report, and decide who reads what. A program that sends every team the same long report gets skimmed, while a short summary of the themes each team owns gets read.
- Pick three moments and one metric for each
- Write one list of themes for the whole company
- Name an owner for each part of the experience
- Share a short summary on a fixed schedule
A voice of the customer example
Say your program collects 1,200 comments in a quarter from three surveys, and 340 of them are about delivery. Each survey alone shows delivery as one theme among several. Read together, delivery covers about 28% of everything customers said, which makes it the program's top priority.
That view across surveys is the point of VoC. The checkout team, the support team and the account managers each saw part of the problem, and only the combined count shows its size.
- Checkout survey
- 180 of 500 comments on delivery
- Support follow-up
- 100 of 400 comments on delivery
- Quarterly NPS email
- 60 of 300 comments on delivery
- Delivery across the program
- 340 of 1,200, about 28%
Running a VoC program in Usertick
Run each survey where its moment happens: on your website or in your web app, in an email to a contact list, or behind a link and QR code for a store, a room or an event. Every answer from every survey and channel lands in one inbox.
Usertick files each written answer into your organization's categories and themes, started from a pack for your industry, so a theme means the same thing on every survey. Results shows NPS, CSAT and CES with their change from the period before, and the Overview writes what changed across every survey once a period has 30 responses.
Share dashboards with the whole organization or with chosen people, and from Pro, send a survey's results or a dashboard as a PDF to email, Slack or Microsoft Teams every day, week or month. On every plan, alerts post to Slack or Teams when NPS or urgent responses cross a line you set.
Mistakes to avoid with a VoC program
Small choices that keep the results useful.
- 01
Starting with every moment
A program that surveys every touchpoint on day one buries the team in answers. Start with three moments and add more once those run on their own.
- 02
Keeping findings in one team
VoC pays off when the teams that own each part of the experience see what customers say about it. Send each team a short summary on a schedule.
- 03
Changing the questions every quarter
New wording breaks the comparison with past periods. Keep the core questions the same and add new ones beside them.
- 04
Never telling customers what changed
Customers stop answering when nothing seems to follow. Say what you fixed in your release notes or your next email.
Frequently asked questions
Survey scores such as NPS and CSAT, written comments, support tickets, reviews, interview notes and the reasons customers give for canceling. Anything customers say about their experience counts, as long as it is collected and read on purpose.
Usually a customer experience or customer success lead, with product, support and marketing as the main readers. The owner keeps the questions consistent and makes sure findings reach the teams that act.
Fewer than most teams expect. A purchase or onboarding survey, a support follow-up and a regular relationship survey are enough to start, and more can follow once those run on their own.
Usertick reads the answers to your surveys. Feedback on review sites and in help desks stays in those tools, and your surveys can ask the same customers at the moments those tools cover.
In Usertick, set how often each website survey can come back after it is closed, and add earlier survey rules, on 1 survey on Free and on every survey from Starter, so someone who answered one survey recently isn't shown another.
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