What is the Voice of the Customer (VOC)?
Voice of the customer, or VoC, refers broadly to the various processes by which organizations gather feedback from their customers, and advocate for the interests of customers within the organization. It can also refer to explicit feedback and requests or implicitly observed needs and desires. Engaging with customers to better understand their needs and creating a sense of empathy, increases the likelihood that you’re able to develop a product or features that will solve the customers’ problems.
Who is responsible for the VoC at an organization?
The Product Manager, and sometimes UX, are responsible for carrying the “voice of the customer” into the organization. The success or failure of a product in large part falls on the role of the Product Manager and their core team. Since the product is ultimately attempting to serve customers and Product strategy is fundamentally a customer-facing strategy, the responsibility of VOC falls squarely with Product Management. It may not be Product who conducts every interview or does all of the analysis, but it is Product who coalesces these inputs into a comprehensive product strategy and must advocate for that strategy and thus, the needs of the customers it serves.
Listening to the Voice of the customer
It is one thing to listen to your customer. It’s another to fully engage with empathy to help solve the problems that your customers are facing. Here are a few ways you can make sure you’re getting maximum impact during your conversations with customers.
- Know your Customer (KYC) – Knowing your customer means more than just understanding their likes and dislikes. KYC refers to a vetting process. Before doing a deep dive with your customers about your potential product features, do a basic vetting process asking key questions.
- Customer Personas – Now that you’ve properly vetted the customer that you’re going to be engaging with, you’ll want to segment and profile them creating a user persona. You’re likely solving different customer segments that have different needs – it is important to break that out to understand those needs and to whom they apply.
- Empathy – In an effort to develop empathy for your customers, try using the product yourself for a period of time to gain insight into the full experience. And when understanding the customers needs, try to go deep enough to understand and relate to the problem to understand the motivations and what a genuine solution would look like.
- Sharing is Caring – Share the customer feedback, both positive and negative with the team. The more the team feels like the success and failure of the product is a team effort the more inspired they will be to build a successful product.
What are some VOC benefits?
Listening to customers and engaging with them in an effort to better understand their wants and needs relative to your product can be an effective way to organize new features in terms of relative importance and satisfaction. This process also provides product insights, creates market awareness and highlights customer trends.
Conclusion
A thorough understanding of Voice of Customer is the path to customer-centric innovation. The most likely path to success is to capture the heart of your customers with your product. This can only be done if you listen to the voice of your customer.
