Do you wish you had more insight into what your customers want? More data that could help you improve your product? Getting this information may not be as difficult as you think — using voice of the customer (VoC) techniques, you can collect customer feedback in a variety of ways.
In this post, we’ll cover 13 VoC techniques that were inspired by input from 16 product marketing and customer success experts. These techniques will help you learn from your customers and deliver a better product or service.
13 VoC Techniques
Many of the VoC techniques below are easy to implement. You may already be using some of these techniques — we’ll explain how to get the most out of them.
1. Feedback form
What it is: A feedback form is a simple digital form that asks customers to rate a product or service. It can be delivered via a chat window, a pop-up on a website, via email, or via SMS.
How to use it: You can use the feedback form to identify opportunities for improving your product or service. When feedback is negative, consider following up with the reviewer to get additional insights.
2. Customer interview
What it is: The customer interview is an in-depth and personalized way to collect customer feedback — usually in person or by phone. This is one of the less common VoC techniques, but is useful in some situations.
How to use it: One of the best uses of a customer interview is to talk to customers that are ending their relationship with your business. For SaaS companies, it’s helpful to know why a customer chooses not to renew, and asking a departing customer for feedback could leave them with a favorable impression of your business.
3. Net promoter score (NPS) survey
What it is: A new promoter score is the percentage of your minus the percentage of your detractors. To get this score, you’ll need an NPS survey, which is a type of feedback form that asks users to rate your product, service, or brand on a scale of 1 to 10. Promoters are customers who choose a rating of 9 or 10; detractors are those who choose a rating of 6 or lower.
How to use it: Follow-up with detractors to learn more. Maybe their lack of enthusiasm stems from not knowing how to fully use your product, or the quality of your support. Check in with your promoters, too — thank them for being loyal customers, and ideally, offer some kind of discount or incentive that will keep them on board.
4. Live chat
What it is: Live chat is a form of customer service in which a live agent can communicate with a customer online via a chat window. The software that powers a live chat window can start a conversation with a chatbot, then based on a customer’s responses, transfer the chat to an agent.
How to use it: A live chat is an important part of voice of customer research because when customers are communicating in real-time, they might be more candid, giving agents insights they might otherwise not get with a feedback form.
5. In-moment survey
What it is: An in-moment survey is a short request for feedback that occurs when a customer is interacting with you or completing an action — finishing an online purchase or interacting with your product, for example.
How to use it: These surveys are ideal for collecting feedback about your product and customer experience. You can use this VoC technique to gauge customer effort, or establish your Feature Fit Index (FFI).
6. Feature request
What it is: Customers who are regular users of a particular software may at times discover that it doesn’t meet all of their needs and submit a feature request. Feature requests can help companies identify flaws in their software, or the need for more frequent updates.
How to use it: If you receive a feature request by email, follow-up with a phone call. You’ll want to gather as much context as possible about the task your customer is hoping to accomplish, and a personal check-in shows that you care about your customers.
7. Focus group
What it is: A focus group can be a group of your customers, or a group of people that meet certain criteria you define, based on what you hope to learn from the experience. A focus group is usually fewer than a dozen people who gather to discuss topics presented by a moderator.
How to use it: A focus group is a voice of the customer methodology that can help you gauge reactions to innovation and change, such as a new product feature, a rebranding, or a different way of doing business.
8. Support ticket
What it is: A support ticket is an online form that customers can use to report a bug or request support. This form is usually linked to a CRM, or it generates an email that’s delivered to the support team.
How to use it: As with other forms of feedback, a support ticket can help you identify problems like coding errors, a poor user experience, or a lack of integration with other platforms. (Tip: Set up your ticketing system so that customers have to select products and/or categories, so your team can sort them accordingly.
9. Feature preview
What it is: A feature preview is a notice about a new feature, usually delivered within an app or via email. It may include a screenshot, a short video, or a link to a program like InVision, where customers can click through to see new features or functionality.
How to use it: Asking for feedback on a new feature accomplishes two objectives: It makes customers feel that you value their opinion, and it helps you refine features before roll-out.
10. Email
What it is: Email is still a popular way to communicate, despite the emergence of other, more immediate communication formats.
How to use it: Email is a good way to foster brand loyalty with existing customers. You can let customers know about new developments with your business or product, send special offers, or invite them to look at something on your website. You can also embed surveys in emails to collect feedback.
11. Online review
What it is: An online review is a powerful marketing tool, as many consumers read reviews before making a purchase. But these often don’t occur organically — you have to reach out to customers and ask for reviews.
How to use it: There are a few ways to put reviews to work for you. Often, companies solicit reviews via email following a customer’s purchase, or via SMS. Whatever process you decide to use, make sure it requires little effort for your customers. And don’t forget to respond to all reviews — demonstrate that customer voices matter to you.
12. Social media
What it is: Social media offers a way to interact with customers in a meaningful and ongoing way.
How to use it: Establishing a social media presence isn’t enough. If you’re interested in capturing voice of customer insights, you’ll need someone to monitor your social profiles for comments and shares, and respond in a timely manner. You can tie this into your campaign for reviews — if someone stands out as a top fan on social, invite them to write a review.
13. Website behavior
What it is: Website behavior can be the voice of the customer, even when no words are exchanged.
How to use it: Using insights from heat maps, and reviewing analytics such as page views and bounce rates, you can see which sections of your site are working well for you and which ones could use improvement.
25 Experts Share Their Top VoC Techniques
Kristy Smith
We've been using Tidio to provide live chat and prompted chat bots to our readers. We're currently in the midst of a redesign/relaunch and Tidio was hugely valuable when it came to collecting feedback and ideas from readers. Ill admit there was bit of a learning curve when it came to bots, but now, the ability to ask targeted questions based on where a user is on the site is incredible!
Chris Dreyer
Simply put, we ask them. I know many individuals will probably toss NPS as an answer....and yes we do that too, but nothing beats a candid conversation. Any complaint is an opportunity to improve. Having the tough conversations allows for growth. It also creates trust with your customers. If they feel their voice is being heard, and you're doing your best to address the concerns, it's a recipe for long-term success.
Paige Arnof-Fenn
Market research is more important now than ever! Whatever we thought we knew or understood before Covid about our customers and market must now be checked because the world has changed so much since last March. My advice for small businesses is to go on a Listening Tour! Politicians do it all the time and it is great for business too. Make a list of current & lost customers and prospects, ask a few smart open ended questions then sit back and take notice. They will be more than happy to tell you what is on their mind.
If you listen to what they share with you there will be plenty of opportunities to help them and improve your business too. I did it when business slowed and picked up several new clients but you can do it any time. It is a great way to connect and a lot of fun too.
Start listening with no strings attached, you'll be amazed what you find. It does not cost anything with social distancing now it is all video & conference calls and virtual coffee meetings anyway and you will get an earful. I did my listening tour the old fashioned way by sending out e-mails & picking up the phone then brought a pad & pen, asked a few open ended questions then shut up and started taking notes. I had no idea what to expect and got a lot of great feedback as a result.
Brett Casey
Trying to get our finger on the pulse of who and what are customer is, their core values, behaviors, etc. has been quite the learning experience in a good way. Of course we use NPS Promoter Scores and after-call surveys. I've also learned to listen closely to the agents when they bring up customer concerns; seems much easier to get to the root cause of their issues by doing so.
We're not afraid to ask for reviews (Social Media, Google, etc) and feel the ones that need the quickest response is a bad review. All of these help me understand what the customers really think of us. Early on, I tended to operate my deal here how I wanted to, and just assumed everybody loves my agency....of course that isn't true.
By responding rather than reacting to positivity and negativity from customer feedback, it has helped us grow immensely year over year.
Aiza Coronado
It's simple really. We ask them.
When they send us inquiries, we ask them why they're looking for a service like ours and why now. When they didn't accept the proposal, we ask them why. When we close a deal, we ask them what made them say yes.
It's from these quick feedback where we get our next marketing copy. And insights on how we can improve.
I like hanging out in Facebook Groups to listen to how our prospects talk, but it's different when you get to hear them say it... especially from the certain segment of SaaS founders (and fellow SaaS service providers) that we attract.
Aleksandra Mitroshkina
Our customer success team conducts interviews with the customers on a weekly basis and then fill the Voice of the Customer file which we share on with the Product Team and Stakeholders. This is a very powerful tool that adds more transparency and insight to the usage of our services.
Blaine Bertsch
As we have an intimate relationship with our Partners and direct clients - we will reach out as we look to find better solutions or consider strategic opportunities with our platform - to see if they feel they will be beneficial and value-add to their business and opportunities. We will utilize technology to collect the qualitative/quantitive data as well as simple email comms as our clients appreciate a personal touch.
Trey Gibson
We tried NPS in the past and our customers didn't really seem to get the concept of the question which would cause our score to be lower than it should so we moved to something more straight forward and simple which is a pop up in both our mobile and web app with a simple thumbs up / thumbs down option and after our customer chooses an option they are given an open text field to input additional context.
The pop up is triggered at different points throughout the customer journey after 7 days, 30 days and 90 days and then every 6 months so we can get an idea of how we're living up to their expectations throughout their lifecycle.
Sarah McVanel
I include their lessons learned as well as successful practices in my keynotes, when I'm interviewed for podcasts, and bonus materials for clients (e.g., 70+ ways to recognize your customers). I love sharing client success stories to inspire others, whether they are my clients or not. It gives them the recognition they deserve, and spread the learning!
Mateusz Krempa
Apart from standard tools and processes like NPS or Quarterly Business Review meetings, we take a special approach to quantifying feature requests that our customers share in different forms.
We collect all the feedback we can get - from meetings, emails, support tickets, surveys - and map it to a unified template in a Jira project. Additionally, we ask more specific questions about customer' needs and expectations, which will help Product Managers to better understand the use-cases.
Later on, we review all the feature requests. We use criterias like: overall benefit for the product, alignment with our strategic goals and value proposition or frequency. After revision, we incorporate the most valuable requests into our roadmap. This process makes our customer feedback more actionable.
Once a given item is assigned to a specific release on our roadmap, Account Managers reach out to all requesters and inform them about that. Our customers are pleased with our proactive approach and feel satisfaction when involved in product development.
Petra Odak
It’s actually pretty simple - we are very passionate about providing support in real time so we are very active in our live chat. This is where we collect the most data about our product and talk to our customers to resolve their questions and problems.
This is a goldmine for capturing the voice of our customers which we then use for creating new copy for our home page, product copy, emails, blogs, you name it. Our tool of choice is Intercom, which is a bit pricey for some companies but there is no better live chat app out there at the moment.
Ryan Dunagan
We have an active review management program in place across several vendors. These reviews provide critical customer insights and feedback that directly or indirectly influence every part of the business.
Paul Granger
Social listening also called social media listening or social media monitoring is the act of crawling the Internet, specifically on social media platforms, for mentions of a brand or a product. This is often done through the use of dedicated tools for social listening such as Hootsuite, HowSociable, HubSpot, Social Mention, Sprout Social, and TweetReach.
Mandy Wu
At Voilà, content creators' needs sit at the center of our product development. From beta testings to post-launch, we combine the techniques of in-app/on-site surveys to capture explicit feedback with heatmap/session recording to unearth unexpressed voices.
Sean Carty
Understanding our customers is core to my role as a product marketer. It informs everything from feedback I give to our product team to the messaging and enablement I use to support sales and marketing.
Not only that, but customer sentiment and references are invaluable assets in building confidence with prospective customers. Beyond my own purposes, the voice of our customers is key when it comes to directing our engineering resources and improving our sales and support processes.
Because our customers’ feedback is so important across our business, we’re capturing that signal at multiple points, pre and post-sale, along the customer journey. We do this at scale through direct interviews and feedback surveys run by marketing, product, customer success, and others. More focused feedback is discussed in regular meetings with our customer advocacy board populated by leadership at strategic accounts, in win/loss analyses we conduct for noteworthy opportunities, as well as periodic business reviews and exit interviews run by our customer success team. We’re also in the process of implementing a post-onboarding CSAT survey.
Our voice of customer efforts have helped us in a number of ways. One specific instance that comes to mind is a win/loss interview I did with the Director of Brand Marketing from a popular cycling gear manufacturer. Through the interview I learned that they struggled with retailers using unapproved creative – sometimes even belonging to competitors – to promote their products. They explained that they chose Brandfolder because our superior, intuitive user experience was a competitive differentiator for them.
That it would make them stand out by giving their retailers an exceptionally easy way to leverage their approved brand content. Incorporating this customer’s voice allowed us to really strengthen our story when marketing to companies in similar situations.
At its center, capturing our "voice of the customer" is a complete process of gathering feedback from the clients, making sure they feel heard and making it clear we understand where the feedback is coming from. We put a lot of effort into making customer centricity a key piece of our DNA at Brandfolder.
Raviraj Hegde
1. Hotjar feedback: We have enabled a feedback option on our entire platform via hotjar. This feedback option has 5 star options to leave both positive and negative feedbacks. We work on negative feedback immediately if its in our product pipeline or easy to implement.
2. CSAT score: We also have customer satisfaction scores that help us identify if we are doing a good job.
3. Quarterly user surveys with emails: We send quarterly user surveys to all of our users asking what features they want us to build, do they have any comments on improving our existing features.
At Donorbox we have more than 35,000 active users, so we have feedback options on the go. We are always looking for ways to improve our product with more features, simplicity and ease of use.
