The term Voice of Customer (VOC) first appeared in 1993 in a study by Abraham Fagen and Lawrence Brown, when they described it as a methodology for collecting and analyzing customer expectations and needs to create competitive products, and today this approach is used in both B2C and B2B companies, because customer focus has become a key factor in success in any market.
Companies operating in the field of SaaS, e-commerce, financial technologies, B2B sales and even traditional retail actively use VOC to identify customer pain points, understand their motivations and adapt marketing, product and service strategies based on real data, not guesswork.
What is Voice of Customer?
The voice of customer methodology provides a structured approach to capturing and analyzing customer insights. Voice of Customer (VOC) is a methodology that systematically collects, analyzes, and applies customer data from their actual words, reviews, and interactions with a brand, and the goal of this approach is to understand what influences a customer’s decision to buy a product, stay with the company, or switch to a competitor.
Companies that implement VOC study not only direct feedback, but also hidden signals that can be extracted from customer conversations, social media, customer service, and behavioral data, because often customers themselves cannot clearly articulate their needs, but analyzing their experiences and behavior provides valuable insights for optimizing marketing, sales, and products. To gather voice of the customer effectively, businesses must implement systematic processes across multiple touchpoints.
Key elements of VOC include:
- Customer feedback – reviews, ratings, complaints, and suggestions received through surveys, chats, email, or social media. Using an ICP Generator can help you create a highly targeted ideal customer profile, which is essential for accurately collecting VOC and ensuring your marketing and product strategies address the right pain points.
- Context of interaction – when, where, and in what situations customers provide feedback, as well as what emotions they experience.
- Behavioural data – information about how users behave on the site, in the application or when interacting with support.
- Sentiment Analysis – determining the general mood of customers (positive, neutral, negative) and identifying problem areas.
- Comparative analysis – studying the VOC of competitors to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your own product.
Importance of Voice of Customer
What is VOC in marketing? It's the practice of using customer feedback to optimize marketing strategies. Companies that use Voice of Customer increase conversion, reduce customer churn, and create products that the market really needs because they don’t guess, but work with real insights.
VOC affects three key areas of business:
- Marketing – companies that analyze VOC understand what triggers, emotions, and pain points motivate customers to buy, and adapt advertising and content strategies so that they resonate and work towards conversion. Marketing VOC focuses specifically on customer insights that can improve messaging and campaigns.
- Product – VOC allows you to identify weaknesses in UX, missing features, and factors affecting customer satisfaction, which helps not only improve the product, but create solutions that exactly meet the expectations of the audience.
- Sales and customer service – VOC helps you understand what objections prevent customers from making a purchase decision, what questions they ask most often, and how you can adapt sales scripts and support to increase LTV and user retention.
A prime example is Slack, which at the start was just an internal communication tool in a gaming studio, but thanks to active VOC analysis, they found out that teams needed a simple but functional alternative to email, which led to the product reformatting and the launch of one of the most successful B2B SaaS services in the world, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2021 for $27.7 billion. Another case is McDonald's, which in 2015 conducted a global VOC analysis and found out that their customers wanted more customization in the menu and improved ingredient quality, after which the chain launched the "Create Your Taste" option, which allowed visitors to create their own burgers, as well as a program to update the composition of dishes, which led to increased sales and increased customer satisfaction.
Key Methods for Collecting Voice of Customer
Common VOC methods include surveys, interviews, social listening, and support ticket analysis. I have collected five key methods for collecting VOC that help you understand your customers better and turn their voice into real business decisions. How to collect voice of customer: implement multiple channels including surveys, social listening, and interview programs.
1. Surveys and questionnaires are the fastest way to collect VOC
Questionnaires and surveys are a basic but effective way to understand what customers think because they can be used to ask questions about user experience, satisfaction level, pain points, and even test new ideas, but it is important not to just hand out standard forms, but to correctly formulate questions in order to receive not template, but valuable answers.
I have selected several convenient services that will help you set up and automate surveys. Google Forms is a simple and free tool if you need to quickly collect opinions. Typeform is a convenient solution with question logic that makes surveys more interactive. In my opinion, the best choice for advanced analysis is SurveyMonkey, as it automatically segments responses and helps identify key insights.
In 2019, Airbnb surveyed users who frequently cancelled bookings and found that the main problem was a lack of trust in hosts, after which the company implemented an improved profile verification system and added new security guarantees, which reduced the number of cancellations by 12%.
2. Analyze customer conversations - identify hidden pain points
Often, customers do not fill out surveys, but share their real emotions in conversations with support, sales managers, or in chats, so analyzing real dialogues helps to identify what customers are thinking about but do not directly say in surveys.
I recommend using Gong and Chorus.ai if you need to analyze calls and messages with customers using AI that identifies sentiment and key topics. In my opinion, Salesforce Service Cloud is one of the best tools for deep analysis of customer communications, as it allows you to automate the collection of VOC and combines data from different channels.
In 2019, Zappos noticed that customers were frequently complaining about shoe size confusion in phone calls, even though this wasn’t an issue in their on-site reviews, and after analyzing thousands of customer service conversations, they added dynamic sizing suggestions and video guides, which reduced returns by 14% year over year.
3. Social Media and Review Monitoring – VOC Without Asking Directly
A Customer Persona Generator is another valuable tool that enables businesses to turn VOC insights into actionable profiles, helping to refine communication strategies and better meet customer expectations. Today, customers most often discuss companies not on their websites, but on social media, Reddit, Twitter, and forums where they openly express their opinions, complain, or recommend products, and this is why social listening is one of the most powerful tools for collecting VOC, because it allows you to identify real user opinions without them participating in surveys.
In my opinion, the best option for deep monitoring is Brandwatch, which analyzes trends and provides detailed statistics on the tone of discussions. If you need something more accessible, Awario and Mention are great for quickly tracking brand mentions on social media and forums.
In 2021, Nike noticed an increase in negative discussions on Twitter about the difficulty of choosing shoes for flat feet, after which they created a series of expert articles and video guides explaining how to choose shoes, which increased organic traffic by 22% and increased engagement on social media.
4. Analyzing support requests - insights that make money
Every client who writes to support does so for a reason, but because they have an unresolved problem, which means that if you systematically analyze incoming requests, you can not only improve the quality of service, but also identify growth points for the product and marketing.
I recommend using Zendesk and Intercom if you want to structure requests and identify recurring requests, and if you need to track hidden trends and understand which complaints are most common, then Freshdesk and Kustomer will help you with this best.
Spotify analyzed thousands of user requests in 2020 and found that many did not understand how to disable autoplay, although this feature was already in the interface, and after testing new solutions, they added tooltips, which reduced the load on support and the number of such requests by 20%.
5. Interviews and in-depth research - understanding customer emotions
Formal surveys and quantitative data do not always give the full picture, because they do not convey the emotional side of the user experience, so in-depth interviews allow you to understand how customers think, what their expectations are, and what emotions they experience when interacting with the product.
If you need to collect high-quality VOC interviews, Lookback.io and UserTesting will help you conduct sessions with real users, and if you need to analyze interview transcripts and find patterns, Dovetail is one of the best tools.
Slack conducted a series of early customer interviews and found that their number one fear was the transition from email to chat, so they developed a smooth onboarding system, email integration, and training materials to help get enterprise users onto their platform faster.
How to Use VOC in Marketing, Product, and Sales
Collecting VOC data is only half the battle, because if a company doesn’t use insights to make changes, then the analysis is meaningless, and successful brands don’t just listen to customers, but adapt marketing, improve the product, and optimize sales based on real data. Voice of the customer data collection should be an ongoing process, not a one-time initiative.
1. Using VOC in Marketing – More Engagement, Less Guesswork
VOC meaning marketing refers to using customer insights to create more effective marketing strategies. Companies that analyze VOC understand what triggers, emotions, and pain points motivate customers to buy, and adapt advertising and content strategies so that they resonate and convert.
That’s why brands focused on the voice of the customer rewrite advertising messages using words and wording from VOC, revise email marketing to add more personalized triggers to emails, rebuild content strategy to create articles and videos that answer real audience questions, and even change the delivery of advertising creatives to better reflect the problems and needs of users.
In 2021, HubSpot analyzed VOC data and found that many marketers struggle with lead generation, after which they created a series of guides and webinars on this topic, which increased organic blog traffic by 35% in a year.
2. Using VOC in the product - creating solutions that users want
When a company analyzes VOC not only to evaluate the current product, but also to find new opportunities, it gains a competitive advantage because instead of building a roadmap on guesswork, it develops features and improvements that are guaranteed to close user pain points.
That is why VOC data helps identify the most common complaints and eliminate them in the product, collect customer requests for new features and include them in the development plan, analyze the weaknesses of competitors to strengthen your value proposition, and test UX changes based not on assumptions, but on real user experience.
Notion used VOC feedback to understand that users want more flexibility in interface customization, which led to the launch of a personalized dashboard feature that has become one of the most popular among users.
3. Using VOC in sales - increasing conversion without additional costs
Sellers and marketers often face the same customer objections, but companies that use VOC know how to close these barriers in advance and increase sales through targeted content and personalized scripts.
That is why VOC helps to identify recurring objections and include them in sales scripts, analyze the reasons for deal refusals and adapt commercial offers to real customer pain points, train the sales department on real VOC cases, creating scripts for answers to frequently asked questions, and implement automated sales funnels that close key user doubts even before communicating with a manager.
In 2022, Salesforce analyzed VOC data and found that most B2B customers were wary of complex CRM integrations, so they launched a series of demo videos and guides on simplified setup, which increased lead-to-sales conversion by 18%.
Conclusion
If you are not working with VOC yet, start small: launch surveys, analyze support requests, see what customers are saying on social networks, implement at least one feedback monitoring tool - and in a few months you will see how real insights help change strategy, increase sales and make a product that customers not only buy, but recommend to others.
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