The Power of Listening: Mastering Voice of the Customer Surveys

These days, understanding your customers isn’t a “nice thing to do”; it’s an absolute necessity. To truly understand your customers, you need to spend some quality time listening to them and understanding the voice of the customer. That’s why mastering the art of the voice of the customer survey can be a game-changer for any business seeking to better understand its customers. The power of listening to your customers transcends beyond just collecting feedback; it serves as a strategic compass, guiding your decision-making, shaping your product development, and, most importantly, building strong, lasting customer relationships. 

Read on to learn more about voice of the customer surveys, why they’re so important, how to create them, and some sample questions that can get you started creating your VoC survey today. 

What Is a Voice of the Customer Survey?

At its core, a voice of the customer (VoC) surveys captures customers’ expectations, preferences, and aversions toward products, services, or your company in general. A VoC survey involves gathering both quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers about their various touchpoints with a company. Touchpoints could be anything from an interaction with your website, chatting with your customer service representatives, or actually using your products and services. By exploring customers’ experiences with these touchpoints, you’ll gain a holistic understanding of your customer’s journey and experience with your company. 

Why Are Voice of the Customer Surveys So Important?

A VoC is more than just another survey to worry about. The benefits of VoC surveys extend far beyond mere data collection. They provide invaluable insights that can shape product development, fine-tune marketing strategies, and enhance customer service. Hopefully with all of these pieces in place, you’ll experience improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, the power of VoC surveys lies not just in listening to what customers have to say but in using those insights to create a better, more personalized customer experience.

Let’s dive into three specific benefits from utilizing VoC surveys as the powerful they are: 

Understanding Customer Needs and Wants

At the heart of any successful business strategy lies a deep understanding of customer needs and wants. VoC surveys are literally the voice of your customers. They serve as a way to pull out real and salient insights into your customers’ needs and wants. These insights are the pulse of the market, reflecting real-time customer sentiment and demand. By tuning into the voice of the customer, you can identify what truly matters to your customers and adjust your strategies, products, and services appropriately. Your customers love it too.. VOC surveys provide customers with the opportunity to communicate their needs and wants directly to businesses.

Improving Customer Satisfaction

You created your business to solve a problem, and you want to make sure your products and services are actually doing that. The way to see if you’re reaching your customers the way you want is to evaluate your customer satisfaction. A VoC survey gives you the chance to do just that. Plus using these surveys can also help you boost your customer satisfaction on its own. Customers love the opportunity to be heard and understood, so when you’re actively working toward that, they’re going to notice and appreciate that. 

Improving the Business Overall

VoC surveys are not just about improving customer experience; they offer significant benefits for the overall health and growth of the business. These surveys help businesses pinpoint potential issues from the customer’s perspective, allowing them to proactively address these concerns before they escalate and cause significant damage. Whatever customers aren’t liking, with a VoC, you have a chance to stop that in its tracks. This proactive approach not only improves the customer experience but also strengthens the company’s reputation, enhances operational efficiency, and drives overall business success. 

Designing Your Voice of the Customer Survey

Voice of the customer surveys are powerful. How do you go about creating your own? Let’s dive into some of the basic steps for designing a highly effective VoC survey. 

Define Objectives

Before crafting your VoC survey, it’s crucial to define clear, specific objectives. What are you trying to do or understand? Are you looking for insights on a specific product or service you want to refine? Or are you looking to improve your customer satisfaction overall? Knowing what your objectives are will help you design a survey that gathers data to help with your goal. You can ensure the data you collect is actionable and relevant to your overall business goals. 

Choose the Right Types of Questions

Once you have clear objectives, you need questions that achieve your overall goals. The choice of questions in your VoC survey can significantly impact the quality and type of feedback you receive. To gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ experiences, it’s advisable to use a mix of multiple choice questions, scales (like the Likert scale), and open-ended questions. Multiple choice questions and scales are excellent for collecting quantitative data, offering clear, easily analyzable feedback. On the other hand, open-ended questions allow customers to express their opinions and experiences in their own words, providing rich qualitative data that can offer deeper, nuanced insights. A mix of question types will give you deeper insights overall. 

Keep It Simple

While it’s important to gather as much valuable feedback as possible, your customers won’t complete a long survey. It’s much better to have fewer questions and more complete surveys than the other way around. Aim to keep it simple and keep your surveys no longer than 10 minutes. The simpler and more streamlined your survey, the more likely customers are to complete it and provide honest, thoughtful responses.

Start Broad, Then Get Specific

When structuring your VoC survey, a useful approach is to start with general questions before delving into more specific ones. Starting broad helps your customers “warm up” to providing you with feedback. Broad, initial questions can pertain to overall satisfaction, general experiences, or perceptions of your brand. Essentially, your early questions should be easy to answer without too much extensive thought. You can narrow as you go to get more detailed feedback. 

Questions to Ask in a Voice of the Customer Survey

Those strategies can help you get started. To really take your VoC survey to the next level, we have some starter questions to help you write your own voice of the customer surveys. The questions we provide are broken up into general categories that you may want to consider on your surveys. 

Value-Based VoC Questions

  • Did you find everything you were looking for today?
  • Is there anything you were looking for that we didn’t have?
  • On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the value of your purchase?
  • What are the most important qualities you look for in a product or service? (This question is particularly poignant as a multiple choice question)
  • Did our customer service help you resolve any issue you came across?

Brand Loyalty VoC Questions

  • How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1–10? 
  • When thinking about our brand, product, or service, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
  • What might prevent you from doing business with us in the future?
  • How likely are you to switch to a different brand, product, or service?

Customer Satisfaction Questions

  • How would you describe your experience with us today?
  • How satisfied are you with the product or service you received?
  • Was your customer service agent able to handle any issue you had?
  • What could we have done to improve your experience?

Final Thoughts

Overall, VoC surveys are powerful tools to better understand your customers and how they really perceive your company. Utilizing these surveys, you can further refine your products and services, enhance your customer satisfaction, and better meet the needs of your customers. 

Learn more about how a voice of the customer survey can help you build a better brand with InMoment today!

What Is the Difference Between Voice of Customer and Market Research?

A lot of folks believe that voice of customer (VoC) programs and market research mean the same thing—but they’re actually quite different! In fact, each discipline differs in purpose, design, analysis and outcomes.

However, even though they’re different, it’s important to point out that one isn’t necessarily better than the other—and brands need both if they want their customer experience (CX) programs to reach their potential.

So, with that in mind, let’s get into a quick primer!

Breaking Down the Difference Between Voice of Customer & Market Research

What Is the Definition of Voice of Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the process of gathering vital information regarding what customers think and feel about their experiences with a business.

How Does VoC Fit into Your CX Strategy

VoC programs are an essential part of any CX toolkit. They’re designed to fulfill many critical functions for your overall customer experience program, including, as their name implies, understanding customer needs. They’re also useful for understanding customer expectations, as well as what those individuals may want from you before even they know. This information can then be used to adjust operations, inform marketing efforts, and help your organization create both short- and long-term Experience Improvement (XI).

Not all VoC feedback comes from typical listening methods like surveys and focus groups, either. A lot of it comes from unsolicited feedback (website reviews, social media comments, etc). Unsolicited feedback is helpful because it gives customers a chance to express themselves entirely in their own terms, which may alert brands to problems and journey breakages that they weren’t aware of.

All of this boils down to the ability to not just capture individual and collective customer feedback, but act upon it. Taking action is crucial to Experience Improvement and building connective relationships.

What Is the Definition of Market Research?

Market research explores hidden relationships within industry data, collected by a market research firm, in order to predict and forecast future events and behavior within the market.

What Is the Role of Market Research in Your Business?

While Voice of Customer is all about feedback, market research takes a slightly wider lens by focusing on understanding the trends around your business.

Primary research is useful for testing new communications and services that your company wants to put out there, while secondary research looks at the dynamics and sizing of the marketplace around you. Conducting these types of research can help your company identify your target market, segment your customers, and identify growth opportunities.

Your company can supercharge its market research efforts by defining the population you want to target with a survey, then creating samples that ensure you’ll have a match. We’ve found that surveys like these are most effective when they’re blind, meaning that the customer or individual stays anonymous while taking them, and challenge you to do the same! This method is great for reducing response bias.

The Difference between Voice of Customer (VoC) and Market Research
This handy chart breaks down the differences between these two methods

So, Why Do You Need Both?

VoC and market research aren’t the same, but your CX program and your organization need both in order to truly understand your customers as people. That fundamental, holistic understanding fuels unforgettable experiences that build loyalty while also creating additional revenue! So be bold in your strategy and use both VoC and market research. Your customers will feel heard, your C-suite will be impressed, and the experiences you provide will be meaningfully transformed.

Click here to read our full-length white paper on why your brand needs both VoC and market research. Our very own Eric Smuda has spent decades in both fields and provides an in-depth look not just at why these disciplines are important, but how your organization can wield them effectively.

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