If you want your business to succeed, you need to listen first and foremost to the Voice of the Customer (VOC).

This is because nobody dictates the likelihood of a business succeeding or failing like \customers do. They can come to you in droves, they can stick around and give you all the business you could wish for, and they can abandon you without notice or explanation.

This article covers what Voice of the Customer means, how to collect it, and how it helps businesses. Specifically, we’ll be digging into what VOC can do to help you guard against any dangers befalling your business.

What is the Voice of the Customer?

Voice of the Customer is feedback from customers. It can be about a practice, or a product, or about the strengths of your customer service vs customer support.

Voice of Customer techniques and character may vary. Feedback can be direct or require investigation to uncover. It might not even be what it appears to be on the surface, which is why it pays to take some time to analyze what you hear.

But the most important thing is to pay attention to VOC. Engage with it effectively, and you’ll get actionable insights into how your business is performing. Ignore it, and you’ll never know why your customers have turned against you.

How is VOC collected and studied?

VOC traditionally relied on customer interviews conducted by employees or survey companies. Batteries of questions, interviews, and focus groups were used to discern customer sentiment.

These techniques still exist to an extent, but it’s worth mentioning that you may need to employ an incentive to have customers participate

Image sourced from Statista

Surveys are often combined with or replaced by automated analysis of online behavior, social media comments, and online reviews.

Whichever route you take,VOC collection generates large amounts of data. Large datasets can overwhelm without advancing understanding. So, part of your VOC strategy should be a clear awareness of what you’re doing and why.

Let’s say you have an omnichannel contact center via RingCentral RingCX software. Yes, you’re curious to see how customers are finding their contact center experience, but you’re wondering if the chatbot is delivering what it should.

In this case, focus questions on specific topics rather than requesting general feedback about the entire experience. You could end up with as much detail as you’d find in an encyclopedia or a materiality assessment. You may get deluged with responses, many of which will be irrelevant.

So, stick to the point. Ask questions related to what the bots are doing, and you’ll have a pertinent set of Voice of the Customer data.

Using the Voice of the Customer to mitigate against risk

Business involves both opportunities and risks. VOC helps you have more of the former and less of the latter. Here’s how.

1. New product launches

New product launches can succeed when customers want them, or fail when no market demand exists.

There needs to be a way to ensure that customers will love this new product. Voice of the Customer can do this. By conducting a dialogue with your customers, you can learn what matters to them, which is the first step to a successful product launch.

Successful selling identifies customer needs and shows how products meet them.

If you talk to your customers, you can find out what they need is to try to talk to as many customers as possible to gather diverse feedback. Consider an auto dialler to expand your reach and streamline this process.

2. Brand identity

Strong sales can mask brand identity problems. New products or partnerships that contradict your brand identity damage your reputation.

Let’s consider Feel the Pulse, a hypothetical plant-based snack company that does well across the Pacific Northwest. One day, it strikes the boss that the company’s never put out a donut before now, and the time is now right to give it a try. Such is the boss’s belief in this direction that they don’t bother to stop to ask customers what they might think of it.

The donut gets launched with a sizable marketing campaign. But, sure enough, it’s a flop. This is because a healthy snack company looks downright odd selling a donut. What’s more, what people want in a donut is unashamed calories and fat. They don’t want to be thinking about health for those blissful few minutes.

If this hapless boss had sought the Voice of the Customer, they might have learned that the healthy profile of the business was central to its brand identity as perceived by its customers. This would then have warned them that abandoning this would cause trouble.

3. Avoids marketing waste

One of the classic marketing sayings is that half of your marketing spend is wasted; the problem is knowing which half. This saying dates back to a 19th-century milieu when businesses were flying blind to a certain extent. They had little idea of what was working because they didn’t have a good line of communication with their clients.

In short, they had very little access to the Voice of the Customer.

Using VOC insights, you can now see what propelled a customer to your site. You can ask if they found out about it from Google, from a social media presence, or from a particular campaign. Then, once you know what’s working, you can do more of this and abandon the poorer-performing routes.

Alternatively, you can work to remedy what’s going wrong with the marketing channels that are not delivering. For instance, you may have gone all out with an email campaign because your target audience appears to prefer emails. But, disappointingly, this extensive (and expensive) email campaign has produced nothing.

You could ditch emails altogether going forward. Or, you can ask the Voice of the Customer for guidance. In this example, feedback from customers via a survey may tell you that your customer base still likes emails. They just didn’t get this particular campaign.

4. Service quality

Too often, a business owner only becomes aware of a drop in service quality when customers start to abandon the business. By this point, it’s often too late to do anything about it in time to avoid a massive hit on profits as customer loyalty takes a downward turn.

So, the sensible option is to monitor customer perceptions of your business before they take drastic action, such as using your competitors instead.

If you’re listening to the Voice of the Customer, this is easier to do. You can ask customers to complete a quick post-purchase survey to let you know what they thought of the service they’d just had, for instance, the proficiency of the team member or the effectiveness of the IVR system.

You can also examine customer behavior to determine how long they stayed on your site and what kind of CTR is occurring there.

Even better, combine several techniques, and you’ll have a highly successful VOC program that gives you a rounded idea of what customers are thinking, which you can use to inform your business decisions.

This way, you can improve matters before poor performance has a chance to impact the bottom line, and continuous improvement can take place. This is how you get great customer retention rates.

Open those ears

The Voice of the Customer is one of those rare phenomena that can transform a business without costing the earth. Most VOC collection techniques are easy and cheap to deploy.

As far as the customer is concerned, quite often they’re only too keen to let loose with their opinions. It’s nice to be heard and to make a difference. So take advantage of this. You can turn the most effusive into brand ambassadors, giving you some real bang for very little buck.

To finish: in business, as in much of life, communication is everything. A treasure trove of data is out there, waiting to be claimed by those with ears to listen.

FAQs

What is the Voice of the Customer?

The Voice of the Customer (VOC) is any direct or indirect feedback that tells a business how its customers are feeling. VoC feedback can be sought via analytics tools that analyze online behavior or from a follow-up survey.

Why do businesses use VOC?

VOC can tell a business where it’s going wrong and even suggest how to put things right. It can give a complete picture, giving businesses the chance to remedy and move on.

Updated Jun 27, 2025