The "voice of the customer" (VoC) refers to the feedback, opinions, and preferences expressed by customers regarding a product, service, or overall customer experience. There are many voice of customer tools out there to help you analyze customer feedback. Often, you need a strategy in place beforehand.
This article breaks down the steps to establish a voice of customer strategy to use in creating a voice of customer template for your voice of customer program so that your company can gather the correct data to create a better user experience for your customers.
What is the Voice of the Customer?
Voice of the Customer (VoC) is an approach used to capture customer feedback, expectations, and experiences across all touchpoints with your brand. Unlike traditional metrics that tell you what is happening, like conversion rates or page visits, VoC explains why it's happening by revealing the sentiment, motivations, and pain points behind customer behaviour.
VoC includes all forms of customer feedback: survey responses, support tickets, social media comments, online reviews, call center transcripts, chat logs, and more. When unified and analyzed effectively, this feedback becomes a strategic asset that drives measurable improvements in customer experience, product development, and business outcomes.
Common VoC Methods
There's no single way to capture customer feedback. The right method depends on what you're trying to learn, who you're trying to reach, and where in the customer journey you need insight.
Here's how the most common approaches compare:
Most effective VoC programs combine several of these methods. Surveys and NPS give you structured benchmarks. Support tickets and social listening surface problems you didn't think to ask about. Behavioural data shows you what customers do, while interviews and focus groups explain why.
Why is Voice of the Customer Important?
Voice of the Customer is a term commonly used in business to emphasise the importance of understanding and meeting customer needs and expectations.
Why? Because more and more businesses are putting their customers first.
Sales and profits are still significant. But building long-term customer loyalty and nurturing those business-to-customer relationships is the best way for brands to flourish in a hyper-competitive era and when consumers can be swayed elsewhere in just a few clicks.
The key to building that loyalty and nurturing those relationships is giving your customer an amazing experience. It needs to be seamless across channels. It needs to be personalised. It needs to make them want to come back and, better yet, shout about that exceptional customer experience to their friends and family.
To create amazing customer experiences, we need to know what our customers think and feel.
We can understand something about our customers from the hard numbers, the kind of data many of us are used to seeing in website analytics, where we can dig into things like on-site customer behaviour, returning customer traffic, or conversion rates.
But this is only part of the story.
Voice of the Customer takes on board customer sentiment as well as customer research. It tells you what the customer's perception and expectations are of your products, service, or brand as a whole.
This is crucial. After all, perceptions drive behaviour.
We know that whether you are the most expensive retailer compared to your competition doesn't really matter. If customers perceive that to be the case, then it might be something that needs to be addressed.
You can only really know what perceptions your customers have about your brand by listening to them.
10 Voice of Customer Examples from Real Companies
Leading companies use VoC programs to make better decisions, reduce churn, and drive measurable business results. Here's how some of the world's most successful brands put customer feedback to work, organised by the VoC methods they rely on.
In-App Feedback
1. YouTube's Quick Ratings
YouTube randomly asks viewers to rate videos using a simple 1-5 star system. This lightweight approach doesn't interrupt the user experience but provides actionable sentiment data at massive scale. YouTube uses this feedback to analyse content performance, refine algorithms, and understand user preferences across millions of interactions.
2. Netflix's Rating System
Netflix's thumbs-up/down system wasn't their first approach. They originally used a 5-star rating system but discovered through VoC analysis that customers associated stars with satisfaction levels rather than simple like/dislike preferences.
Switching to thumbs up/down increased survey responses by 200% and gave Netflix always-on market research showing customer sentiment toward content.
3. DoorDash's In-App Reviews
DoorDash optimised its app to include customer reviews directly within the platform. This made VoC feedback quick and convenient without forcing users to leave the app for external platforms like social media. Everything users needed was in one place, improving the overall customer journey.
4. OpenAI's Built-in Feedback Loops
AI platforms like ChatGPT build feedback directly into the product. A simple thumbs-up/down button lets users rate responses. Behavioural metrics, like whether users need to ask follow-up questions, indicate if the first response was satisfactory. This continuous feedback loop lets OpenAI improve product quality in real time based on actual user experience.
Customer Surveys
5. Walmart's Incentivised Customer Surveys
When Walmart needed to improve customer relationships and brand reputation, the CEO made customer feedback central to decision-making. Walmart used customer surveys with an incentive (a chance to win a $1,000 gift card) to boost response rates. Customers ranked their experience from 1-10 across various categories, and over time, VoC analytics tracked each store's progress toward improvement goals.
6. Cox's Call Center Sentiments
Telecom company Cox Communications made VoC a central part of its business by collecting customer data from call centers. The direct dialogue provided deeper feedback than online surveys and ratings alone. Cox reduced customer churn, improved NPS, and identified key experience trends that surface-level metrics would have missed.
Behavioural Data as Feedback
7. Amazon's Personalisation
Amazon treats customer actions as a form of feedback. Whether a customer views a product, purchases it, or adds it to their cart, Amazon uses that behavioural data to recommend relevant products on future visits. This VoC approach, using behaviour as feedback, drives significant sales by personalising experiences at scale.
8. Uber's Dual Audience Feedback
Uber collects in-app feedback from two audiences (drivers and passengers) with both rating each other after every journey. These transparent VoC surveys create fairness and accountability on both sides of the platform. Ratings affect reputation for both parties, ensuring quality experiences across the marketplace.
Real-Time and Proactive Listening
9. Schweppes' Real-Time Experience Tracking
Schweppes used real-time experience tracking to monitor a series of advertisements. Stakeholders could see results quickly and respond by shifting resources to the most successful campaign. The outcome was a significant increase in sales and customer engagement driven by data-backed creative decisions.
10. Slack's Feedback Evolution
Slack built a VoC program to listen to customers during product development. According to CEO Stuart Butterfield, "When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it, immediately." Customer feedback became the key factor for setting the product roadmap. When feedback showed demand for better app integrations, this became an immediate priority. By gathering VoC early, Slack caught pain points before products even launched.
How to build a successful voice of customer program in 3 steps
There are three steps to building a successful VoC program.
First, collect customer feedback.
Different brands across varying industries will see customers providing feedback at different touchpoints. Customer support emails, social media channels, and online review sites are critical places in the digital context. It is also important to note that the types of feedback will vary from channel to channel and dependent on when in the path-to-purchase your customers are providing it.
Often, brands must be proactive in ensuring the lines are open for users to be forthcoming with their reviews. Feedback surveys with open-ended questions can be sent out at specific times across the customer journey to really start to identify pain points along the way.
Additionally, it isn't always about online feedback. Businesses with offline touchpoints, such as bricks and mortar stores, can gather feedback in-store, and customer service calls can be recorded for analysis too.
Second, this feedback needs to be analysed.
We've touched on transforming qualitative data into quantitative data above. This is called coding – assigning a numerical tag to each piece of feedback. It can be done manually, but it is better to have the necessary tools to carry out this tagging automatically.
Similarly, when looking at trends and patterns within this transformed data, using an AI-powered tool such as Chattermill to dig out the insight from these numbers is the best course of action.
Third, act on it.
This is crucial for your VoC program – taking that feedback to inform your CX strategy.
Chattermill's Dave Ascott sums it up in the following way:
'You want to get the voice of the customer into the business. You need to get the data, to understand it, and to distribute it to those who can take action.'
Those who can take action could be your marketing department – which might need to tweak content and messaging somewhere. It might be an operations manager switching delivery suppliers. Or it might be your product development team who needs to rethink the product's next iteration.
The key is that the information gathered from VoC can be utilised as soon as it needs to be – and can be embedded into process and strategy going forward.
Creating a Voice of Customer Template with Examples
An effective VoC strategy hinges on connecting with your customers to gather the comprehensive data you need to understand them better. This data provides valuable insights into customer expectations, their actual experiences with your brand, and customer feedback, problems, and complaints.
The Importance of a Voice of Customer Template
To streamline this process, using a Voice of Customer template can be highly beneficial. A VoC template serves as a structured framework to capture and organize customer feedback efficiently. It ensures consistency in data collection, making it easier to analyze and act upon the information gathered.
Start with Your VoC Strategy and Find the Questions You Need Answered
The starting point for any VoC strategy is identifying the key questions you need answered – your primary objectives for the initiative. These objectives could range from attracting new customers, increasing repeat purchases, improving communication with your customer base, to gathering insights for new product development or business function transformation. Your VoC strategy should always be aligned with the goal of achieving customer success.
Example questions:
- What factors influence customers' decisions to purchase or not purchase our products?
- How satisfied are customers with their overall experience with our brand?
- What specific features or aspects of our product do customers find most valuable or least valuable?
- How effectively does our customer service resolve issues and meet customer needs?
- What improvements or changes do customers suggest for our products or services?
- What are the main reasons customers choose our competitors over us?
Defining Your Objectives with a VoC Template
Once you've defined your question, a VoC template can help determine the best techniques for gathering customer data and insights. For example:
Customer Sentiment Analysis. If your objective is to discover customer sentiment towards their experiences with your brand, then online surveys to existing customers in your database may be the most effective option.
Product Development Insights. If you aim to develop a new product or enhance an existing one, focus groups might be the best information-gathering technique to capture in-depth opinions through customer interviews.
Once you've defined your question, you need to decide upon the best technique for gathering customer data and insights. If your objective is to discover customer sentiment towards their experiences with your brand, then online surveys to existing customers in your database may be the best option. But if you want to develop a new product or enhance an existing one, focus groups might be the best information-gathering technique to discover in-depth opinions through customer interviews.
Your VoC strategy will define an objective (pose a question), determine the best technique to gather feedback and customer data, and then analyse the responses to inform an action plan.
The benefits of a Voice of the Customer program
A VoC program gives you the most comprehensive understanding of your customers. If you are unfamiliar what a Voice of the Customer Program is, review this article here.
First, the VoC process allows you to gather feedback from various sources. Whether your customers are talking about you in support emails, live chat, on social media, or online reviews on your product pages – a Voice of the Customer program will draw all of this together to start building a picture of what your customers think throughout the path to purchase and beyond.
Where are your pain points? What is prompting shoppers to look at competitors? Why are we seeing such a massive spike in customer returns?
From here, your VoC program can unify this feedback with other forms of data.
To make it usable, you need to assign quantitative (numerical) tags to the qualitative (free text) content your customers provide. What trends are emerging? Can this data be used to segment particular groups of customers better? What about calculating customer lifetime value (CLTV), customer effort score (CES), customer satisfaction (CSAT) or net promoter scores (NPS)?
Beyond this, a VoC program can make this unified data genuinely actionable.
What within your CX needs to be addressed, and who within your business is best placed to take the necessary steps to make improvements?
You've got the feedback from your customers. You've turned it into usable data. Now it's time to actually use it.
The real benefit of a VoC program is using that feedback to make positive changes for your customers and brand.
How companies are changing the business landscape with VoC
Customer feedback is not a new phenomenon. But our ability to truly analyse that feedback and to unify it with other data to create a single source of customer truth is the real opportunity for businesses in the post-Covid era.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of organisations with VoC programs will supplement traditional surveys by analysing voice and text interactions with customers. Here at Chattermill, we work with many brands to help them do that. It is already our reality.
H&M are one such brand, as Ross MacFarlane details in our CX Leaders Roundtable: How to solve customer friction in eCommerce. The company was founded in Scandinavia but scaled up to include both UK and US markets. MacFarlane found that particular language nuances only came to light when digging into customer sentiment.
'We had a European size model that did not work for our UK customers, it did not work for our US customers, and it did not work for our Asian customers,' MacFarlane says. 'We went on a long journey on listening to customers and getting customer input and really trying to decentralise the way we standardise our sizing.'
The significant discovery for H&M was that there was a different perception between size and fit. In short, the issue was more on sizing – which called for tweaks to product pages with more images and detail to give customers a better idea of what they would receive after ordering.
VoC is not, however, just the priority for well-established name brands such as H&M. UK-based musicMagpie emerged in the late 2000s into a vertical already dominated by the likes of Amazon and eBay.
Since then, musicMagpie has positioned itself as the number one platform for buying and selling the country's refurbished tech and physical media products.
Although customer support had always been at the heart of the business, it was only through implementing a VoC program with Chattermill that the company could automatically tag the 70,000 or so monthly user interactions it would receive.
By properly analysing VoC, the brand was able to overhaul its fulfilment and delivery offer – especially during the peak shopping season. The result significantly boosted customer sentiment and shopper satisfaction, saving their staff around 200 hours of work time every month.
Voice of Customer program best practices
Unify customer feedback across data channels
At Chattermill, we call this Unified Customer Intelligence. Drawing together data from as many diverse sources as possible to give the most comprehensive understanding of your customers you can get.
When it comes to VoC, we are primarily concerned with customer feedback, reviews, and online messages gathered from places like social media. But this also needs to be paired with other kinds of data, including returns data, transactional data, conversions – anything that can help deliver insight about your consumers.
Unify departments with a single source of truth
While we talk a lot about unifying data, we are also very hot on unifying departments within businesses. For customer-centric brands, gone are the days of siloed teams not talking to each other.
All the data in the world isn't much help if separate teams within your organisation don't have the same access to it.
The single source of truth about your customers can give the whole business a more acute focus on improving the customer experience and ensure all the teams work together towards a shared goal.
Use dashboards and reports to surface insights to the right people
Part of getting the single source of truth to all teams within the organisation and making your VoC data properly actionable comes from how it is presented to them.
Internal reporting is a no-brainer. Real-time dashboards that all team members have access to are crucial too. They ensure everyone – from customer support teams to product teams – has access to that single source of truth and is best equipped to respond agilely. Effective integration with existing platforms make this all the more efficient and an easier user experience for your team members.
Deliver clear ROI and business results
Linking VoC – and customer experience more broadly – to ROI is a constant challenge for brands.
Here at Chattermill, we also know how important it is to prove, on a financial level, that investing in listening to your customers is beneficial for the bottom line and for getting future buy-in.
One fundamental way to understand the impact customer experience is having on ROI is to focus on customer retention.
Suppose you can track positive sentiment in your VoC data with more purchases from returning customers. In that case, it becomes clear that what is driving that sentiment is driving that retention.
Whatever it is that is making those customers happy enough to return repeatedly would result in more churn and less customer loyalty if it was not in place.
Why it's time to really focus on your customers
Consumers complaining about or advocating for brands is really nothing new.
Likewise, the explosion of big data is not news anymore.
But we are at a turning point in terms of being able to understand what customers say from the thousands of pieces of unstructured text your business receives every month. And those businesses that are proactive with unified customer intelligence are set to have that competitive edge over the next few years.
Brands of all sizes and across all verticals know that they need to be able to compete on CX to retain customers as their habits change and they become increasingly disloyal.
Businesses know that in the post-Covid era, retention is a more worthwhile investment than acquisition – and it is those experiences that make consumers say "Wow!" and want to shout about it online and offline which are really going to drive that retention.
Voice of the Customer Template - Download
Uncovering your voice of the customer is an essential part of shaping buyer personas and your customer journey map. Download our voice of the customer template below to get started on your program and learn more about what your customers think and feel.
To learn more about how VoC tools like Chattermill can help you gather and analyse customer feedback at scale, book a demo.
Read our blog to discover how to drive action with your VoC program.
Voice of the Customer (VoC): FAQs
What is Voice of the Customer (VoC) and why is it important?
Voice of the Customer refers to capturing and analyzing customer feedback—such as reviews, support messages, surveys, and social media mentions—to understand their expectations, pain points, and sentiment. It is essential because it helps businesses make data-driven improvements, deepen customer relationships, and stay competitive.
What are the main benefits of a Voice of the Customer program?
A VoC program provides a comprehensive understanding of customer pain points and motivations, supports segmentation, and informs key metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES. Ultimately, the greatest advantage is turning feedback into actionable change that improves products, CX, and the brand experience.
What are the core steps to build an effective VoC program?
To build a successful VoC program you should:
- Collect feedback across channels (e-mail, reviews, support, surveys, social media).
- Analyse feedback, using tools to tag and quantify qualitative data.
- Act on insights and distribute them to stakeholders who can drive meaningful change.
How do businesses convert qualitative feedback into actionable insights?
VoC programs transform qualitative customer comments into quantitative tags—a process known as coding—often using AI-powered tools. These tags help uncover trends and prioritize issues, enabling teams to analyze patterns and drive targeted improvements.
Which channels are most effective for collecting VoC feedback?
VoC programs rely on diverse touchpoints such as customer support communications, social media, online reviews, open-ended survey responses, recorded calls, in-person interviews, and feedback forms. A "unified customer intelligence" approach integrates all these sources for a holistic view.
How does a VoC program deliver ROI across the organization?
By translating raw feedback into insights, VoC programs enable CX, marketing, product development, and operations teams to make informed decisions. For example, improvements in delivery or sizing can increase customer satisfaction and reduce returns, while streamlining operations—saving time and cost.
What role does leadership play in making VoC effective?
VoC must be embedded into the organization's decision-making process. Feedback needs to reach those who can influence change—marketing teams for messaging updates, operations for process changes, or product teams for feature improvements—for continuous customer-focused development.
Can VoC programs help smaller brands or only big enterprises?
VoC programs are valuable across the spectrum. Even smaller or emerging brands can benefit—like musicMagpie, which automated tagging of tens of thousands of customer interactions to improve fulfillment during peak season—leading to better customer satisfaction and significant time savings.
What does "Unified Customer Intelligence" mean in VoC?
Unified Customer Intelligence refers to consolidating feedback data from various sources—social media, support, reviews, transactional data—into a single framework. This comprehensive view supports deeper insight extraction and more coordinated action across the business.
