What Is Voice of the Customer (VoC)? A complete guide

Customer feedback is critical to helping product teams build the best product possible and for product marketing to find the best market fit. Most product teams know this: however innovative a product is, it must fulfill a real customer need or solve a pain point, and be easy enough to use and understand, to gain traction.

This is why capturing the Voice of the Customer (VoC)—and acting on that feedback—becomes extremely valuable. Strategic VoC programs go beyond making it easier to sell your product, but also help build customer relationships and customer loyalty. Why? Because the customer trusts that you’re listening. 

What is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer programs and initiatives are how product teams stay connected to their users' real experiences. It’s essentially about listening to what customers want, and how they respond to your product or service. This may include everything from direct feedback through surveys to behavioral signals from analytics software, all of which help teams understand the gap between internal assumptions about what customers need and how they actually experience your product or service.

Definition of Voice of the Customer (VoC)

Voice of the Customer is a strategic way to collect, analyze, and apply customer feedback, needs, and preferences to inform product decisions and development priorities. Customer feedback is typically both explicit (through surveys, interviews, and support tickets) and implicit (gleaned through behavioral data, usage patterns, or churn indicators). Sometimes this feedback isn’t always about the product—it might also be about your service or other areas of the business.

The benefits of a Voice of the Customer program

A strong, centralized VoC program can help you to:

Optimize development resources

VoC programs help validate assumptions early and can help prevent teams from building features customers don't want or solving problems that don't exist. They also help to create a cycle of continuous improvement.

Build customer trust and loyalty

When customers see that their feedback was heard and acted upon, it creates stronger emotional connections and reduces churn by addressing pain points before they become deal-breakers.

Strengthen product-market fit

Continuously collecting and analyzing customer data helps you stay aligned with market needs, so your product evolves with features and capabilities that are relevant and competitive.

Uncover new revenue opportunities

Let your customers help you! VoC programs can reveal unmet needs, expansion opportunities, willingness to pay for specific capabilities, and insights into how to differentiate your product. They can also help you quickly evaluate customer responses to product launches or pricing, allowing you to shift product strategies if necessary.

Align cross-functionally

VoC creates a shared understanding across product management, engineering, marketing, sales, and support teams, ensuring that everyone works from the same customer insights and priorities.

What is Voice of the Customer’s role in product and marketing? 

Voice of the Customer can serve both product development and marketing teams in specific ways, but has the most impact when used to create a shared understanding of the customer experience—ensuring that both functions are aligned on customer priorities, throughout the entire customer journey, instead of working from different assumptions. In short, VoC becomes a way to take a truly customer-centric approach.

For product teams, more specifically, VoC provides a reality check. The team may want to build some cool features, but are they the ones your customers say they need most right now? For marketing teams, VoC helps shape messaging, ensuring that it’s grounded in customer feedback, pain points, and success stories, which makes it more likely to resonate.

VoC essentially turns inside-out activities and messaging into outside-in, data-driven strategies. With less guesswork and friction in the go-to-market and customer experience strategies, you’re in a better position to encourage customer adoption and retention.

How AI is changing Voice of the Customer programs 

As you’ll see in the section that follows, there are many methods (and tools through which) to capture VoC data. The challenge is sifting through feedback across multiple sources, making sense of it, and prioritizing which feedback is most critical to address. Fortunately, AI now enables teams to take vast amounts of customer feedback and quickly mine it for the insights that will lead to the most impact.

There are technologies, however, that can assist with VoC within the tools you already use. For example, product and marketing teams already using Airtable can take advantage of native AI to automate ingestion of customer feedback from things like Slack threads, Zendesk tickets, and Gong calls into a single, centralized base. Then, AI categorizes, themes, and scores feedback so that all feedback is triaged and teams can quickly react. AI can also help link insights to features on the product roadmap and prioritize against key goals, rapidly speeding the time-to-decision timeline.

Methods for capturing VoC data

Voice of the Customer programs begin with data collection—either by soliciting feedback or paying attention to the spaces where customers are already offering it. Methods for capturing VoC data typically fall into a few categories:

Direct feedback methods:

Indirect methods using behavioral data:

Some emerging or more advanced methods may include AI-powered analysis of call transcripts from sales calls or contact centers, or through conversational AI feedback, where customer sentiment is automatically captured by AI agents. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of organizations will supplement traditional surveys by analyzing voice and text interactions. 

How to implement a Voice of the Customer program

If you’re unsure where or how to start, follow these five steps.

1. Define objectives and success metrics

As with any major program, begin by identifying what you want to learn and how you'll measure success. Success metrics aren’t necessarily tied to the amount of information you collect or the number of channels you use, but rather more strategic goals, such as reducing customer churn, improving customer retention, driving product adoption, or boosting your CSAT score. 

2. Select the sources you’ll monitor and collect data from

Depending on your product or service, some methods for collecting data might be more relevant than others. You might want to start by gathering customer feedback from just a few channels, aligned with where your customers engage and your goals, and consider whether you’re balancing quantitative metrics with qualitative insights. It might be easier to monitor social media sentiment, but think about how you can combine that with customer surveys or interviews.

3. Build a process that can scale

Establish a process and cadence for gathering, organizing, and routing feedback to the right teams. Customer feedback comes in at different intervals across teams, so it’s important to map the timelines, process, and team ownership and then determine whether you share insights at a regular interval or use technology to support shared access and create a central source of truth.

4. Analyze and synthesize insights

Transforming raw feedback into meaningful patterns and trends has traditionally been a pain point, but this is where modern AI tools save the day, reducing or even eliminating manual analysis. AI can identify priority issues and create summaries that product and marketing teams can use in the near term for decision-making. AI-powered VoC programs become an always-on form of market research that can help inform key business decisions.

5. Create closed-loop processes for acting on feedback

It’s meaningful to customers when they can see that you’re taking feedback to heart. As you build a VoC program and iterate, ensure that insights are driving real change and that customers can see and feel the impact. Not every initiative needs to be feedback-driven, but when they are, make sure you communicate back to customers that their feedback was valuable and that you’ve made an improvement.

eBay’s Voice of the Customer transformation: an example of VoC in action

eBay faced a challenge familiar to many large organizations: the company collected over one million pieces of customer feedback annually from surveys, support tickets, forums, and social media, but struggled to process it effectively. The human power required was enormous. It took 3-4 weeks just to categorize feedback, with total resolution cycles stretching to 9 months—and just to put a solution on the roadmap. Product managers were essentially flying blind, unable to identify customer pain points in real-time.

Add to that: feedback is global, in multiple languages, and siloed between teams. Angela Yanes, director of product operations at eBay, had used Airtable at a previous company and saw an opportunity to centralize customer insights. Given the complexity of eBay’s ecosystem, she brought the platform in as a pilot, for use within the advertising team. Four years later, Airtable is the official tool for planning and roadmaps across all of eBay, now using Airtable’s AI capabilities.

When it comes to making sense of customer feedback using AI, eBay again began with a pilot for one (of more than 200) advertising projects. It sought to implement an AI-powered Voice of the Customer system that automatically processes multilingual feedback, categorizes issues as bugs or feature requests, and translates content from languages including Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and German. The pilot was successful—the system creates intelligent routing by automatically generating Jira tickets for engineering teams and groups hundreds of feedback pieces into actionable themes around key areas like ad fees, budgets, and campaign creation. It even recommends a response to the customer, and the company is now looking at how to roll it out at scale and add more automation in the future.

This move from fragmented, slow manual processes to an integrated, AI-powered system boosts eBay’s ability to be truly “customer obsessed.” From the pilot alone, the team saved “months of work and we’ve been able to close the loop with many more customers than before,” says Yanes.

Voice of the Customer best practices

Follow these best practices to quickly move from collecting feedback to taking meaningful action:

Amplify your customer’s voice with ProductCentral

Airtable ProductCentral offers a flexible, AI-powered solution, helping product (and marketing teams) cut through the noise—or what can feel a lot like noise—and organize customer feedback into roadmap-ready insights. Airtable can adapt to any VoC workflow, with opportunities for automation at all stages—from data ingestion to auto-clustering and prioritization to syncing with Jira and updating dashboards. Product operations leaders can feed product teams a steady stream of fresh insights, critical for validating product decisions and meeting or exceeding customer expectations.

Book a demo to see how ProductCentral can help you turn customer feedback from a black hole to a real-time customer insights engine.