What is voice of customer (VoC)? A practical definition

A practical definition

What is voice of customer? In practice, voice of customer (VoC) means capturing what customers say about their experience, in their own words and in scores, organising it consistently, and using it to decide what to change. The term covers both the feedback itself and the work of making sense of it.

Where VoC comes from

• Public reviews: Google Maps, app stores, review sites.
• Surveys: CSAT, NPS, CES and their open comments.
• Complaints and support contacts.
• Social media posts and messages.
• What staff hear in stores and on calls.
• Sales and account conversations, for B2B businesses.

What it produces

• The topics customers care about, in their words.
• How customers feel about each topic, and how that changes.
• Where problems concentrate: stores, channels, products, times.
• Evidence: real quotes that make findings believable.

VoC is more than surveys

Surveys only hear about what you ask, from people who choose to answer. Unprompted sources such as reviews and complaints reveal what customers raise on their own, which is often different. A VoC programme that relies only on surveys tends to confirm what the business already thinks.

How teams use it

• Operations: find and fix recurring service problems by store.
• Product: prioritise bugs and features users mention.
• Marketing: understand what customers value and how they describe it.
• Leadership: track how the experience is changing and where to invest.

From VoC to a VoC programme

Collecting feedback is the easy part. A VoC programme adds a consistent taxonomy, owners for each theme, a monthly rhythm, and checks that changes worked.

Common questions

A simple example

A retail chain reads its Google reviews, survey comments and complaints together for the first time. Separately, each looked unremarkable. Together, all three mention the same thing at the same stores: long waits to pay at weekends. That agreement across sources is what voice of customer adds. The chain adds weekend billing staff at those stores, and the complaints fall in all three channels.

Related terms

• Customer feedback: the raw comments and scores.
• Customer experience (CX): the experience itself, which VoC describes.
• Closed-loop feedback: acting on feedback and telling customers.
• VoC programme: the organised process of collecting, analysing and acting.
• Customer insight: a finding from VoC that explains behaviour and suggests a decision.

Why VoC matters more now

Customers now write about their experiences in public, in volume, every day: on Google Maps, app stores and social media. That makes the voice of the customer both easier to hear and harder to ignore, because prospective customers read it too. And language models make it practical to classify all of it, in many languages, rather than reading a sample.

Doing this with Falcon

Falcon adds the review-based measures to your CX metrics: for every theme and store, the volume of mentions, negative share, its change month to month and the number of reviews behind it, from Google Maps reviews of your stores and Google Play reviews of your app. Every number opens the reviews that explain it, which survey scores alone cannot do.