Voice of Customer Survey: Strategies, Examples, and Templates

A company that doesn’t know its customers fails before launch. You can’t make product updates, create marketing plans, or improve service delivery if you don’t know the specific problems your customers face.

With a VoC survey:

• Your product team collects helpful feedback that influences product design and updates.
• Your marketing team learns more about the prospect journey and optimizes touchpoints for engagement and conversion. 
• Your customer success team understands the customer’s needs and what they expect from you. The information helps you transform into a customer-centric brand focused on building experiences your customers love.

So, how do you create a voice of the customer program built on the user’s needs? In this guide, we’ll walk you through your options for capturing VoC data and show you examples of some of the best VoC surveys we’ve seen. There’s also a free Voice of the Customer Survey Template to help you create or optimize your VoC program.

What is the voice of the customer (VoC)?

Voice of the customer is a research method used to collect customer feedback about their experiences with your products or services.

56% of customers are loyal to brands that understand them, so a VoC program is a core business strategy for understanding your customer needs and making product updates. It’s an excellent way to engage directly with your customers. You’ll capture and act on customer feedback to create experiences that leave your customers raving.

Organizations conduct VoC research to close the gap between customer expectations vs. the actual experience with your business. It’s useful for product development, marketing, and customer success. These departments work together to identify and improve each customer journey stage through cross-collaboration. 

Essentially, good VoC programs help you form a closer bond with customers while improving internal collaboration between departments.

What are the benefits of a voice of the customer program? 

Improved service delivery

86% of customers are willing to pay more for better service delivery. Creating or updating products based on actual customer expectations enhances customer satisfaction. 

Establishing a feedback loop ensures you’re constantly working to improve your weaknesses and satisfy customers. In addition, a satisfied customer is more likely to return and become brand loyal. 

Trader Joe’s is an excellent example of using customer feedback to improve service delivery.  A few changes they made based on customer feedback include:

• Branding is fun, blending both farm-to-table and nautical styles with an easily recognizable Trader Joe's flair. It matches their target customer very well and leads many customers to perceive them as an all-organic, all-natural store even though they're not.
• Employees in Monrovia CA serve as a tasting board that helps ensure everything on the shelf is delicious. This creates a high customer satisfaction cycle that brings people back.
• Employees are engaged with after-hours tastings for free, which means they naturally chat up customers and connect about how great a particular food is, leaving both employees and customers more satisfied.
• Registers are stocked with unlimited sticker rolls, which employees dole out abundantly, bringing joy to kids and parents alike.

Trader Joe delivers a great customer experience and employees stay because they enjoy working there. The voluntary turnover rate is only 4% which is lower than the industry average.

Increased revenue and customer retention

82% of organizations agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition, and 86% of customers will buy from the same brand if they had a great purchase experience.

Profit increases when companies go the extra mile to provide a memorable customer experience. Just like Trader Joe’s, you build brand reputation and customer loyalty over time. 

Product innovation

By keeping your ear to the ground, you’ll always be the first to know when consumer needs are changing so you can adjust to meet demand.

Take Apple as an example. Steve Jobs tried to find the balance between customer experience and technology. He believed that if you place the customer front and center, everything would naturally fall into place.  He was right. So far, Apple has sold over 400 million iPods, 1 billion iPhones, and over 100 million Macs.

Another example is the story of Chrysler’s Dodge Dart vs. the Porsche Cayenne. While both models launched in the early 2000s, only one had a successful launch. 

Porsche’s product team conducted comprehensive customer research to get feedback on every car’s features and the customer’s willingness to pay for those features. As a result, Porsche sold around 100,000 luxury vehicles. On the other hand, Chrysler went from product development to engineering without a customer survey, and sales flopped.

Better market fit

Great customer service is your best marketing strategy. It should be a priority that forms the foundation of your marketing plan, not an afterthought. Customers define a great brand, leading the conversation with word of mouth referrals, online reviews, and communities. 

Instead of guessing what your customers want, VoC strategy means you spend time interviewing them to understand their pain points and create strategies that cater to their needs. 

The data also helps you understand customer preferences to optimize your funnel for the buyer’s journey. Giving customers a voice at every interaction (through, for example, customer care chat and surveys) creates a personalized experience. 

Improved collaboration between teams

A VoC program that isn’t tied to customer support or success won’t work. This is because the VoC program goes far beyond sending customer surveys and hoping for the best. 

Questions to ask customers include:

• Is our company creating value?
• Is our product easy to use?
• What is your definition of success?
• Do we help you achieve that definition?

The answers to these questions tell you what success means to each customer. It requires collaboration from sales, marketing, product development, and customer success teams to provide a great customer experience. This experience begins when they start the customer journey and extends long after the point of purchase.

3 key questions for crafting your VoC strategy

1. What are the goals you want to achieve with a VoC program?

The answer to this question determines other questions you ask. VoC research serves the goals of:

• Continuous improvement 
• Benchmarking

Benchmark-focused surveys are metrics-heavy and feature rating questions. Meanwhile, continuous improvement surveys feature rating questions linked to follow-up questions. These questions are designed to understand the reasoning behind the rating.

For example, a survey question could be:

Rating question: On a scale of 1 to 5, how successful was your visit?

Follow-up question: Could you provide more insight to help us understand why your visit was unsuccessful?

2. What do you need to achieve your goal(s)?

With a benchmarking-focused VoC strategy, the answers to questions are limited. The results from these questions are ranking data and trending metrics that are parsed into sub-components.

VoC programs focused on continuous improvement have more opportunities to serve the customer’s needs deeper than benchmark VoC surveys. That’s why we use “capture” rather than “ask” when phrasing questions. In addition, AI-powered survey tools can collect more data than survey forms. 

In the background, it collects:

• Pages the user visited
• Product categories they viewed and compared
• Abandoned cart
• Wish list
• Checkout abandonment

You use the data to curate survey questions that help you understand their needs and optimize the site for improved customer satisfaction.

3. What survey tool will you use?

If benchmarking is the goal of the VoC program, then you need a simple survey tool.  Examples include SurveyMonkey and Typeform. But if continuous improvement is the goal, you need an advanced survey platform that captures the entire user experience to help you customize the survey. Examples include Rever and the Lean Way.

Voice of the customer survey template

A VoC template is a checklist for asking VoC related questions. The voice of the customer template also establishes how you’ll analyze data to ensure you’re asking the right questions and capturing the right data. Here’s a free voice of customer template to download:

12 VOC techniques every business should explore

1. Customer interviews 

Customer interviews are one of the most popular methods of collecting VoC data. They help you understand the customer’s perspective on product use cases, service issues, and general impression of a brand.

You’re opening the door to personalized conversations that lead to in-depth research and tailored customer experiences by speaking directly with the customer. While you can conduct customer interviews in groups, it’s best to schedule interviews with single customers. 

Best for: One-on-one interviews allow you to dig into specific details and create an environment where the customer feels comfortable to open up about sensitive issues that may not be possible in a group setting.

2. Online customer surveys

Online surveys are one of the most flexible and fastest ways to collect VoC data. After a customer engages with your website, buys a product, or interacts with your online support team, you can ask questions about their experiences.

There are no hard or fast rules to surveys. It could be three questions sent after signup, a 20-point questionnaire sent to the customer’s email, or a customized survey based on specific feedback you want to collect. The most important thing is to ask the right questions to get useful feedback.

Tips to guide you when sending out VOC surveys include:

• Segment surveys based on personas
• Keep the questions concise
• Questions should be easy to understand. Use more yes/no questions and fewer open-ended questions to encourage completion

Best for: Teams that want to be frugal and gather insights across a large customer group.

3. Live chat

46% of customers prefer live chat to social media and email for support services. Apart from support services, adding live chat on your website allows you to collect real-time feedback through questionnaires and surveys.

Consider using Guru as your knowledge management platform to make your support team more efficient. Guru’s AI Suggest functionality integrates with LiveChat to suggest relevant content for support agents so they can answer queries faster with more confidence.

Best for: Teams of all sizes and budgets benefit from integrating live chat into their VoC program.

4. Social listening via social media

A third of Americans have used social media to complain about a company or its customer service. Social media is a powerful tool for gathering VOC feedback. In addition, millions of people use social media to connect with each other and the brands they love. 

Customers share their experiences on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. For example, Facebook has a feature that lets customers leave reviews about brand purchases they’ve made. This means that customers can influence the purchase decisions of others by sharing comments and posts.  

If social media reviews influence 67% of customers, you want to be right there where the conversation is happening.

 Use social listening tools to:

• Conduct sentiment analysis
• Observe and participate in customer conversation
• Learn trends
• Capture unfiltered feedback
• Address concerns openly
• Collect data to improve customer experience strategy 

Best for: Companies of all sizes who want to improve their brand perceptions online.

5. Website behavior

Customer behavior on your website is a valuable source of VoC data. Apart from online surveys and live chat, analyzing your customer’s web behavior helps you collect passive feedback. You can achieve this task with web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Bing Analytics.

These tools show data such as:

• Visitor demographics
• What time do they visit your site
• The pages they visit the most
• Bounce rate
• Drop off points
• Entry points
• Most popular and least popular pages
• Highest-grossing and least converting pages

Other tools like Mouseflow, CrazyEgg, and Hotjar provide data on:

• Heatmaps
• Eye-tracking
• Scroll maps
• Visitor recording

Best for: When launching a new product, service, page, or site, these tools can help companies keep track of user behavior to quickly see red flags and improve them. 

6. Recorded customer call data

From customer support calls to demos and sales calls, recording customer interactions is a gold mine for VoC research. Recorded calls are a smart way to leverage historical data to understand how customers perceive your brand, what they expect from your products, and the objections they have.

While it’s labor-intensive and requires patience to go through each call and take notes, the rich data you collect is worth it. It also helps you learn how customer-facing teams perform and discover areas for retraining. Paired with topic and sentiment analysis, you can select specific calls to review based on highly negative experiences for a problem you want to solve.

Best for: Sales teams to help you understand problems your audience face and ask better questions during discovery calls. For marketing teams to create content around repeat queries or questions. To train customer support teams on best practices.

7. Customer reviews

95% of customers read reviews before making a purchase decision. 72% of customers won’t take action until they’ve read reviews.

Online credibility isn’t just what you generate. It’s all the instances where your business appears online, especially online reviews. Therefore, it’s essential to monitor your brand’s online reputation to grow. 

Online reviews could include lengthy open-ended reviews that customers leave on social media platforms or their websites. It also includes ratings of your product and descriptions of the customer’s experience with the product or service.

Reviews help you collect both positive and negative feedback. As a result, you learn areas where you currently excel and areas that need more work. Options to collect reviews include:

• General reviews: Facebook, Google My Business, Bing Places, TrustPilot, Yelp, and Consumer Reports. 
• Travel and Hospitality: TripAdvisor, Booking.com, and Expedia
• SaaS and tech: G2, TrustRadius, and Capterra 

Best for: Brands of any size that want to build trust with customers and rank higher on Google My Business.

8. Net promoter score

Net promoter score (NPS) is a way to measure customer loyalty. NPS helps you assess customer loyalty to your brand and its product. 

If you’ve ever encountered a web survey asking how likely you are to recommend a service, then you’ve seen NPS in action.

Like the one above, you ask customers this single question and they pick an answer on a scale of 0-10. The scale is segmented into three groups:

Detractors (0-6): Customers who had a bad experience and are unlikely to return. These customers may hurt your brand reputation when they share their experiences with other potential customers.

Passive (7-8): Customers who are satisfied but not to the extent of promoting your business.

Promoters (9-10): Customers who had a great experience, loved the product and are likely to refer buyers. They also have a high customer lifetime value.

To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of promoters from the percentage of detractors. A positive NPS score of +1 to +49 is good, and anything above +50 is excellent. However, what matters is how your NPS compares to the industry average. A low NPS of +25 could mean greater loyalty if your competitors score below +25.

Best for: Customer success managers who want to improve communication with customers and for product teams to monitor product performance.

9. Emails

Emails can be as casual or as formal as you like. You can create an email template or send highly personalized emails to specific customers who represent your target audience. 

Tips for collecting feedback via email include:

• Use a simple, focused design to encourage responses from subscribers
• Use a template to streamline messaging
• Add personalization tags to make the reader feel like you sent the email directly to them
• Tell the reader why you want their input
• Add a clear call to action, so the reader knows what to do next
• Consider offering incentives in exchange for the user’s time, for example, a $5 coffee shop gift card

Best for: Brands of all sizes that want to improve service delivery.

10. Focus groups

Focus groups are a popular method to collect voice of the customer data through structured group interviews. It offers a unique opportunity to gather multiple customers (either in-person or remotely) to discuss their needs and provide feedback that improves customer satisfaction.

Eight to 12 customers meet during focus group sessions to share beliefs, perceptions, and opinions about your product or service. In addition, they are sometimes used to support data from surveys and user interviews as a way to understand the customer’s voice for each of your organization’s touchpoints. 

The data from focus groups helps marketing teams develop relevant content and supports product teams as they make product updates.

Best for: Teams that don’t have the budget for one-on-one interviews to gather personalized feedback.

11. User testing

This lesser-known technique in VoC strategy comes from UX research. Users are paid to visit a page, website, or explore a prototype. They are selected to match target persona criteria, like demographics. They are given a scenario-based prompt to complete while talking aloud about their thought process. These can be either recorded with platforms like usertesting.com or facilitated by a researcher. For example, you might ask your user to imagine they are shopping for a product like yours and then ask them to show you how they would find one, or how they would find it on your site.

The risk here is that many people say what they think you want to hear. So these work best when you start with something like, “This isn’t my work, so don’t worry — I want you to be honest and you won’t hurt my feelings.”

Best for: Understanding digital journeys and how to optimize them. Generally, user testing requires a relatively large budget, starting in the five figures. For projects with limited budgets, online user testing can be a cost-effective alternative to traditional user testing. Userbrain, Lookback, Userlytics, and Loop11 are some low-cost tools to consider. 

12. Diary studies

Here again, this method stems from UX research and offers a way to follow the same participants over a long period of time. People self-report their activities, including their activities, thoughts, and problems. 

This method requires you to recruit customers or even employees who are willing to journal their frustrations and actions related to your product or service and share them with you. Diary studies provide a clear peek at users’ real lives, including their motivations, habits, needs, and impressions.

Best for: If you’re not able to get enough of a look in a minute, an hour, or a day with your customers, this is a way to dig deeper. Recruiting employees is free, so it may be one of the best, cost effective forms to deeply understand customer habits. By running a diary study, you can better understand long-term behavior, like habits, or customer journeys that happen over a long period of time, like a power user adopting a new software.

4 VoC examples to inspire your next survey

Upserve

Upserve used customer testimonials to show the value of their product. For example, this customer below says Upserve provides real-time information that helps him manage his restaurant and increase profit margins.

It matches the messaging on Upserve’s homepage, where they say that they give you everything you need to manage and grow your restaurant.

Using your customer’s end goal as your value proposition ensures your messaging aligns with the customer’s needs. VoC research helps you extract customer feedback from unstructured data. Asking customers to share feedback via testimonials brings your messaging to life.

Subbly 

Subbly is a SaaS eCommerce software for marketers and entrepreneurs. When they implemented a VoC program, they added a feedback monitoring system to their Facebook page. The tool allows users to vote on ideas they like.

Subbly believes that harnessing VoC data is the best way to run your company because it shapes your product roadmap and the features you release.

Zeronorth 

The voice of the customer should be the action you live by, not just shared verbally on your knowledge base software. 

"Our Vision is to empower businesses to build trusted software that we all rely on in work and life."

- Zeronorth

Safety is one of ZeroNorth’s biggest selling points, and they highlight this feature in their mission and culture content. In addition, they repeatedly mention that their goal is to build trusted software. Zeronorth re-emphasizes this message throughout their website and other online content.

Plainview

Plainview is a SaaS company that provides resource management and strategic planning for B2B brands. As part of their VoC program, they host Inner Circles meetings where customers attend focus groups and user interviews. They’ve met with over 1,000 customers spread across 40 sessions. 

The VoC program led to a web design update because customers highlighted a flaw in the navigation design that prevented them from reaching their goals. The new design serves the customer’s needs and improves user experience.

Use the voice of customer survey to power growth in your organization 

No company succeeds without customers. You can’t speak to your customers in a language they understand or create products they love if you don’t know their needs. VoC survey helps you make the data-driven decision that transforms your company into a customer-centric brand.

Use Guru’s templates to manage your VoC program. You can also collaborate across departments with our internal communication tool. It’s easy to share data, brainstorm ideas, and organize information. A central platform ensures employees have access to the real-time information they need to make data-backed decisions.