“Voice of Customer.” It sounds like a modern-day Oracle of Delphi—decisive yet mysterious, divine yet accessible, a source of truth that’s also a riddle.
The Oracle was a must-visit for ancient Greek leaders facing mind-boggling decisions that could make or break them, like whether to launch a new type of tzatziki dip (just kidding). When King Croesus of Lydia was wondering if he should go to war against Cyrus the Great of Persia, the stakes were high. He didn’t want to leave the decision up to his own whims, so he consulted the Oracle.
This was, by all accounts, a wise choice, and Pythia gave Croesus an answer. Unfortunately, he misinterpreted it, and chose to go to war … disastrously.
Product innovators are in a similar situation (well, it can feel that way sometimes). The risk of a failed launch is too great for them to simply trust their gut, but consumer feedback can be unreliable for many reasons. Procedural bias, survey fraud, and the simple fact that a lot of people don’t know what they really want are all likely to lead product development teams astray.
How can you devise a Voice of the Customer strategy that’s guaranteed to guide you towards product launch success? Here, we’ll take a look at the challenge of getting solid insights from customers and how to overcome them.
Product development teams use the term “Voice of Customer” (VoC) to refer to all the statements, sentiments, and behaviors that arise from regular people interacting with a brand. If you’re doing VoC research, you’ll want to find out:
As much as possible, you’ll want to collect data relating to all of the above, and then turn it into a narrative that you can use to make your product better fit a market need. You’ll need to look at multiple channels, including social media, reviews, and direct customer interviews.
Essentially, Voice of Customer analysis means capturing and contextualizing authentic customer feedback across touchpoints. (A touchpoint is any moment that someone spends interacting with your brand, from reading the claims on your packaging to bringing your wine bottle to a friend’s house.)
Are people excited about your product and ready to integrate it into their daily routines? Or are they frustrated about something? Did they really want to like it, but there’s just something they can’t get past (like an ingredient that a YouTube video says causes cancer)? These are all things to find out directly from people who’ve used your product.
VoC research is daunting because there’s so much to know, and you’re also trying to dig deeper than the usual surface-level insights without too much irrelevant information. Here’s a quick guide to help beat the overwhelm.
As crucial as it is, VoC research and analysis can be tricky. First of all, there are a lot of channels to look at. You don’t want to miss anything that’s important, but you also don’t want to get lost in the sauce.
When you’re trying to find out the motivations behind customer purchasing behavior, you’ll be dealing with a lot of unstructured data from open-ended interviews and video diaries. This data can be a gold mine, but this doesn’t mean the mining is easy.
Fortunately, tools like Highlight’s artificial intelligence platform can help you extract meaning from mounds of data relatively easily. Thanks to automatic topic modeling and sentiment analysis, you’ll be able to quickly understand customer sentiment without getting buried alive in the unstructured data you receive from interviews and open-ended surveys.
Take this example from Highlight research on skincare consumers, where Highlight AI does the hard work for you, summarizing responses, surfacing oft-repeated words, and enabling deeper search of your qualitative data.
Like Pythia’s prophecies, consumer feedback can be cryptic or incomplete, and it’s often ripe for misinterpretation. Sometimes, this is due to stakeholders’ tendency to only hear what they want to hear.
We all do this, and so did King Croesus. The Oracle’s exact words to the King were: “If you make war on the Persians, you will destroy a great empire.” Croesus thought that meant the destruction of the Persian empire; it really meant the end of his own. (Perhaps Pythia could have clarified.)
We all have this tendency. That’s why it’s vital to avoid inserting our own biases into any given Voice of the Customer methodology, whether it be surveys or focus groups. The best methodologies are the ones that give respondents the best shot at responding authentically.
But what if customers don’t know how they feel about something, even when there aren’t any leading questions tugging them in a biased direction? It’s not easy to imagine what we haven’t experienced, or come up with ways in which a product could be better. Most of us aren’t actively thinking about the umbrella, tea kettle, or lipstick of the future—that’s the product development team’s job.
While this is all true, there are ways to give product testers more food for thought. People definitely know when they don’t like something, and the more they use a product like yours, the more thoughts they’ll have about it. This is why in-home usage testing (IHUT) is such a powerful way to propel customer-led growth forward.
There are some things that you can only learn when you let people try out your products as part of the rhythm of their daily lives. Otherwise, a lot of the information you glean will be mostly guesswork on the part of respondents (“I think I’d use this daily” or “I’d probably like that flavor”).
With in-home usage testing, Voice of the Customer questions like “how often did you use our conditioner?” will draw upon the authentic customer experience. You can have testers interact with your product over the course of a week or more and see how it fits (or doesn’t fit) into their usual routines. Observed behaviors in the context of a consumer’s organic environment and routines is one of the most reliable predictors you have for future product performance.
IHUT also helps connect the dots between user statements, feelings, and real behavior. People don’t always do exactly what they say, and their feelings can change over time. But with IHUT, you’ll be able to track all of these things.
Remember, the goal of VoC research is to build more customer-centric products, not simply to get feedback. Be sure to act on your findings, and then clearly communicate your improvements to customers through updated marketing.
Closing the loop builds trust and shows people that their feedback leads to real action. It’s a chance for you to make a lasting good impression on your loyal customers and win over people who may have shunned your product initially.