Author: Adam Bunker
Subject Matter Expert: Sam Scott
Failure to listen to your customers is failure to compete in today’s market. Understanding customer needs, reacting to their feedback, and working to deliver on evolving expectations is vital to building winning CX strategies.
So how do you tune in to all that customer sentiment, sort the wheat from the chaff, and transform raw feedback into actionable insight? The answer lies in building a robust Voice of the Customer program. It’s the foundation for building next-level customer experiences powered by data, not hunches.
Free eBook: 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for VoC Platforms Report
Definition of Voice of the Customer (VoC)
Voice of the Customer (VoC) refers to strategic customer experience programs designed to capture what customers are saying, thinking, and expecting from a business, product, or service.
In this context, Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a collective term for your customers’ feedback about their experiences with, and expectations for, your products or services. It encapsulates customer needs, opinions, pain points, and emotional sentiment, usually collected through technology platforms that analyze data using text analytics and sentiment analysis.
The benefits of a Voice of the Customer program
As customers demand more and more direct engagement from brands, VoC programs have only gained traction, emerging as a core business strategy that feeds into decision-making processes. And that’s with good reason: businesses that proactively capture and use Voice of the Customer data tend to improve customer experiences across the board.
While the positive impact of listening to customers is clear – as happier customers are more loyal, after all – the real magic happens when brands strategically apply these valuable insights to optimize their customer experience strategies.
Here are some compelling stats on the benefits of a robust VoC program:
- You’ll foster loyalty. Forrester research shows that customers are 2.4x more likely to stick with brands who can listen and solve problems quickly.
- You’ll meet customer expectations. Almost two-thirds want the brands they buy from to do a better job of listening to them.
- You’ll boost your revenue. ‘Customer-obsessed’ brands who act on feedback experience 41% higher revenue growth.
In other words? A Voice of the Customer program gives insight into customer preferences, problems, and complaints – putting businesses in a better position to identify issues and opportunities so they can implement targeted improvements and strengthen customer relationships.
What a modern VoC program can mean for businesses
Customer-perceived quality and outstanding customer experiences are proven drivers of business success. But where VoC gets even more exciting is in how cutting edge tools and technologies are fundamentally reshaping the nature of insights, and the strategic outcomes that active customer listening can achieve.
AI-enabled tools powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) unlock two transformative shifts for Voice of the Customer programs:
Trend analysis at scale
Where traditional VoC programs relied on manual data collection and aggregation, today’s AI-enabled tools can ingest and organize huge volumes of customer data, instantly integrating information from across all touchpoints.
This means sentiment gathered from social media posts is seamlessly combined with survey feedback and contact center analytics. Casting this wider net yields higher quality data and deeper insights – helping customers to feel truly heard. For example, even if a common pain point is only mentioned by a handful of people across a multitude of channels, AI will still spot the pattern and flag it for resolution – an insight that would likely be missed in traditional analysis.
Predictive analytics
Why stop at emerging trends? With AI’s ability to analyze data at lightning pace, today’s best CX and VoC tools are able to go one step further and actually predict risks and pain points before they emerge. This means that brands can use today’s feedback from customers to predict tomorrow’s challenges. And, crucially, this enables them to close the loop on reputational risks well in advance.
As CMSWire puts it: “By harnessing AI capabilities such as NLP, predictive analytics, and ML, businesses can transform vast troves of customer data into actionable insights that drive product innovation, service improvements, and personalized experiences.”
“Predictive analytics employs statistical models and ML algorithms to analyze historical and current VoC data to forecast future customer behaviors, needs and trends. By understanding the factors that influence customer decisions and customer satisfaction, businesses can anticipate changes in market demand, customer preferences and potential issues before they escalate.”
Methods for capturing VoC data
While the way we capture Voice of the Customer data has evolved over the years, established foundational approaches remain highly valuable. Where that evolution counts is in how various data capture methods are analyzed together using the latest in CX and experience management tools.
Here’s a rundown of the best ways to gather customer feedback:
Surveys and feedback forms
Old but gold, customer surveys remain a powerful method to collect customer feedback and understand customer perspectives directly. While some survey data types are stronger than others (written feedback is the holy grail, offering rich, nuanced insights compared to the relatively blunt nature of scoring systems), any direct input you can solicit from the people who interact with your brand is priceless.
Online reviews and ratings
Online customer reviews – the kind that people leave on your site as well as on third-party sites like Google Reviews – should be an integral part of any customer listening program. The key is to collect and incorporate reviews from those external channels in real time, leveraging AI for continuous monitoring. With the right tools, you’ll be able to analyze review text for sentiment, emotion, and effort – and form an action plan from what you learn.
Digital analytics
Website behavior, product usage data, and CRM data can give you inferred insights about user behavior. By applying the right tools and an analytical approach, you can transform this information into a robust understanding of customer behavior and preferences, enabling more informed business decisions for your product development teams, sales teams, and more.
Omnichannel analytics
Modern VoC truly shines when tools analyze data from every channel and platform in a unified way. That means survey data sits alongside third-party reviews, social media mentions, text analytics from customer support calls and sales calls, chats, and every touchpoint in between.
Omnichannel analytics help brands build a complete, nuanced understanding of customer sentiment and customer engagement, but also begins to form the bedrock of a wider omnichannel customer experience strategy. This is because understanding customer interactions across every touchpoint allows for the development of more unified and seamless experiences.
AI and Natural Language Processing
Omnichannel analytics suites are increasingly being supercharged with artificial intelligence. AI’s ability to simultaneously analyze every signal, extract deeper insights from vast data sets, and offer predictive analytics empowers organizations to better anticipate and personalize their customers’ experiences.
In other words, when it comes to Voice of the Customer, AI tools can be the difference between being proactive and reactive. Often, the latter means reputational risks that escalate too quickly to combat them. This VoC process, supported by advanced technology, enables continuous improvement and business growth by turning raw data into actionable insights in real time customer feedback.
How to implement a Voice of the Customer program
Voice of the Customer programs provide early warnings and direction directly from your most important asset – your customers. Here’s how to translate customer feedback into your future success and drive continuous improvement.
Connect valuable feedback across data channels
Organizations that rely on only one or two channels to measure and optimize their customer interactions inevitably limit the accuracy and depth of their customer insights. Without an omnichannel experience management and feedback platform, Voice of the Customer programs work off of an incomplete understanding of customer preference, behavior, and satisfaction.
Leading brands, however, recognize the power of gathering feedback from every customer touchpoint along the customer journey, acting on those unified insights to create truly seamless customer experiences and increase customer loyalty.
Collaborate across departments with action planning
An effective VoC program requires the active involvement of multiple departments in collecting, analyzing, and acting on the customer input you collect. It’s easy to collaborate across departments with the right action planning tools. For example, Qualtrics® allows you to tag owners, set deadlines, and even supply step-by-step guidance to enable everyone to delight their customers and improve business processes.
Incorporate the Voice of the Employee
Connecting the employee and customer experiences will give your organization a more complete picture of what is really going on – and why.
Employee feedback unlocks three essential insight streams that directly impact customer experience by…
- Providing context for customer interactions
- Helping identify process, policy, and technology hurdles that hinder experience delivery
- Giving insight into the quality of employees’ own experiences
Use dashboards and reports to surface insights to the right people
The right Voice of the Customer tool is one that helps make sense of what’s going on in your business. You’ll want a platform that allows you to configure unique dashboards for every role and provides relevant insights directly to the individuals who can act on them.
Again, Qualtrics can help here. Our platform allows you to create automated actions and alerts based on location, responses, behaviors, department, role, and more. You can also loop in the right stakeholders automatically based on the feedback received – from the leadership team to the frontline customer-facing employees.
Track ROI and business results
Any successful customer experience program needs to deliver value to the business, so it’s essential to go in with an ROI mindset and focus everything from your measurements and metrics to the actions and improvements you put in place on what they’ll deliver back to the business.
Demonstrating the ROI of VoC goes beyond simply reporting on metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). The real value lies in connecting improvements in these metrics to tangible financial outcomes for the business.
That means focusing on:
- Market share
This includes optimizing market penetration by expanding your reach within your target audience, increasing share of wallet by capturing a larger portion of your existing customers’ spending compared to competitors, and boosting category spending by attracting customer spending from other areas to your offerings instead.
- Cost
Every activity has a cost, so understanding the costs to serve, acquire and retain customers – and weighing them up against the projected gains of any increase in those areas – is an essential component here. An improvement in one area may see an increase in retention, but if the cost of that activity is greater than the projected improvement on the bottom line, it’s not worth doing.
- Efficiency
How worthwhile is the time spent to make any feedback-driven changes? Understanding this means tracking the total number of man-hours required to complete a task to customer satisfaction, or the total amount of time from beginning to end.
With these factors in mind, it’s easy to see why Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) has become the premier financial metric in customer experience. CLV takes into account a whole range of individual metrics – from share of wallet and market penetration to cost of acquisition and customer retention – to provide a robust ROI metric.
Customer-centricity: The secret to a successful VoC program
Before you jump in and begin building a step-by-step plan for achieving customer experience maturity, you’ll want to set the stage. After all, if you collect VoC data but can’t put it into action, then that information and effort will simply be wasted.
The key here is in building a customer-centric culture. Your organization needs to be ready to listen to its customers and act on what they’re saying. Decisions need to be driven by real insights, including customer insights and customer analytics, not assumptions – and stakeholders at every level need to be prepared to deliver on change.
So where to start? Organization-wide customer centricity requires six key characteristics – so your first step toward a market-leading VoC program is assessing your business’ readiness against these core tenets:
1. Strong leadership
Establishing a customer-centric culture starts at the very top. Without executive-level buy-in any customer-centric initiative will likely have limited impact. Securing the support of lower-level leaders is equally vital for driving meaningful changes to the customer experience. Leaders set the tone for their teams, so if a leader decides that the customer is important, their direct reports will follow suit.
2. Vision and clarity
Your vision for VoC needs to be specific enough that everyone within the organization can easily understand and rally around a common business objective. Start by focusing on the language and messaging you’ll use to convey your vision; we recommend a short and simple vision statement to help you increase understanding and buy-in from leadership.
3. Engagement and collaboration
An engaged workforce is vital for the long-term success of a customer-centric company. As employees become more engaged, cross-functional collaboration and synergy will naturally create more impactful and successful customer initiatives. To truly engage your workforce, you have to understand them. The most tried and true method for doing so is by implementing a formal employee experience program.
4. Listening and learning
A systematic method for monitoring and collecting customer feedback is key to improving the overall experience. Because customer feedback can be gathered via multiple channels – including surveys, focus groups, online customer reviews, and direct feedback – it’s important to build any listening program on a robust platform – one that can evolve and scale alongside your customer base.
5. Alignment and action
Alignment means that all members of a company are marching towards the same vision, and each workgroup can easily outline the actions needed to help realize that vision. Action here refers to the measurable steps taken to improve the customer experience. Experience gap analysis will help you identify which areas to take action on, including how to improve customer loyalty and address customer pain points or customer complaints.
6. Patience and commitment
Building a world-class customer culture is not an overnight exercise, and it’s never truly “finished”. The most successful customer-centric organizations in the world are built in an iterative fashion over a number of years.
Customer experiences and culture are slowly altered, data collection practices are refined gradually, and analysis is ongoing. All along this journey, leadership must demonstrate patience and commitment to the process and vision.
Choose the right VoC tool to improve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty
Modern VoC programs enable your organization to develop a customer-centric culture, and – in turn – reduce customer churn and grow customer lifetime value.
But, increasingly, that’s only made possible by the right tools.
That means that a truly effective VoC program requires a VoC strategy and technology working in tandem. For the former, AI-enabled tools that collect and analyze data with a touchpoint-agnostic eye are revolutionizing this process. They empower brands to move beyond assumptions and guesswork to data-driven insight and proactive, predictive experience management.
Qualtrics XM for Customer Experience™, for example, helps organizations surface customer friction and guide frontline teams in the moment to better serve their clients. Our Voice of the Customer software will enable you to collect VoC feedback at every touchpoint, find the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ with advanced predictive analytics, and build out powerful role-based dashboards and reporting.
But you needn’t just take our word for it. We’re thrilled to be recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Voice of the Customer Platforms – for the fourth time. Download the report below to learn more about the state of the market – and our recognition.
Free eBook: 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for VoC Platforms Report