What exactly is Voice of Customer Research? (… And why do we bother with it?)
Conducting interviews, sending surveys, mining testimonials and combing through social media – all adds up to hours (and sometimes hours and hours!) spent poking around behind the scenes. And not a single moment of it making a direct sale or even a pitch!
In business, we quantify the value of an initiative by correlating efforts directly to sales, which means seldom is it possible to demonstrate and defend the direct value of VOC research. Don’t make the mistake of being misled by misleading metrics: a solid VOC strategy is critical to increasing sales because of the foundation it lays and the opportunities it unlocks. There will be no clear formula tying it to your marketing ROI, but the results will be impossible to argue.
I see it all the time: too many businesses assume that the quality of their product speaks for itself. There is a common assumption that since how you talk about your product is just a few words here and there, spending too much effort describing what it is, what it does, and who it does it for, is a waste of time.
This is a false assumption, because subpar products outperform much higher quality ones all the time.
Imagine you have a problem, and you’re looking to invest in a solution. You visit a site that uses lackluster language that follows a pattern of “We do [this thing] for you”. But they’re not talking about the problem the same way you do. The words they’re using don’t elicit any emotion in you. No emotion means the buying decision is not triggered.
Then you visit a second site that is talking about the outcome you want, using the exact same language you use to talk about your own problem!
You are going to pick that 2nd one, the one that speaks your language, even if that first one is ultimately a better fit. Humans make buying decisions with emotion and justify those decisions with logic. Uncovering Voice of Customer (VOC) is critical to stirring the right emotions at the right times.
Prospects and leads will only decide to buy when they can truly see themselves in your stuff. If the message or positioning isn’t crystal clear: that this product is meant for them, they don’t buy it, even if your product is the perfect fit for them.
It’s been t-o-u-g-h to be in business the past few years. Volatile markets, civil unrest, wars, these all affect the way buyers and business owners alike behave. Everyone is feeling burnt out on numerous fronts. Even though your business exists to make sales, and selling more is the lifeblood of your operations, the idea of “selling” just might not feel good right now. But rest easy, because the secret is your true audience WANTS to be sold to. They have a problem, they want it fixed, and they need someone to step up and fix it for them, no matter what’s going on in the world around them. They are happy to pay for the products and services they need! What they’re burnt out on is being sold on, talked into, the things that aren’t right for them.
Voice of customer research is all about getting to know your perfect fit audience on a more intimate level, learning how to speak their language. Once you achieve that, selling becomes unnecessary. Voice of customer data mining can turn your sales process into something more like matchmaking: you know who you’re speaking to, you know what they need, and you know how to speak about your product in ways that speak directly to them in words and phrases they themselves use.
So what are the best practices and most effective voice of customer methodologies? Let this article serve as your introduction to voice of customer techniques and your go-to guide on voice of customer strategies.
What is VOC research?
Voice of customer (VOC) research is a specialized data mining technique. That sounds technical, but it isn’t. VOC research is simply a process of knowing where to find opportunities to observe your best fit customers and leads in the wild, where they speak normally and naturally about their struggles, desires, fears. And then knowing what to do with that information.
There is value in getting to be the objective observer, gathering unspoiled data on what they want, why they buy, and, just as important, why they don’t buy.
When you prioritize finding this kind of information, it unlocks a whole new world where you get to know your audience on a deeper, more intimate level. A world where you forge more meaningful connections with the audience you exist to serve through brand positioning and messaging that resonates with them.
Many market research experts tout customer interviews as the gold standard for voice of customer techniques, but it’s not the only way, and sometimes, it’s not even the best way.
Sometimes a survey will be a better choice. Using surveys means the subject has more time to think about their answers without the added pressure of being in a two-way conversation.
Sometimes just devoting some time to reading what people have to say is the best choice. People write reviews and testimonials from an emotional place, making them a great resource for the most natural language the audience uses directly tied to your product or service.
Combing through social media comments and threads is like being a fly on the wall in their natural habitat.
Hit reply campaigns are like having a conversation with a friend in a familiar place (there is no more intimate place on the internet than our inbox, and that’s the whole point of email marketing: to build relationships in that familiar place). We reveal things when we’re comfortable in that way, things that could be valuable to you in your positioning and messaging.
Read on to learn more about which voice of customer research techniques are right to use and under what circumstances.
Getting the Interview
Interviews are great, but they’re not without their drawbacks.
Interviewing is an in depth process typically requiring higher budgets and significant investments of time to properly coordinate, conduct, and process the results into usable data.
Luckily there are tools available to help you speed up parts of the process. One of my personal favorites is Fireflies, an AI assistant that attends your meetings on autopilot, automating the process of creating notes, transcripts and summaries. Not only do you not miss anything, it takes a fraction of the time to analyze your interviews. Fireflies.AI is also less expensive and more accurate than just about any other solution I have found.
Sometimes the interview just isn’t the best way to get the information you’re looking for.
What people say when they’re asked directly typically isn’t well aligned with what they’re actually thinking or needing.
Asking them directly leaves your data vulnerable to an array of biases, mostly subconscious on the part of your subject. There’s a certain amount of pressure when being asked in a formal setting, and sometimes interviewees are motivated to give the answers they think you want over answers that represent what they actually think and feel.
Reciprocity is a strong psychological principle; when someone does something for us, we are compelled to return the favor. This can affect the quality of the answers, since interviewees might worry their own thoughts/ideas are not good enough, and offer you answers that don’t truly represent them but that they feel are most valuable to you. You should also keep this principle in mind anytime your interview is based on an incentive for participation. They are subconsciously motivated to give you answers that they perceive match the value of the incentive you’ve offered them.
So once you’ve determined interviews are the right technique, how many interviews should you conduct? The answer of course is “it depends”.
How much time do you have to work with to set them up and conduct them? How niche is your product/service? What’s the price point? What’s the time and energy investment required of the user of your product? What resources do you have allocated to market research?
When budgets aren’t an issue, you have a very niche offer at a high price point, interviews are probably a good idea.
Other times, surveys, review/testimonial mining, and observing social media comments can be more effective ways to uncover relevant voice of customer data. A basic principle of scientific research is that a subject who knows it’s being observed is inherently changed, which skews the data and taints the results. Luckily market research is both art and science.
Potential Questions to Ask in an Interview
How does our product (or service) help you meet your goal of _______? Depending on how well you know your customer before the interview, the more specific you can get about their specific circumstances, the more relevant their answers will be.
What situation would mean you don’t need our product/service anymore? You get information on what success looks like to them, because they’re prompted to forward thinking about what it looks like when they’ve achieved their desired outcome using your product.
How would you explain our product/service in a single sentence? Prompting them to get really specific and succinct. Asking variations of this question can reveal that the way you see your product and the way they see it is very different, and that’s okay! Because now you have an opportunity to adjust your positioning and/or messaging to resonate more directly with them, and other customers just like them.
Voice of customer case studies
Let’s talk about real world success stories for a minute. Terrateam, an infrastructure management company, uncovered the hidden nuggets of voice of customer primarily through a combination of interviews and review mining.
Since they offer a technically complex product (people who understand infrastructure management are best suited to talk to other people who know about infrastructure management!) it made sense for them to take the lead on their own interviews. They knew how to ask the right questions and how to answer appropriately to elicit more information.
The interview process revealed their audience wasn’t who they thought! Before the interviews, they believed they were competing with a free product that required a ton of labor, but what they were actually competing with was a paid product. This changed their positioning and put them on a whole new level.
Better identifying the market they were speaking to allowed us to reposition the brand messaging to better speak to that market. We also learned all about things the people in their market love, things they objected to, what they wanted, needed and also potential opportunities to improve in ways that would respond directly to those needs and wants.
Later on, through review mining, we unlocked super cool, and totally unexpected, language that brought the brand to life in a whole new way! A way that could only come from the voice of the actual users! It would never have occurred to, or even made sense to, an outsider – no matter how creative a thinker.
Review Mining
Reviews are the perfect place to find simplified and succinct language, so you can “come to life” in the eyes of your audience, in ways even the most seasoned writers, strategists and marketers couldn’t come up with.
Going back to the case of the infrastructure management brand Terrateam, review mining revealed a true jewel in the crown of their brand messaging:
“We make infrastructure management manageable”
Which sounds wonky and repetitive to those of us on the outside, but resonates deeply with the target market. We know this for certain because those words came directly from a customer review!
But which reviews should you mine, and where do you find them?
Your Own Offers
A good place to start is with your own customers. Where do they typically leave public reviews, feedback and testimonials? Do they use trustpilot? Your google business page? Your social media accounts?
Mining reviews and testimonials is effective, but the best place to uncover the voice of your existing customers is to be intentional about including it as part of your offboarding process. Use your offboarding process to turn their results into a case study. Ask about what went well and what didn’t go well. And if it did go well, don’t forget to ask for the testimonial.
Getting Engagement with Surveys
Surveys allow you to ask the exact same set of questions you would in an interview, with the ability to address a larger audience. It takes less time, money and effort on your part than does interviewing, and it eliminates the locate/identify steps of the review mining process.
To get the most out of analyzing your survey results, you need to be skilled at reading between the lines. It’s a universal human condition to struggle to describe what we really think/need. We are constantly subconsciously correcting for biases, the ways in which we think people want us to respond, protecting our egos by making sure we sound competent and confident, even when we aren’t. In this way, the interview is more effective because you can ask follow up questions to get down to the heart of it.
There is of course always the option of following up with your survey respondents via email to ask those deeper clarifying questions typically reserved for interviewing.
You don’t need a big budget or fancy tech or tools or complex processes to run a highly effective survey campaign. Nicole Morton from Nicole Morton Agency shares the success behind a survey campaign she ran for her client, using Respondent.io With a budget of just $600 for 10 respondents, she was able to create and direct her traffic towards a Google Form and within a matter of hours had great survey data, no muss, no fuss.
Don’t Forget to Peak at What Your Competition is Doing
Not only is it okay to take a look at what your competition is up to, it’s a vital part of market research and essential to sales and brand strategy. Sometimes we feel uncomfortable “taking a peek”. We want to be original, we don’t want to be accused of copying or emulating. We want to stay in our lane, but staying in our lane requires us to be alert and aware of everyone on the road around us.
Knowing what your competition does really well and what they don’t do so well allows you to position yourself in the gaps and capture opportunities to speak to parts of the market they are missing. Looking at your competition is especially important when you’re emerging into a new market or if you’re newer on the scene and your competition simply has more reviews.
Remember, the point of voice of customer research is to uncover the ways in which your target market is speaking about their problems and the solutions they need. Checking out your competition is not just getting an idea of what they’re doing. It’s about what they’re saying, and how their audience is responding to it. You can see what they’re doing that people don’t like and use that information to avoid showing up in ways your audience doesn’t respond to.
Where to Dig for Hidden Gems
You can get creative. Think about all the places people would naturally talk about the problems they have that your products and services exist to solve. It might be creepy to try to eavesdrop on them IRL, but you can definitely do that on social media!
Social Media Comments
Deep diving into the comments sections on the social media apps where your market spends their downtime is the perfect place to uncover some truly beautiful voice of customer gems. My friend Jess Kelly at Scribble & Brine Copywriting & Consulting warns that this process is easy to get lost in, so better start a timer!
Why is it such a valuable resource worth investigating? Because the things people say in comments and social media threads are typically unfiltered, unedited bits of information coming from a place of emotion (you don’t bother commenting if you don’t care, you just scroll on by). The reason messaging is such a powerful tool in sales and marketing is because our emotional brain connects with the words before our intellectual brain has had the opportunity to filter and process the meaning and order of those words. Using the same emotional language they use when their guard is down is like holding up a mirror so that they can truly see themselves in your brand, establishing trust and connection instantly in a way they can’t quite explain, but they can feel.
When you find posts that are particularly useful, you can give it a like to boost its algo juice, while also ensuring you see more like this in the future. However, beware! Sometimes the most useful posts belong to your competitors directly, and you will want to consider carefully whether or not it’s in your best interest to “boost” it.
“Hit reply” campaigns (in your email marketing)
Why is this particularly valuable? It’s easy, cost effective and works on numerous segments of your audience.
New sign ups are in a perfect position to tell you how they feel both about their own problem and how they perceive your solution and your ability to provide it because it’s incredibly fresh on the top of their minds.
You can also segment your list and ask questions about why portions of your audience didn’t buy. Then you can tag respondents as possible leads for future offers you craft specifically to fill the gaps they help you identify to better meet your audience’s needs.
These campaigns can be tricky. How do you motivate and incentivize your new subscribers to hit reply and leave a thoughtful response?
- Humor! People are motivated to engage with things that tickle them, so don’t be afraid to get just a little bit silly in your wording or approach.
- Real talk – they’re already on your list, it’s not a first impression, people connect with sincerity and authenticity even if they don’t necessarily share that viewpoint
- Reciprocity – if you give them something, human psych 101 tells us they’ll be compelled to do something for you in return.
Finding Your Own Hidden Gems
Even knowing what to do and where to dig, this can still feel like a daunting task. Want to find out how we could work together to mine the perfect message and language that speaks directly to them? Schedule your consult today.
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