Innovation drives modern business success, but improving a product—whether your own, a competitor’s, or the industry standard—can be easier said than done. One powerful way to increase the likelihood of successful innovation is to understand the aspirations, expectations, and pain points that drive purchasing decisions. This is where the voice of the customer (VoC) comes in.
What Is Voice of the Customer (VoC)?
In design thinking, the voice of the customer (VoC) represents the persona of your target consumers, built from what you know about them, including:
- Demographics: Age, gender, geographic location, marital status, education level, occupation, income, ethnicity
- Aspirations: Hopes and goals when using a product
- Pain points: Frustrations that drive them to seek solutions
A clear voice of the customer means that you understand your users’ expectations, preferences, and experiences well enough to guide ideation, product development, marketing, and customer experience design.
In the Harvard Business School Online course Design Thinking and Innovation, part of the six-month Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy program, VoC efforts often begin by identifying customer pain points to spark innovation. A voice of the customer program, or VoC program, formalizes this process by collecting and analyzing feedback through surveys, interviews, observation, and general market research.
Benefits of a Strong Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program
Without a VoC program, companies essentially guess customers’ needs. Innovations based on assumptions can waste time, money, and resources—or even alienate loyal customers.
Implementing a strong VoC program provides clear advantages for your business. By leveraging customer insights, your organization can make data-driven decisions that lead to:
- Faster and more successful development of products or services
- Higher customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Stronger brand awareness and perception
- Competitive agility
HBS Dean Srikant Datar, who teaches Design Thinking and Innovation, notes that understanding the voice of your customer can also help break cognitive fixedness—mental blocks that limit how you view a product or service. He identifies three main types:
- Functional fixedness: Limiting a product or service to its traditional use
- Structural fixedness: Seeing objects or services as indivisible or unchangeable units
- Relational fixedness: Narrowly interpreting the relationships among a product’s attributes
Key Voice of the Customer (VoC) Strategies
If you’re new to implementing a VoC program, these four strategies provide a strong foundation.
1. Collect Feedback at Multiple Touchpoints
Customer data is at the core of any VoC program. Without it, you can’t truly understand what customers want, need, or expect, making data-driven innovation impossible.
To collect comprehensive feedback, gather input from a variety of sources, including:
- Customer surveys: Analyze post-purchase, net promoter score (NPS), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys
- Website analytics: Track how customers interact with your copy, images, and pages
- Social listening: Monitor social media and review sites for brand and competitor mentions
- Customer support transcripts: Identify recurring complaints
- Live chat and chatbot interactions: Review real-time feedback
2. Implement a Structured VoC Program
While a lean startup might begin with an informal approach, a structured VoC program quickly adds value by streamlining feedback collection.
Begin by identifying tools that align with your data goals. Platforms like Qualtrics, Medallia, Hotjar, and SurveyMonkey, as well as social media, email, and customer relationship management systems, can help.
Align your VoC program to your broader business objectives. Doing so clarifies its value to stakeholders and guides which data to collect and how to act on insights.
3. Involve Cross-Functional Teams
VoC insights matter only when applied. Share findings across departments, including:
- Product: Improve existing offerings or ideate new ones
- Customer experience: Remove friction from the buyer journey
- Sales and marketing: Inform website copy, email messaging, advertisements, and outreach
- Support and service: Enhance customer support and reduce tickets
In addition to discussing VoC findings in cross-departmental meetings, create internal dashboards so data remains accessible and actionable.
4. Also Consider Voice of the Product (VoP)
While the voice of the customer is critical, it’s not the only source of insight. The voice of the product (VoP)—how customers use your product—can reveal opportunities beyond your current market.
“If we don’t understand who our customer base is or who we’re providing value for, you’re not going to get a valuable innovation at the end,” explains Yoni Stern, partner and senior vice president of business development at consulting firm SIT, in Design Thinking and Innovation. “However, what we find is that many organizations and many approaches ignore the second half of the entire environment, and that’s the environment of your resources, the product, and the system itself that you’re looking to innovate.”
To incorporate VoP into ideation, Stern recommends asking:
- What resources are currently available?
- How can they be leveraged or reimagined?
- How might they meet newly discovered or latent needs?
“If you have that dual system, where you’re scanning both the voice of the customer and the voice of the product…then you have a much fuller picture and a much greater wealth of resources in which to use in order to create true innovations that sometimes even surprise the user and the market,” Stern says in Design Thinking and Innovation.
Challenges in VoC Programs and How to Overcome Them
Even the best VoC programs face obstacles. To address those, consider common challenges and potential solutions:
Low Survey Response Rates
Insufficient feedback makes it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions. Encourage participation by offering incentives, such as discounts or coupon codes, and simplify surveys to avoid overwhelming respondents.
Data Overload
High volumes of poorly organized data can hinder insights. In these instances, return to the data lifecycle to ensure that you’re properly wrangling the data you collect: cleaning, tagging, and securing it. Data visualization tools can transform raw data into actionable insights.
Internal Silos
Silos prevent effective communication across teams. Appoint a VoC owner to champion the program, ensure findings are implemented, and bridge departmental gaps.
Learning to Identify Opportunities for Innovation
Developing a VoC program and applying its insights to product development is an effective way to uncover innovation opportunities, but it’s not the only approach. Design Thinking and Innovation also emphasize the VoP, design principles, and a human-centered focus across all business functions.
Courses like Design Thinking and Innovation, or the Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy, teach these design thinking frameworks to help you build the skills to thrive in today’s business landscape.
Are you ready to deepen your understanding of the voice of the customer so you can begin pursuing real, valuable innovation within your business? Consider the Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy—which includes Design Thinking and Innovation in the required curriculum—to learn how to leverage creative problem-solving tools for the modern business world. To explore all our digital transformation programs, download our free course flowchart to find the right fit.
