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Successful companies prioritize customers. They design products that meet customer needs, provide exceptional customer service, and build marketing campaigns around customer behaviors.
\nTo do this well, businesses need to know a lot about their customers. Demographic data and broadly available market research can tell you what certain populations tend to think, do, or prioritize, but that information is not specific to your business. It can’t tell you, for example, what your existing customers think of your company or what their specific needs are.
\nVoice of the customer (VoC) programs fill this gap. By soliciting specific information about customer needs, VoC programs can help businesses improve the customer experience, increase customer loyalty, identify market opportunities, and boost sales. Here’s what VoC programs are and how you can successfully implement one.
\nTable of Contents
\nVoice of the customer is a type of customer research program that gathers direct and indirect feedback about your customers’ preferences, needs, and experiences with your business.
\nVoice of customer programs emphasize actionable insights and offer a basis for business owners to make changes based on findings. In many cases, they also involve following up with customers to address their feedback and communicate any changes.
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\nLearn how to create exceptional customer service experiences at any stage in business. Taught by Mat Patterson, customer service evangelist at Help Scout, you’ll gain practical tips to help you make customer service a competitive advantage.
\nBefore starting a voice of the customer program, consider your goals and what impact you’d ideally like to see. The first (and most obvious) reason a business would start one is to gain valuable insights into customer experience, which you can use to improve your customer satisfaction and ultimately increase revenue.
\nYou can also use voice of the customer programs to conduct audience and market research or support a specific business goal, like improving a particular offering or boosting performance in a certain market. In fact, voice of the customer programs are highly customizable—you can design yours to gather just about any type of customer feedback you might need.
\nBusiness leaders often use voice of the customer programs to guide strategies that help their organizations achieve the following:
\nThe right methodology to gather voice of the customer feedback depends on your desired outcome, available budget, and team’s capacity. Here’s an overview of five popular methods and the tools they require.
\nCustomer interviews can be a heavy administrative lift, but they’re also a great way to gather direct input. Because interviews are a conversation, you can adjust your questions in real-time: If a customer says something particularly intriguing—like, for example, that they would recommend your product to everyone they know if it only had one additional feature—you or an employee will be right there to ask what that feature is.
\nDaphne Williams, chief growth officer at Sweet Beginnings, found a lot of useful insights in customer interviews. “One-to-one interviews can be particularly insightful,” she says. “One interview I did, a customer brought our product and showed me where they purchased the product from, and what else is in their cabinet. That provides a certain level of insight as to what they actually purchase. It’s a good read to see what people say they do and what they really do.”
\nInterviews can also help you improve customer relationships. Facilitators can use one-on-one interactions to establish rapport with customers, express gratitude, and answer any questions the customer might have.
\nBusinesses can conduct interviews over the phone, in person, or using video chat technology (like Zoom or Google Meet). You might also consider taking notes or having an assistant jot down the customer’s answers or any follow-up notes.
\nFocus groups are a market research technique in which a small number of people participate in a loosely structured discussion, often around brand perception, a current product or service, or a new idea.
\nFocus groups offer some of the same benefits as one-on-one customer interviews. In both cases, facilitators can ask follow-up questions, pursue promising lines of inquiry, and build relationships through personal interaction. Unlike interviews, however, focus groups don’t take place in a vacuum—participants will react to each others’ comments and may either disagree or reach consensus, a dynamic that can help business owners anticipate the larger social conversation around an issue or initiative.
\nConsider recording sessions so you can review customer insights in-depth at a later time. You can use a video camera or your computer’s native recording technology, using a screen recorder like Loom for virtual sessions, and using a transcription tool like Rev to simplify data processing.
\nIn-person or online surveys are a common method of gathering voice of the customer feedback. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is one popular example. NPS surveys ask customers how likely they would be to recommend a company, product, or service to a friend on a scale of one to 10, and use responses to generate a customer loyalty score.
\nYou can also target survey questions to individual objectives. For example, if you want to increase the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns, you might ask customers how often they use each social media channel.
\nRyan Zagata, founder of Brooklyn Bicycle Co., uses surveys to understand why customers don’t buy from his store: “To be frank, a lot of the best feedback is from people who didn’t buy our bikes. What we’ve learned is, obviously there’s a lot of bike brands out there that we compete with, but we compete more with somebody not buying anything. They don’t buy any bike as opposed to somebody buying a bike. We don’t lose to another brand as much as we lose to somebody not buying anything.”
\nRyan continues, “How do you find out when people don’t buy your product, what they did? Did they buy something else? Are they still saving up for it? We got all sorts of answers.”
\nTools like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms can help you gather quantitative and qualitative feedback and organize customer responses by question. You can also use a post-purchase survey tool like Grapevine to automate survey sends based on customer activity.
\nIncluding a customer feedback form on your website can help you gather direct feedback on an ongoing basis. Feedback forms also give customers a private way to lodge customer complaints, allowing your team to address issues without that information necessarily becoming public.
\nIf your web builder offers a native contact form application (like Shopify’s), you can customize it to solicit customer feedback. If not, use a plug-in like Formidable Forms or WPForms.
\nOnline customer review analysis is a common method to gather indirect feedback. Monitor popular review sites like Google Business, TrustPilot, Yelp, and Capterra for mentions of your company, gather reviews in a spreadsheet, and analyze results.
\nReviews are a type of qualitative feedback, which can make it hard to process data—particularly if you have a lot of them. You can use tools like MonkeyLearn to process text, automatically categorize reviews by sentiment, and extract quantitative insights.
\nImplementing a voice of the customer program requires planning. Here’s how to start your own.
\nDetermine your objectives, which can be to understand how customers perceive your brand, test the concept for a new product or service, or learn more about customer behaviors. Think about what your desired outcome is from the feedback.
\nThen, select a method for collecting data, considering your available resources and the type of customer input you need. If your goal is to evaluate your overall customer service efforts, you might select a low-cost method that will allow you to reach a large number of respondents, like an online customer survey. If you’re interested in testing the concept for a new product or service, you might organize a focus group to dig deeper into audience reactions.
\nDevelop your voice of the customer questions and use your selected methodology to collect and record customer feedback. VoC programs often aim to answer some versions of the following questions:
\nAnalyze customer feedback, using digital tools as applicable. Depending on your voice of the customer methodology, you might review qualitative responses manually, process quantitative data, or combine both approaches.
\nFor example, if you asked your customers what they consider when making lunch for their children, you might review responses and find that nutrition, convenience, mess, and child preferences show up repeatedly. You can then use a data analysis tool to calculate the percentage of responses that name each factor.
\nSend an email thanking all respondents for their participation in your program. Follow up with unhappy customers to discuss their specific concerns, and address customer feedback as needed.
\nVoice of the customer programs emphasize meaningful, data-informed action. Your research will tell you what’s working for your business and what’s not. To translate this information into improved business outcomes, you’ll need to adjust your business products, services, and processes based on findings. Address major problems and implement easy changes right away, and schedule time to plan and implement other adjustments over the following weeks or months.
\nBusinesses measure the voice of customer program success using both direct and indirect methods. At a high level, a VoC program is successful if your customers are happier and better served after it.
\nYour specific analysis process will depend on the method you choose to gather feedback. When analyzing VoC data, remember to:
\nCommon voice of the customer program challenges include the following:
\nSome companies implement ongoing voice of the customer programs (for example, through post-purchase surveys or customer review analysis) and process data monthly or quarterly. Many also repeat larger initiatives (like Net Promoter Score surveys) once or twice a year to monitor for changes and support continuous improvement.
\nVoice of the customer programs are popular among companies across all industries. They can be particularly valuable for businesses that serve a large number of customers, because without a structured program, it’s difficult for these businesses to gather and process customer feedback.
\nhttps://www.shopify.com/blog/voice-of-the-customer
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A new AI service for “parsing” music tracks.
\nThe Mikrotakt neural engine can split any track into vocals, instrumentals, bass, drums, and other audio tracks.
\nIn addition, you can upscale vocal tracks to clean up the voice and adjust the pitch. This feature is ideal for musicians and content makers.
\nThe new Chinese model DeepSeek-V3 becomes a competitor to ChatGPT:
\n– registration requires only your email and password
\n– the neural is quite fast: answers are generated in seconds
\n– Thinking mode, where AI turns into an academic on any topic
\n– the model can read diagrams and generate any texts
\n– files of different sizes can be uploaded
\n– the neuron is good at working with code
\n– absolutely free
\nHailuo AI from China can clone any voice without censorship in a few seconds. Its library includes more than 300 voices in different languages and intonations. The model also allows for full customization: you can change the tone, speed, and timbre and add sound effects.
\nThe Chinese have released a worthy competitor to ChatGPT.
\nThe Qwen2.5-Plus chatbot provides accurate answers, can read documents and images, and is completely free of charge.
\nKrea allows rotating models in its “Photoshop”
\nKrea developers have come up with an incredible feature for their neuro-Photoshop: you can drop any object and edit its position in 3D space.
\nThe Upscayl neuron has received a 16x upscale, so now it can save even the most hopeless photos. The download is free.
\nThe Wegic neural network has become even cooler.
\nNow websites are generated in seconds, and all your edits can be made with simple queries.
\nYou just throw in a promo and you have a perfectly(?) designed website.
\nA working AI meme generator.
\nThe Brainrot neuron follows trends, selects relevant images, and produces memes that are even funny to read. And all this is free.
\nGoogle has released a top free guide to AI agents.
\nIt contains everything: basic knowledge, tools, architecture, training methods, and a step-by-step recipe for creating agents on LangChain and LangGraph.
\nIt is a cool service for learning languages with an AI interlocutor.
\nThe Lingocat neuron imitates the native speaker, gives feedback, and has tasks to improve skills. And all this is free of charge.
\nThe free neural from the Chinese outperforms(?) ChatGPT.
\nA new model called R1 has been released that outperforms the best version of ChatGPT. R1 is twice as powerful as the previous version and it has literally everything you need: programming, math, rewriting, and everything else. It’s worth noting that if you look at the graph of how it “outperforms”, it doesn’t encourage you to switch from OpenAI to the Chinese neural.
\nUniversal AI photo editor.
\nGenerating, replacing, or deleting details, styling, changing the background, and upscaling – and this is not the whole list of functions of the new and free Dzine neural.
\nPrompt generator for ChatGPT
\nPromptEngine works according to the official recommendations of OpenAI. The service also supports other language models: Claude, Gemini, LLama, and Mistral, which can be selected from a list.
\nOpenAI President showed a feature for the o1 model.
\nAccording to Greg Brockman, the o1 model works a bit differently than other types of AI, and to achieve high performance, you need to follow a certain plan in writing promos:
\nthe goal, response format, warning, and context.
\n(The Anatomy of an o1 Prompt attached an example image)
\nChatGPT can now write first.
\nThe neuron will remind you of important things like a real assistant. For example, in the morning, it can provide a ready-made excuse for being late for work, and in the evening, a convincing explanation for a deadline shift.
\nSo far, only 10 regular tasks are available, but by the end of the week, all paid users will receive the new feature.
\nOpenAI offers free tokens for ChatGPT.
\nHowever, there is a caveat: in exchange, they ask for permission to use your promos to train models.
\nThe offer lasts until the end of February. Pro users can get up to 1 million tokens per day, and mini-version users can get up to 10 million!
\nTrump has canceled Biden’s decree on control over AI development.
\nThe document, signed in 2023, required developers to share test results with the government to reduce risks. However, Republicans insisted that this restricted freedom of speech and hindered progress. Now, AI development is unrestricted again.
\nChina will organize a competition between robots and humans
\nIn April, China will host the world’s first half marathon where people will compete with robots. The race will involve 12,000 runners and dozens of androids. Technology versus biology is a real race of the era.
\nAI tokens soar after the Stargate project announcement.
\nOn January 23, Trump announced a $500 billion investment from the private sector in the development of AI infrastructure in the United States. As part of this project, OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle will create a joint venture called Stargate. Immediately after this announcement, the AI and big data token market showed significant growth:
\n– AI16Z and AI Rig Complex (ARC) grew by 30% per day
\n– GRIFFAIN and ZEREBRO tokens doubled in price
\n– MetamonkeyAi (MMAI) showed an increase of 152.25%
\n– FLock.io (FLOCK) – by 57%
\nThe smartest o3-mini model will be free!
\nSam Altman said that this neural will be able to solve complex problems in programming, math, and data analysis – all for free.
\nFeatures of o3-mini:
\n– advanced analytical abilities
\n– accelerated data processing speed
\n– ease of use for everyone
\nThe release is planned for the near future.
\nOracle founder supports AI totalitarianism
\nBillionaire Larry Ellison stated that the total surveillance system with artificial intelligence based on cameras, drones, and police recorders will force citizens to “behave in the best way possible”.
\nOracle has recently entered into a partnership with OpenAI and Softbank. Digital dystopia is becoming a reality.
\nThe first Chinese base for robot training was opened in Shanghai
\nThey will learn to help around the house, play football, and assemble cars.
\nThe data obtained in the process will be shared with various companies.
\nCurrently, the center has more than 100 androids and plans to expand to a thousand by 2027.
\nChatGPT can now create any kind of application – a new Canvas feature has been released that runs the code right in the browser.
\n– There are no limits to ideas – we invent and ask AI to draw up a detailed project description.
\n– Copy and paste the request into the chat with the neuron, but add the “/canvas” command at the end.
\n– AI will produce a fully working application in React and HTML in a second – you can test it right away!
\n– There are no limits or restrictions – you can even clone YouTube in your browser.
\nThe feature is free.
\nTop 5 promos for working with any amount of information – the neural will squeeze out all the “water” from the source and give you only concise, verified facts:
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