Prioritizing Voice-of-Customer Research in Product Marketing

Voice-of-Customer (VoC) is necessary for creating relevant, innovative products and go-to-market strategies that drive adoption. In this post, I'll break down the "what," "why," and "how" related to gathering customer input. 🗣

🛠 VoC research is insights that you capture from your customers on their needs, desires, opinions, and pain points. Analyzing and applying this information improves the competitiveness of products, product delivery, and sales enablement. It also enhances the precision of positioning/messaging, GTM plans, and customer experience.

⚠ I have found challenges related to collecting VoC research to vary across companies and industries; however, overcoming the obstacles is worth the effort. Common obstacles are low survey response rates, extracting insights from qualitative data, limited sample sizes, and customer privacy concerns.

📋 There are multiple ways to collect VoC. Taking advantage of in-house resources helps to keep costs low. Work with your data and insights team on a survey design that enables you to collect unbiased feedback with minimal friction. Collaborate with marketing on the best channels for survey distribution.

📱 Social media listening is an unobtrusive way to collect customer input. Monitor online discussions to understand the sentiments and perceptions of your customers. You may find that negative commentary is based on incorrect information, which you can resolve with content and direct customer outreach.

🔎 Focus groups and customer advisory boards have come in handy throughout my career. If planned and executed carefully, you can walk away with a wealth of information. This tactic is very time-consuming but can work well in industries where providing feedback in a group setting is not uncomfortable. Alternatively, setting up 1:1 customer interviews enables you to get even more in-depth input.

👨‍💼 Utilizing a third party is also an option for collecting VoC, especially if the survey needs to be completely unbiased. Although this method can be costly, responses may be more accurate, and survey completion rates can be higher. Be sure to choose a reputable and well-established partner who can vouch for the validity of the insights generated.

💻 You can also extract and package useful insights from your support ticketing system if submissions are tagged in a useful way. There may be data that can be used to inform the product roadmap or evaluate the ease of use of newly released products and features.

Product marketing leaders make a stronger impact when they deliver newfound insights from customers to internal stakeholders, especially to product management, sales, and customer success teams. When VoC strategies are standard practice, your product marketing efforts will soar, and you'll be a rockstar! 🌟🗣