Voice of Customer (VOC)

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us we are dependent on him”

-Mahatma Gandhi

I bet nobody can deny the above stated fact, that indeed customer is the most important aspect of any business. Anyhow I am 100% sure that at least once in your life you’ll fell quite opposite to this. You’ll feel like business is doing a great favour on you by even listening to you.

I wish I am wrong but if I am right, you have encountered a person/ business, which do not value the voice of customer.

Today let’s gain some insights into this wonderful concept which at last is taking some long due traction nowadays and understand why is it so important and how this can benefit you. Here’s all what this article contains.

• What is VOC?
• Why VOC is important and how brands are recognizing it?
• Categories of customer
• Methods of capturing VOC
• How to translate VOC to customer requirements?
• Few Examples and template.
• You will also get a excel template related to VOC

What is VOC?

VOC means Voice of the Customer so before we understand what’s VOC it’s important to know who is a “Customer”.

So just like everyone else I did a quick search on google and this is what comes up first “Customer is someone who pays for your product or services” and all of us knows this, but is this true. Is it still relevant?

I used google to get this definition but they didn’t charged me anything, do they charge you? Or am I not a customer? As per my belief, the definition needs some upgradation. Therefore, we can define customer as “Someone who receives the processed output”.

Voice Of Customer – VOC can be defined as a feedback from the customer about their experience of using our products/services. It can also represent the demand, preferences, expectations or needs of the customer from our business or process. VOC can be both negative and positive

Why VOC is important?

VOC if used properly can help business understand the true requirement of the customer and in turn help them grow rapidly. Because customers will only pay for products or services, which fulfill their demand or requirement and solve their problems. And in true sense every business has only one goal – “To solve customer problems”. Luckily, VOC is getting its deserved place as a core business strategy in every organization.

And you can literally see this around you, the brands which take VOC seriously thrives even during periods like ongoing pandemic on the other hand those who ignore VOC will literally fall even during booming times.

Brands, which use VOC as their core strategy and thrived

1. Google’s Android – Nobody is unaware of this brand, started in 2008 this brand is at the epitome of success and VOC is at the heart of it. Every user provides crucial feedback to it and based on that data android has developed so niche to every user. Imagine using the same OS from 2010 till date, would you still be using it? I don’t think so. On top of this, it being open sourced adds another layer of feedback to it
2. Flipkart/ Amazon – These brands use VOC as a core strategy. Customer reviews and ratings are a great way to capture VOC. And these reviews and ratings build trust in customers mind. Can you imagine shopping online without reviews? It will be a nightmare for me at least.

So, I guess it’s quite clear to you that how VOC is so important and how every brand is using it nowadays to understand their customers and grow. However, you might ask that I am not an entrepreneur what’s in it for me? Similarly professionals in following ways can use VOC

• Internal Customers – Even though you are not a brand but you can use VOC to understand the demands of your internal customers. Example: HR department can use VOC to understand employees and gain longer retention periods
• Improvement Projects – Improvement projects like Lean, 6 Sigma etc are done to so that we can add value to the products for the customers. Thus VOC is critical aspect for starting any improvement project
• ISO documentation – Understanding the customer comes under 4^th clause of ISO 9001 format. So in order to start ISO project capturing VOC is critical

Categories of Customer

So you already know who is a Customer, Now let’s see how customers can be categorised. In business development, we broadly classify customers into two categories.

1. External Customers

2. Internal Customers

But these terms are so common that I won’t explain them.

What we’ll rather do is, we’ll divide the customers into 5 categories which we generally use in “Business Excellence” projects and they are as follows:

• Investor – So when we capture their voice, it’ll be called as “Voice of Investor”. Investor represents all the Shareholders, Management, etc.
• Customer – So when we capture their voice, it’ll be called as “Voice of Customer”. These are the external customers, one who pays us (mostly).
• Associate – So when we capture their voice, it’ll be called as “Voice of Associate”. These are internal customers like employees.
• Process – So when we capture this voice, it’ll be called as “Voice of Process”. This will come from KPIs and CTQs. (Will you be interested to know more about CTQs?)
• Supplier – So when we capture their voice, it’ll be called as “Voice of Suppliers”. Everyone who provides us goods or services can be called as supplier.

I’ll be very frank with you that it’s not feasible to remember all the categories and terminologies every time and as a result I missed out few categories during my examinations. Thus I started devising few tricks to remember them. So to remember all the categories I made up an term called “I – CAPS” (Inspired from a brand, we all know about). Now it’s really important not to miss any customer because each of them plays a vital role.

Note: “I – CAPS” is not any standard terminology, this is something totally made up by me so that I can remember every category of customer easily and I would highly recommend you to do the same.

Methods of capturing VOC

Any method using which you can gauze the experience or expectations of the customer can be used as a method to capture VOC. This in reality there can be infinite ways to capture VOC, but I’ll mention few common VOC capturing techniques

• Customer interviews:

This method is a very traditional method of capturing VOC, here a direct communication is established with the customer to understand their point of views or to get their understanding of the products. This method is time consuming and requires lot of capital

• Surveys:

Surveys are done asking few predetermined questions to participants and insights are sought based on their response to those questions.  Surveys can be both online and offline. What’s really important while conducting surveys is to ask correct question, if correct questions are not asked you’ll not gain anything worthwhile out of it.

• Focused groups:

In this method 8 – 12 customers are grouped and they are given an opportunity to interact with the product, later their perceptions or experiences are recorded and evaluated. This method is mostly used after doing Customer interviews and/ or Surveys to gain more insights.

• Live chat:

This is a very popular tool among customers to interact with the customers. As a matter of fact in a recent survey, it was found that almost half of the customers prefer interacting with live chat more than a traditional call. Thus if you add a Live chat option on your website it can help you capture VOC quite effortlessly.

• Social media:

This again is a quite popular technique to capture VOC in modern times. Biggest advantage of using this technique is its wide reach and two way communication with the customers. It helps you gain unfiltered feedback from the customers quite instantly.

Similarly there are many other tools like Recorded calls, Website activities, Emails, etc to capture VOC. If you wish to learn more about them you can mention them in the comment section.

How to translate VOC to customer requirements?

Most of the places you search about VOC the story end by here, but is it really the end? NO! One major step is remaining, everyone mostly misses this step, and it is to translate the VOC to customer requirements.

The differences between VOC and Customer requirement are as follows

In order to translate VOC to Customer requirements we use a “VOC Translation Matrix”

1. VOC – Add what we have capture as VOC
2. Critical Customer Criteria – Understand why are they saying it
3. Customer Requirement – What can we set as a criteria to meet their requirement.

Example:

Click the download button below to get the excel template of VOC translation matrix

Thank you

About the Author

Meet Maheshwari is a budding Lean consultant, a Post Graduate in Industrial Engineering and SixSigma Green Belt. He has worked with 15+ industries and helped them through their Operational Excellence journey since 2018. He has delivered in total 650+ hours of training on various concepts of Lean, QMS and Six Sigma.