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Voice of the Customer: What it is, Business Benefits, ROI, & Tips
Voice of the customer or VoC is capturing, processing, and making sense of customer feedback about your product, service, or brand.
Organizations often “listen” to the VoC to improve customer experience (CX) and customer success (CS), but it's not limited to that. You can also improve your customer experience strategy and product roadmap reflecting your commitment to customer centricity. When customers feel heard and valued they reward you with loyalty and repeat business.
But how do you listen to the voice of the customer when they are all over the place: in surveys, on social media, in review sites, in customer calls and emails, and so on? How to analyze the VoC to empower your teams with action-ready insights? That’s where the voice of the customer program comes in.
In this piece, you’ll learn what is the VoC, how it improves business outcomes and ROI, what metrics you can track, an implementation strategy inspired by an industry giant, and pro tips to get started.
- What is voice of the customer?
- What is the ROI of a voice of the customer program?
- Benefits of a VoC program for enterprises
- What can you understand or measure from a voice of the customer program?
- Voice of the customer listening strategy: inspirations from an industry giant
- How to build a VoC program in 2025
What is voice of the customer?
Voice of the customer is a research strategy (also called a VoC program) to gather and process customer feedback about a specific part or entire customer experience delivered by your business.
Acting on VoC data leads to meaningful improvements in your CX strategy, product development, CS, and ultimately, revenue. It could also be a springboard for product innovation and a common source of truth to unify teams with the shared goal of customer retention and loyalty.
The source of the VoC could be data from any touchpoint your customers engage. Unlike social listening, which is limited to social media conversations, VoC gathers customer insights from diverse touch points – direct (surveys), indirect (social conversations), and inferred (website data).
According to Gartner, surveys are the most popular VoC tool, followed by ratings and reviews, social listening, feedback from customer support, and website data. Other VoC sources are chatbots, IVR, audio transcripts, CRM, competitor analysis, and user-generated content.
Gartner also predicts that by 2025, 60% of organizations with a VoC program will diversify their listening strategy into other voice and text sources apart from surveys. For an enterprise-scale VoC program, an omnichannel approach is ideal since your customer feedback isn’t limited to any single channel.
However, diversifying VoC sources can also lead to fragmented insights if you use different tools for different channels. This can lead to data silos in the organization and hamper collaboration — potentially leaving ROI on the table. You need a VoC platform that can assimilate data from social and non-social channels on one dashboard.
For example, when The Dow Chemical Company wanted to listen to customer conversations around a marketing claim, it struggled to find enough data (with a little over 1,000 mentions only) from product reviews alone. But it unlocked 125K data points after running a voice of the customer program.
🔥 If you use Sprinklr - See how you can unlock more revenue by analyzing billions of customer conversations from the largest repository of publicly available data using Sprinklr Insights.
What is the ROI of a voice of the customer program?
The goal of a VoC program is to improve your product quality and customer experience, which enhances your business ROI. Let’s dig deeper into aspects of ROI you can potentially move:
Aspects of ROI | Index and formulas | How VoC helps |
Cost of initiative The total expenses to plan, implement, and maintain a specific project or action | 🔽 Lesser is better Formula: (Net profit / Cost) × 100 | VoC data can help make razor-sharp optimizations targeting a pain point, rather than make broader tweaks, limiting the cost of initiatives to things that matter |
Cost to serve The total expenses to provide products or services to your customers | 🔽 Lesser is better Formula: Cost to serve (per customer) = Total cost of service / Number of customers | Support team can reduce the volume of tickets (plus operation costs) and calls by proactively creating self-serve resources based on FAQs and acting upon the feedback before escalations |
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) The total cost of sales and marketing efforts to acquire a new customer | 🔽 Lesser is better Formula: CAC = (Total cost of sales and marketing) / (Number of new customers acquired) | Precisely tracking and delivering what your prospects want through VoC helps with targeted campaigns and product development. The positive word-of-mouth, feedback, and reviews generated by satisfied customers can help reduce your acquisition costs |
Customer spend Amount of money customers spend on your business | 🔼 Higher is better Formula: Average customers spend = Total revenue / Total number of customers (or transactions) | VoC reveals customer preferences and unmet needs, enabling your sales and PMM team to curate personalized customer experience based on feedback, rather than cold pitching. Personalized upselling and cross-selling can drive higher average order values |
Customer churn Customers who stop doing business transactions with you | 🔽 Lesser is better Formula: (Lost customers ÷ Total customers at start of chosen period) x 100 = Churn Rate | Proactive redressal of customer concerns via the VoC helps improve retention rates and reduce churn |
Benefits of a VoC program for enterprises
A VoC program offers different benefits to different teams. Here are some organizations in a typical large enterprise that can benefit from the VoC program:
1. Marketing and PR
Marketing can zoom into hundreds of millions of conversations around your business to understand what customers want. It can use this data to strategize targeted campaigns, messaging, and improve product positioning.
PR can monitor your brand mentions, track, and analyze sentiments around your business, track the campaign reach, social amplifications, and even identify a crisis before it unfolds.
For example, Chick-fil-A turned negative sentiments around a retired product into a PR and marketing masterstroke by listening to the voice of the customer.
2. Product development
Surveys have long been the gold standard of direct feedback for product development. But most people do not like being bombarded with feedback requests (feedback fatigue!), even though they know it is to serve them better.
Voice of the customer data (along with surveys and direct feedback requests) can inform your product engineering and marketing teams of the sentiments, pain points, experiences, and perceptions about your product, features, and performance from ground zero.
A large technology company used VoC to listen to their customers across social and owned digital channels after pushing out product updates. Their product team set up alerts on their VoC platform to identify customer-reported bugs and fix them before they became support tickets and frustrations.
3. Customer support/service
Your customer support and service teams can stay on top of recurring issues and frustrations and refine customer support strategy.
For example, if online chatter indicates rising customer frustration around a new feature, your support team can curate self-serve resources proactively and pass on the data to the product team.
Listening to the VoC can also give your support team insights into the efficacy of your existing customer support/service workflows, wait times, self-help success, etc., and benchmark them against the competition.
All this data can help your team build empathy for your customers and proactively improve support, which increases the CSAT!
🔥Pro tip - Customers are weary of survey requests. Try weaving questions into conversations with Sprinklr conversational surveys while customers are already chatting with your support team or chatbot. In this way, you can ask questions right when customers are most likely to answer and get deeper insights.
4. Customer success
Your customer success team can analyze conversations around onboarding, product usage, and adoption, using a VoC program.
Your team can then cite this data to make the business cases for product roadmap requests or new feature buy-ins from senior leadership. Improving products from the direct feedback of customers result is reduced churn and improved customer lifetime value.
5. Sales
Listening to the voice of the customer around your business or niche can give your sales team insights about a prospect’s objections, buying triggers, and pain points.
Before hopping on a sales call, your team can use this data to craft a tailored message around your offering.
The voice of the customer can also highlight recurring sentiments or concerns around your business. Your sales team can proactively address concerns before they arise.
Moreover, the VoC data can also inform your sales team what prospects value and care, which can influence your product positioning during a sales conversation and increase win rates.
6. Data and analytics
With billions of conversations about your brand visible in one place, your data team can conduct sentiment analysis, know the share of voice, mine text for key themes, trends, statistics, do root-cause analysis, and segment customer cohorts.
If your VoC tool supports visual listening, your data team can also analyze visual trends such as logo and brand asset usage, brand mentions, etc., in videos and images posted by the public about your business.
Having a bird’s-eye-view of the digital and traditional VoC data in one place can help your data team make data-driven decisions, predict insights with higher accuracy, and conduct targeted campaigns.
Microsoft deployed a voice of the customer program to find the best ways to market workstreams around hybrid work. The VoC data helped it understand sentiments amongst Microsoft customers and the general public around hybrid work, which enabled it to create relevant content focusing on the Microsoft ecosystem.
7. Legal and compliance
Your legal and crisis management teams can confidently take over a war room situation with the added advantage of real-time crisis alert that comes with the voice of the customer platform.
Social listening keywords and sentiments indicative of a crisis in public conversations can help your crisis team prepare for it and devise mitigation strategies.
Moreover, this data can also indicate public sentiment and if it requires proactive PR intervention to manage the potential crisis.
💡 You may like: How to detect PR crises in real-time and proactively resolve them
Further, VoC can surface potential regulatory violations by your org from customer conversations, that, if unattended, could lead to potential legal or compliance problems.
What can you understand or measure from a voice of the customer program?
A successful voice of the customer program can uncover the status of your customer’s experience with your business and key brand KPIs. Here are some of them:
⚡Tip: Listening to the VoC is not limited to social or user-generated content. Gartner suggests that 60% of organizations with VoC programs will use voice and text analysis alongside surveys by 2025. So, you can and should include diverse sources of VoC in your program, such as CSAT, customer effort score (CES), NPS®, customer loyalty index, product reviews, and first contact resolution (FCR). Ideally, you will combine these data points along with your social listening to analyze the VoC.
Brand KPIs
Understand the basic but critical numbers around your brand’s social performance across online and traditional touchpoints such as reach, engagement, follower count, top posts, overall content theme, channels, media mixes, etc.
Brand sentiment
Uncover the top themes and “words of discussion” around your brand from dozens of touchpoints, including offline stores. Measure the emotional tone of the conversations (and not just sentimant polarities) around your business for an idea of the overall brand perception.
Brand awareness
Monitor your brand’s mentions, social media post activities, branded hashtags, share of voice, content reach, and engagement to gauge the awareness around your brand.
Share of voice
Share of voice is the metric that tells you how much your brand is being discussed compared to your competitors. Monitor how often your brand is being talked about in different channels, and how you can improve your share of voice.
Customer satisfaction
While you will need CSAT surveys to get a quantitative score, viewing the sentiments of customers' voices around your business on important channels such as social media platforms where you're active, niche blogs, review sites, Reddit threads, etc., can give a qualitative sense of customer experience with your brand.
Logo usage across mediums
Using a VoC program that supports visual insights, you can go beyond text to “listen” to your audience when it is related to your logo or trademarks in videos and images.
Voice of the customer listening strategy: inspirations from an industry giant
If the voice of the customer program outlines the “what(s)” and “where(s)”, a voice of the customer strategy outlines the “how(s)” and “why(s)” of the VoC program.
✨ If you want an in-depth guide, here's a six-step voice of the customer strategy to turn actions into insights. For now, back to the basics:
For example, a Gartner research found that 74% of marketers use surveys as the primary tool for their VoC program. In this case, using surveys to uncover customer feedback becomes a VoC strategy.
Similarly, the same research found that 71% of marketers choose to use review and rating platforms like Google My Business for VoC data. In this case, analyzing customer reviews for business insights becomes a VoC strategy.
What you want to achieve through your VoC program will influence the strategy, which is essentially the framework and how you’ll implement it. To get started with a strategy find the answers to these questions:
❓How will you listen to the voice of your customers?
❓At what point in your customers’ journey will you capture their voice to optimize their experience and why?
❓How will you make sense of the data and turn the VoC into action-oriented insights?
❓And most importantly, according to Peter Armaly, senior director, of customer success enablement at Oracle: how will you make customers feel that their feedback has been taken and implemented?
Armaly explains how Oracle uses a VoC program to understand customers “at the different phases of their lifecycle” by different teams.
Armaly’s customer success team listens to the voice of the customer across five critical junctures of a customer’s lifecycle (or during the implementation stages for a cloud company like Oracle). Each stage tries to find the answers to specific questions as mentioned below:
1. Provisioning - Did it go well? Did they get the right support?
2. Onboarding - How was the onboarding experience? Can you improve?
3. Implementation - Was it seamless? Did they face hurdles?
4. Going live - How was the overall experience from provisioning to the support they received?
5. Adoption - Quarterly business reviews (QBRs), executive business reviews (EBRs)
At all stages, Armaly’s team listens to the VoC and suggests including as many as 20 channels for the best visibility. Watch what Oracle’s CS enablement leader has to say about listening to the VoC in the video below:
How to build a VoC program in 2025
Here is a step-by-step guide to getting started with an enterprise-grade voice of the customer methodology:
Step 1: Define objective
Arrange a meeting with key stakeholders with an agenda to define the objectives and success metrics of your VoC program.
Is it to improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, enhance product development, understand pain points for marketing strategy, or something else? It could be one of them, a few of them, or all these at the same time.
In most cases, different teams will have different objectives. But all teams should ideally focus on a better CX.
Step 2: Chart out the customer lifecycle and map team involvement
Start mapping the customer's lifecycle from the sales process and gradually move up to advocacy and beyond. Attribute each segment to the teams that are involved.
This is also where you’ll identify (not necessarily choose) sources from across the customer's lifecycle where you’ll tap to listen to their voices. Sometimes emails will be a better source, other times it could be surveys and social media platforms.
⚡ Tip - Consider all parts of your organization and focus on understanding the customer at distinct phases of the customer lifecycle. Ideally, all your business areas should commit to working with the VoC program, endorsed at the highest level, with clear lines of communication and regular reporting between teams.
💡You may need: How to manage customer feedback
Step 3: Identify key questions
It’s best not to start listening without knowing what you want to listen to. This is because the sheer volume of information could make it difficult to comprehend and convert customer feedback into actionable insights.
Here are some sample questions to set for each segment of your customer’s lifecycle:
- What are the biggest pain points customers experience with our products/services?
- What are customers thinking about our brand in general?
- How satisfied are customers with our customer service, onboarding, or ease of use?
- What features or improvements do customers want to see?
Step 4: Set the scope
Don’t attempt every opportunity to improve the CX across teams all at oncewhen listening to the VoC. We know it will be tempting. But resist the urge to act upon every feedback at once, even if you are technically capable to so. It's best to expand the scope of your actions as your VoC program matures.
Talk to your team and decide which customer segments, products, services, and touchpoints are the priority and include them in your VoC program initially.
Here's a ficticious example of setting the scope right: Trendy Threads, an online clothing store, is launching their VoC program. Instead of surveying everything, they prioritize their largest customer segment, women's apparel, and a product with higher returns, dresses. They initially focus on feedback around website sizing information and the return process. This targeted approach helps it gather structured data and focus on targeted improvements before expanding the VoC program to other areas.
⚡ Tip : As suggested by Oracle’s senior director of customer success, Peter Armaly: Prioritize feedback at critical junctures and moments of truth in the customer journey where customers are likely to feel it’s important for the vendor to hear their opinions. These moments could include provisioning, onboarding, implementation, and the go-live event, among other junctures based on your niche.
💡You may need: The customer lifecycle blueprint: stages, tactics, and metrics
Step 5: Finalize the VoC methodology and channels
For a holistic overview of the VoC, aim to listen from a mix of direct, passive, and inferred feedback channels. ✨This guide lists seven voice of the customer methodologies and how other brands are using it, in case you want inspiration.
Direct feedback channels:
- Surveys: NPS®, CSAT, and CES surveys (e.g., post-purchase, after onboarding, after support interactions). Consider in-app surveys for real-time feedback
- Advisory boards: A panel of power users for in-depth customer feedback and expert insights
- Beta tests: Feedback on new products or features before launch through beta testing programs
- Focus groups: Moderated discussions with small customer groups for qualitative insights and understanding of their experiences
- 1:1 Interviews: In-depth interviews to explore individual customer journeys, workflows, and pain points
- Feedback: Forms on your website, app, and within customer communications
- Complaints: Effortless ways to submit complaints and track them systematically
Passive feedback channels:
- Social listening: Brand mentions, conversations, and sentiment online
- Online reviews: Google Reviews, Yelp, industry-specific review platforms like G2, Capterra, Product Hunt, etc., to understand customer perceptions
- Third-party sites: Mentions and feedback on forums, blogs, and other relevant online communities
Inferred feedback channels:
- Web analytics: Time spent on pages, navigation patterns, and drop-off points to understand user engagement and potential issues
- Customer support conversations: Customer support tickets, call transcripts, and chat logs to identify recurring issues and pain points
- Purchase history and patterns: Purchase data to understand customer preferences, repeat purchases, and churn indicators
- Customer effort data: Website loading speed, time to resolution for support tickets, and ease of navigation to gauge customer effort
😌 If you use Sprinklr Social Listening - You can access the largest repository of publicly available unstructured data — including images, videos, and location- and product-specific feedback — and monitor dozens of social and digital channels in one dashboard.
Step 6: Pick VoC listening tools
Having the VoC data is not enough. You will need to execute your strategy with tools.
If you are planning to run an enterprise-grade VoC program, avoid using different tools as it will add to your data silos—something that most large organizations face and, as a result, miss actionable insights and ROI.
The better solution here is to use a customer insights platform that can assimilate VoC from any source with orchestration, reporting, governance, and native AI capabilities. This could be your competitive advantage because all your teams, tools, and data will be unified, saving time and money, and help you understand and engage customers better.
🔥 If you use Sprinklr - Use Sprinklr’s conversational surveys to get insights that static surveys cannot generate. AI dynamically tailors questions during customer conversations and even probes for deeper insights if answers aren't satisfactory. This results in incredibly detailed responses, higher completion rates, and more insights.
🤖 Gen AI powers dynamic surveys in conversations
🤖 AI detects obscure customer experiences from survey results
🔍 Survey data from multiple sources come in one place
Step 7: Collect and integrate data
If you use a customer intelligence platform like Sprinklr Insights, you won’t have to worry about integrating VoC data from different channels and touchpoints.
All your data for functions will flow into the same dashboard that your team members can access, manage, generate reports from, and use AI to interpret and chart the next steps.
In case you don’t have an insights platform, you must set up processes for collecting feedback from each channel and automate reporting where possible.
You will also have to centralize the data for a unified view and implement processes for data accuracy, completeness, and reliability.
⚡ Tip: Don’t send too many surveys. “Survey fatigue” is a thing. Data suggests that 74% of people are willing to answer only up to five questions in one survey. So, it’s a given that frequent surveys will irk out customers.
You must use surveys that you absolutely cannot do without, such as for NPS, CSAT, and direct product feedback. For the rest of the listening, use the variety of data from your VoC listening platform.
💡In case you need: Top 30 customer satisfaction survey questions and tips
Step 8: Analyze, interpret, and collaborate
With the data in and processed, the next step is to analyze it and interpret the voice of the customer. Identify trends, patterns, and key themes.
Use both quantitative (e.g., survey scores, metrics) and qualitative (e.g., open-ended feedback, social listening, transcript) analysis.
This is also where you’ll reprioritize issues (if need be), conduct sentiment and root cause analysis of the data.
Once you’re done interpreting, share it with the team. You can do this by generating regular reports and dashboards. On a customer insights platform, reports and accurate AI insights come out of the box.
⚡ Tip : Measure “lagging” and “leading” indicators of VoC.
Lagging indicators show if you can retain your customers and if they are going to buy more. Example: upsell and renewals. The goal of lagging indicators is to monitor whether listening to customers and taking action influences renewals or expansions. Measuring this metric requires a year or two of monitoring.
Leading indicators show if customer satisfaction is higher or if they opted for additional features and functions, so the adoption is higher. Example: higher customer satisfaction score and advocacy. Tracking leading indicators could establish if immediate follow-up by your team results in higher subsequent survey scores, increased customer satisfaction, advocacy, or adoption of additional features.
💡You may need : 9 Customer experiences (CX) KPIs to consider
Step 9: Implement and iterate
Finally, the VoC program is in, ready to turn into action and better CX. Work with cross-functional teams to create actionable plans to address prioritized pain points and capitalize on opportunities.
Product updates? Process improvements? Service enhancements? Communication adjustments? You can now confidently chart out your next plans because you have data from the voice of the customers!
⚡ Tip: Make customers know their voices are heard. A HubSpot study found that “uncertainty over the impact of survey responses” is one of the top four reasons customers drop off from surveys.
Have a process to acknowledge your customer’s active participation in a survey right after they finish the survey and keep communications active throughout the feedback implementation process:
Share high-level, anonymized survey findings. Example: "We heard you! Here's what we learned from our recent survey...", "Based on your feedback, we're making these changes...".
Point to concrete improvements or changes you've implemented (especially if you've asked about a specific issue in the survey). Example: "Remember that survey you took about our [feature]? Based on your input, we've now [implemented change]"
Reach out personally if they've allowed contact, especially if a customer raises a critical issue or expresses strong dissatisfaction
💡You may like: Customer experience optimization – all you need to know
The future of VoC is AI-powered. Start your VoC program with Sprinklr Insights today
There has always been abundant customer data in your review profiles, CRM, emails, chatbots, voice transcripts, and the list goes on. But what you probably didn’t have is the ability to crunch this data and squeeze insights for real-life changes.
VoC programs using legacy tools are either too limited in scope with one listening channel or are siloed if you’re listening to more than one channel using different tools. In the end, drawing high-level conclusions from customer data across touchpoints becomes challenging.
This is where a customer intelligence platform like Sprinklr Insights can help. It’s a one-stop shop for all the capabilities you’d need for an enterprise-grade VoC program. And AI powers the platform from the ground up.
So, you’ll not only listen to the voices of the customers from dozens of touchpoints in one dashboard, but you’ll also get verticalized AI to interpret the vast amount of data with 90%+ accuracy.
Ready to start listening to the voices of your customers? Take a demo to see how Sprinklr Insights can help you run a full-stack VoC program without multiple tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
Voice of the customer (VoC) is to understand the needs, expectations, and pain points of your existing and potential customers. Whereas customer satisfaction (CSAT) measures the happiness and contentment quotient of your existing customers. VoC is qualitative, while CSAT is quantitative. An example of VoC is interviewing customers for product feedback. While NPS and CES surveys are CSAT examples.
Sentiment analysis uses algorithms to analyze text (transcript), images, videos, and other publicly available data, and identify the emotional tone. It classifies the content produced by the customer as positive, negative, or neutral (and sometimes emotions like anger or joy) by examining words and context. This helps understand customer opinions and feelings from text data at scale.
You can measure customer loyalty metrics like NPS, customer retention, repeat purchase rates, upsells, and resells before and after VoC implementation. Track improvements in these metrics over time. Analyze if positive changes in loyalty metrics correlate with actions taken based on VoC feedback.
AI uses Natural Language Processing to analyze vast amounts of text and voice data automatically, extracting sentiment and key themes at scale. In some cases, proprietary machine learning like Sprinklr AI (if you use Sprinklr) in your VoC can identify patterns and trends from your data, enabling real-time insights. AI powers automation in feedback collection and response, making large VoC programs efficient, personalized, and actionable.
VoC data directly feeds into product development cycles by identifying unmet customer needs and pain points for innovative ideas. It defines product requirements and desired features, ensuring user-centric design. During development, VoC validates prototypes through user testing and feedback. Post-launch, it enables continuous improvement by identifying areas for optimization and future iterations based on real-world usage and sentiment.
