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6-Step Voice of the Customer Strategy To Turn Feedback into Action
More than 50% of Americans read reviews before choosing a brand. As a business owner, you cannot just listen to the customer's voice —you have to act on it to ensure feedback converts into tangible improvements which then show up as positive reviews!
A voice of customer strategy ensures that solicited and unsolicited feedback from customers doesn’t fade into oblivion. It helps your team refine experiences, strengthen customer relationships, and drive business impact—all powered by customer feedback.
Here’s a six-step voice of the customer strategy to help you move from just listening to impacts with real-world examples, actionable frameworks, and AI-powered solutions.
What is the voice of the customer strategy?
The voice of the customer (VoC) goes beyond simply collecting opinions; it’s about understanding customer expectations, identifying pain points, and using those insights to drive meaningful business decisions.
A voice of the customer (VoC) strategy is the structured approach to capturing, analyzing, and acting on your customer’s feedback to improve business outcomes, such as products, services, and overall customer experience.
With 89% of companies competing primarily on customer experience, success depends on truly understanding customer needs. A strong VoC strategy ensures you can act on feedback, improve CX, and build lasting customer loyalty.
🔥Already have a VoC strategy?
Nothing like it! Get started with all the tools to execute your VoC strategy using real-time consumer, competitor, and market insights from billions of data points and industry-best accuracy — on Sprinklr Insights!
Types of VoC strategies: passive vs. active vs. inferred
There are three main VoC strategies based on the source and method of capturing the voices. These three strategies reflect the diverse channels your customers’ feedback comes in:
Parameters | Passive VoC | Active VoC | Inferred VoC |
Actionability | This approach relies on feedback that originates from the customers rather than the organization | This is a proactive approach that involves seeking out customer feedback | This approach analyzes customer behaviors, transactions, and engagement patterns to uncover insights without active feedback |
Examples | Social listening and AI-driven sentiment analysis, online reviews, social media comments, customer support interactions, video call recordings, emails, and SMS | Surveys (NPS, CSAT, CES), interviews, focus groups, feedback forms, beta tests, 1:1 interview | Website analytics and user behavior, heatmaps, cart abandonment rates, click paths |
Outcome | These insights are valuable, but they only represent a fraction of your customer base | Instead of waiting for feedback, you engage customers directly to uncover insights and address issues before they escalate | It involves analyzing customer data and behavior to conclude their underlying desires and pain points |
Good to know | Most dissatisfied customers won’t leave an explicit review but may share their experience elsewhere. Passive VoC can capture that | People typically respond to proactive feedback requests, even if the percentage varies | There is no prerequisite for a response since this method analyzes existing behavior patterns to draw conclusions |
By 2025, 60% of organizations with VoC programs will move beyond surveys, analyzing voice and text interactions to gain deeper insights. The most successful companies already combine the three VoC strategies to capture a complete picture of customer needs.
✅ Curated for you: What is customer feedback management, and how to do it
6 Action-ready steps for an effective voice of the customer strategy
The six steps cover the entire workflow for a standard voice of the customer strategy that begins with identifying existing touchpoints and ends with closing the feedback loop. ✨Want to start executing the VoC strategy? Here are seven voice of the customer methodologies to begin with.
If your organization has a partial VoC strategy in place, you can start from any of the stages that suit you:
1. Identify existing VoC sources and customer touchpoints
🥅 Goal: Comprehensive coverage of feedback loops across the business
Your organization will have several touchpoints with customers across the customer journey, and all those touchpoints may generate feedback. It’s also possible that you’re not aware of certain channels where potential VoC exists.
Auditing the existing customer feedback inlets — and in the process, identifying the ones that are missing — can help get a clear picture of what’s there and what’s needed for the VoC strategy.
Three tips to identify existing feedback touchpoints:
– Map customer touchpoints: Think broadly about where customer feedback might already be collected within your organization to get started. Here’s a list of the top 11 customer feedback tools to get started.
- Pre-purchase (awareness): Marketing materials (ads, emails, social media posts), website (browse, research), online reviews and ratings, word-of-mouth, events, and webinars
- Purchase (consideration and purchase): E-commerce platform, physical store, sales interactions (phone, email, in-person)
- Post-purchase (retention and advocacy): Onboarding process, product usage, customer support interactions (phone, email, chat), knowledge base and FAQs, billing and payment processes, renewal process, community forums, and social media interactions
- Off-boarding: Cancellation process, exit surveys
- ✨ Here’s a resource to learn more about customer journeys
– Map all feedback touchpoints: In the customer touchpoints, identify structured (surveys, ratings) and unstructured (social media, reviews, chat logs) feedback sources
– Categorize data sources: Organize customer feedback into three types:
- Active (solicited): Surveys, interviews, feedback forms
- Passive: Online reviews, social media mentions, customer support interactions, sentiment, share of voice
- Inferred: Behavioral analytics, churn patterns
- ✨ Here’s a list of different types of customer feedback
😎 Learn from Dow
Lima Beatriz, global consumer and market insights specialist at Dow, is the in-house data powerhouse that informs the manufacturing giant’s marketing strategies for different global clients.
In one instance, Lima was tapping into product reviews of an existing category to inform market research for a new product launch. But what they found from only product reviews were a little over 1,000 mentions of the key data across three geographies, which wasn't enough.
While working for global markets, Lima faces such challenges, namely limited and irrelevant data and inaccurate translations across geographies, which makes it difficult to generate actionable insights. That’s when they decided to go beyond a single channel for VoC.
When they executed a VoC strategy those 1,000 mentions became more than 126,000 from the same geographies!
2. Set clear VoC objectives
🥅 Goal: Align stakeholders to drive meaningful change
Without a clear objective, your team could be quickly overwhelmed, especially when using VoC methodologies like social listening along with surveys that can unlock volumes of data in an instant!
This is where you must align the stakeholders across CX, customer support (CS), product, and marketing for VoC goals for the next steps to drive meaningful change.
Would you use the VoC data for benchmarking, or would you use it for improvements in various fields such as CX, churn, loyalty, issue resolution, net satisfaction, net promotion, etc.?
Four tips to set clear VoC goals:
– Ensure executive buy-in: VoC programs require leadership support to secure resources and drive organization-wide adoption. Without this, insights won’t translate into real improvements. Here’s an excellent resource on getting executive buy-in for VoC.
– Align stakeholders before setting goals: Engage teams across departments to define shared VoC priorities and their outcomes. If CX focuses on improving loyalty while C-suit is expecting innovative ideas from the VoC, it can lead to conflicting efforts
– Define goals based on VoC impact areas:
- Reducing churn? Analyze net sentiment score (NSS), and customer experience score (CES) and identify pain points that cause drop-offs
- Improving CX? Track CSAT trends and implement changes based on customer sentiment
- Increasing loyalty? Use NPS to assess promoter/detractor ratio and refine engagement strategies
– Set measurable KPIs: Set quantifiable metrics like customer retention rates, resolution time, sentiment trends, and product adoption that your teams will measure
😎 Learn from a leading automotive brand
A global automobile brand with a strong focus on customer experience realized that a lot of real-time feedback was lost in social media and siloed native analytics by platforms like X and Meta. To be able to use the gold mine of data, it realized the need to track, analyze, and act on customer insights from a centralized dashboard.
The company adopted an org-wide agreement to focus on customer insights and bring teams together on a customer intelligence suite so that everybody can get a 360-degree view of customers and act upon feedback.
When the data centralization was complete, social interactions that directly converted to purchases skyrocketed by 173%, the first response time plummeted by 80%, and the net sentiment score (NSS) increased.
3. Have the correct queries and listen to the VoC from across touchpoints
🥅 Goal: Draw genuinely helpful insights covering every customer feedback touchpoint
You must set relevant, practical inquiries that will elicit precise feedback from the customer when actively listening to them. This is important to ensure that you get actionable feedback and not vague feedback. Your questions must be simple to grasp, precise, and not leading.
For example, when benchmarking, keep the questions rating-focused rather than open-ended for more quantifiable responses.
The next step is systematically gathering customer feedback across touchpoints. A fragmented approach can lead to blind spots, making it essential to track both direct and indirect customer interactions.
Starbucks played the VoC card successfully back in 2008 with “My Starbucks Idea” — a community forum that sought to turn customers into vested stakeholders!
Customers could leave suggestions that the company could adapt should it fit. This approach allowed the coffee giant to innovate based on an understanding of customer desires.
🚀 Want to launch your community forum?
Build and manage a customizable forum where your customers can interact, share solutions, and recommend product improvements. While you get the tools to gather insights and capture feedback.
Four tips to ensure actionable feedback:
– Expand beyond traditional surveys: Surveys can capture what customers think, but expanding the scope to other methods like real-time social listening, sentiment analysis, chat, community forums, and support call transcript (voice) analysis can answer why customers feel that way
– Aim for omnichannel data collection: Relying only on surveys or one channel means periodic feedback. To keep feedback recurrent and get a well-rounded perspective, monitor owned channels (website, emails, call centers) and third-party platforms (review sites, social media, forums) for feedback
– Balance structured and unstructured data: To gain specific insights, use structured feedback (ratings, surveys, interviews) for measurable trends and unstructured feedback (reviews, customer complaints, sentiment analysis) for deeper context
– Capture unsolicited feedback: You may not ask every question, but customers may have feedback for you! They often express opinions without direct prompting. AI-powered analysis can detect sentiment shifts and inferred signals like churn risk or engagement drop-offs without solicitation
🔥 If you’re using Sprinklr -You can use the customer intelligence suite with integrated VoC capabilities to launch conversational surveys, listen to the VoC, monitor brand KPIs, do crisis management, and benchmark brand performance — all in one place. No more data silos and insights slipping through the cracks! Plus, verticalized AI across the platform gives you 90%+ accurate insights!
4. Analyze and interpret customer insights
🥅 Goal: Structure the feedback data to identify the action points
Once feedback is collected, the next step is turning data into insights. To extract actionable insights, you need a structured approach to prioritization, segmentation, and root cause analysis.
You can take inspiration from McDonald’s, which has one of the best digital teams in the industry! The global fast-food giant has 28,000 social media accounts and already does social listening.
However, its Global Social Data Intelligence Manager, Sneha Jain, wanted data and quantifiable assurance that what McDonald’s is doing is the best and not a presumption.
The team incorporated social media benchmarking on top of the existing social listening setup to fill gaps: Is Pizza Hut earning more likes per post? Tweak messaging. Is KFC delivering great results with fewer posts per week? Consider if the frequency is optimal.
Four tips to interpret customer insights with data:
- Use benchmarking and listening with predictive analytics: Forecast customer churn risk, anticipate market trends, and proactively address customer concerns before they escalate using social benchmarking with social listening like McDonald’s
- Structure feedback based on key parameters: Categorize data by urgency, sentiment, impact on revenue, and customer segment to avoid information overload
- Apply root cause analysis: Identify underlying issues instead of just symptoms. If NPS is declining, is it due to poor customer service, product gaps, or fulfillment delays?
- Segment insights for better decision-making: Break data into customer personas, product categories, and geographic locations for more targeted improvements
🤓 Pro tip - Customer issues don’t always surface in broad digital trends, especially if you have physical stores and locations! Sprinklr’s location insights can help detect geofenced sentiment shifts, store-level complaints, and specific service issues in real-time.
You can pinpoint where problems originate, uncover root causes, and take swift action before they escalate by analyzing localized feedback.
5. Turn the VoC data into tangible improvements
🥅 Goal: Invest in systems and frameworks to take action driven by VoC
Collecting and analyzing feedback is pointless if it doesn’t lead to change. You need a framework to prioritize VoC findings and ensure that insights are translated into tangible business improvements.
Four tips to turn VoC data into action:
– Prioritize insights strategically: Not all feedback is equally urgent. Use a framework like RICE or the IUF prioritization matrix that ranks insights based on business impact, urgency, and feasibility to focus on what matters most.
– Make sense of key VoC metrics: Simply tracking numbers isn’t enough. You need to interpret what they mean for your business. Here’s how:
- NPS is a strong indicator of loyalty and financial success, but it doesn’t explain why customers feel the way they do. Pair it with qualitative feedback for deeper insights
- Retention and churn rates tell you how well you’re keeping customers. Retention reflects satisfaction and cost efficiency, while churn directly impacts revenue and lifetime value. Understanding why customers leave helps prevent future losses
- CSAT provides a snapshot of customer experience. A sudden drop may signal service gaps that need immediate attention
- Verbatim customer feedback (open-ended comments) adds context to survey scores. AI-powered sentiment analysis can help uncover recurring issues and improvement opportunities
- NSS or net sentiment score can aid in tracking CX feedback because it represents the VoC in real time and quantifies overall customer sentiment based on individual mentions or interactions
– Encourage cross-functional collaboration: VoC insights should not live in silos. CX, product, marketing, and leadership teams must collaborate to address pain points and enhance the customer experience.
– Measure impact over time: Once changes are implemented, track how they influence customer satisfaction, retention, churn reduction, share of voice, revenue, and competitive benchmarking across engagement and experience metrics for continuous improvement
😎 Learn from Jackson Hewitt
Jackson Hewitt centralizes all Google review responses from over 5,200 locations in a single dashboard! The organization can see all customer feedback in one place, including NPS, CSAT, and NSS scores, and generate personalized replies using AI and a library of pre-approved responses. The result is an 80% reduction in average case-handling time while maintaining a consistent brand voice in interactions across all locations.
6. Close the feedback loop with customers
🥅 Goal: Convey to customers that their feedback matters and drives your roadmap
Customers want to know their feedback matters. You must actively communicate improvements, showing customers that their voices lead to real changes.
When you acknowledge and act on customer input, you build trust and loyalty. Failing to close the feedback loop can lead to frustration, disengagement, and even churn.
If you want to learn what stages of the customer feedback loop you can automate, check out this post on customer feedback automation.
Three tips to close the feedback loop:
- Automate feedback acknowledgment: A simple “thank you” can go a long way. If you have the means, send personalized follow-ups via email, chat, or support tickets to appreciate and let customers know their feedback has been received and is being acted upon
- Communicate improvements transparently: Customers want to know that their suggestions lead to action. Use email updates, blog posts, release notes, or in-app notifications to highlight what’s changed and how their feedback shaped those improvements. If feedback wasn’t implemented, communicate that as well
- Engage publicly where possible: Addressing feedback in online reviews, social media comments, and community forums helps build credibility. Even if the feedback is negative, a thoughtful response can turn critics into loyal customers
3 Reasons why a strong VoC strategy is crucial for enterprises
A well-executed voice of the customer strategy gives you a clear roadmap to understanding customer needs, improving experiences, and staying ahead of the competition. In a world where customer expectations keep rising, the companies that listen win.
Key benefits of an effective VoC strategy:
1. Better customer experience and satisfaction
Data suggests brands that focus on and improve CX report 60% higher profiles than brands that fail to focus on CX. Customers expect you to hear them, understand them, and act on their feedback. A strong VoC strategy helps you identify customer pain points, s, streamline interactions, and deliver experiences that keep customers coming back. The result? Higher satisfaction, fewer complaints, more profits, and stronger brand perception.
2. Improved product and service innovation
Customer insights are a goldmine for innovation. You can spot trends, uncover unmet needs, and refine offerings by actively listening to feedback. Whether it’s enhancing a product feature or fixing a common service issue, VoC data ensures that changes are driven by real customer demand, not just guesswork.
3. Strengthened brand loyalty and competitive advantage
Loyal customers can turn into brand advocates. When you prioritize VoC, you build trust by showing your customers that their voices matter. This boosts retention and creates a competitive edge, as businesses that consistently act on feedback naturally outperform those that don’t.
🎥 See in action: Building and maintaining brand authenticity at scale
Authenticity is mission-critical and delivering it on a scale can be challenging. In this 30-minute webinar, see how Sprinklr Insights can help your brand build trust, consistency, and transparency.
Top 3 challenges to implement VoC strategy and how to overcome them
Here are the most common challenges in VoC implementation and how to overcome them.
1. Managing overwhelming amounts of customer feedback
A voice of the customer strategy is not like social listening, which may be limited to social media feedback. VoC is unique in bringing in data from social, digital, and even traditional touchpoints in one overview, presuming you’re using the correct platform.
The result is often an overwhelming amount of data where it’s easy to get lost in the noise or lose focus.
Tips to overcome:
- Implement a centralized VoC platform: A single source of truth for customer sentiment and feedback, such as Sprinklr Insights, ensures all feedback is aggregated, analyzed, and acted upon efficiently. This is the single most helpful step you can take for your team!
- Set clear prioritization: Focus on feedback that aligns with business goals, such as reducing churn, enhancing CX, or improving product adoption
- Use AI-driven analytics: If your VoC platform supports it, take the help of AI to automate feedback categorization based on sentiment, urgency, and recurring themes to surface high-impact insights first. Platforms like Sprinklr Insights also support AI-suggested “next steps” thanks to AI built into the platform code base!
2. Breaking down silos for unified customer understanding
Customer feedback often sits in disconnected systems, with marketing, product, and customer service teams working in isolation. In most cases, teams independently review data and act upon them without coordinating with other teams, which could make the efforts less impactful!
Tips to overcome:
- Create a cross-functional VoC team: Ensure collaboration between CX, marketing, sales, product, and support for a 360-degree view of customer feedback
- Adopt a shared VoC dashboard: Invest in a VoC platform that is built for large teams, like Sprinklr Insights. Such tools come with centralized reporting, analytics, and governance
- Align VoC goals across teams: Establish common objectives, such as improving customer satisfaction and enhancing customer experience.
- Establish common KPIs that all departments can work towards, such as CSAT, NPS, and issue resolution rates
3. Measuring the long-term impact of VoC initiatives
Without tracking progress, you cannot justify your investment in VoC programs or refine your strategy for long-term success.
Tips to overcome:
- Track leading and lagging indicators that you decide to track to identify the impact and gaps
- Benchmark before and after implementation: Compare pre- and post-VoC insights to measure tangible customer experience and loyalty improvements
- Set a cadence to review the VoC strategy to refine initiatives based on emerging trends and evolving customer expectations
Turn customer feedback into business growth
As technology advances, AI and automation will play a major role in transforming VoC strategies. So, using platforms that bring the latest and the greatest in AI to analyze feedback more efficiently, uncover hidden insights, and respond faster to customer needs will be your strategic advantage.
Sprinklr Insights is a platform with 90%+ accurate verticalized AI and tools that large enterprises need to execute their VoC strategy in one unified platform. Book a demo today and see how we can help you leverage customer feedback for your success.
Frequently Asked Questions
A successful VoC strategy includes collecting feedback from multiple channels, analyzing customer sentiment, identifying trends, and taking actionable steps to improve products, services, and customer experience
AI helps by automating the analysis of large volumes of unstructured data, identifying trends, sentiment, and patterns, and providing predictive insights to guide decision-making.
Yes, success can be measured using KPIs such as CSAT, NPS, retention rates, and the impact on product or service improvements.
Yes, customer journey maps help visualize the customer experience at every touchpoint, identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement that can be addressed through VoC insights.
Businesses should review and update their VoC strategy regularly, ideally quarterly or annually, to ensure it aligns with changing customer expectations and market conditions.
