Building a Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program is critical for early-stage startups. Especially when you have a freemium model. In the first year, you can get thousands of new signups that activate at a decent rate. And this can translate into hundreds of support tickets every month. Not to mention NPS or Churn feedback. How do you make sense of all this? With a VoC program.
What’s a VoC program, benefits and pitfalls
A VoC program is a way to collect and analyze customer feedback from multiple sources. From support tickets, surveys, sales and customer success calls, or social media to name a few. There are many benefits to building a VoC, but I’ll focus on the top three:
It helps you prioritise. As a startup with limited resources, you need to be strategic in where you invest your time and money. To have the most impact on your business, focus on the features or improvements that are key to your customers.
It helps you identify trends. With multiple sources of information, you face two main problems: insufficient data from individual sources and difficulty in identifying trends. The VoC report resolves these problems by aggregating data, allowing you to discern patterns.
It gives you the full picture. Putting the puzzle together allows you to see the entire user journey and answer questions such as: Are the sales blockers the same as the reasons for churn? How does feedback from new users differ from that of long-time customers?
There are also some potential pitfalls that you should be aware of. Top 3 to have in mind:
Biased data: One of the biggest challenges of any feedback program is ensuring that the collected data is representative. If you only receive feedback from a small subset of your customers, the results may not be reliable. It is important to consider the feedback collection methods, the source of feedback, and whether the sample size is sufficient to draw meaningful conclusions. That's why utilizing multiple channels across the customer journey is key.
Over-reliance on feedback: While customer feedback is essential for product development, not all feedback has equal importance. Some customers may request changes that don't fit with your vision, aren't possible with your resources, or would be unpopular with other groups of customers. You should consider customer feedback, but also use your own judgement and expertise when making decisions.
Difficulty implementing changes: Making changes to your product after receiving clear feedback can be hard, even if the feedback is actionable. Depending on the feedback, it may require lots of resources or a complete overhaul of your development process. Startups should be prepared to be flexible and adapt quickly to feedback, but also realistic about what they can change given their limitations.
Analysing Results
In previous editions of this series, I did a deep dive into the main sources of feedback. Check out the links below:
What’s missing is collecting feedback from Sales and Customer Success calls. How you do this will depend on the tools you use, but it comes down to this:
If you use a CRM, record feedback there directly. A multiple-choice field makes it easier to extract information. Remember to track the date you received the feedback, the account it's related to, and include an open field so your AE and CSMs can add additional notes.
If you don't have a CRM yet, a Notion database or spreadsheet will work. Use the same fields mentioned earlier. At Typeform, we built a short form that both Sales and CS teams used to log calls with customers to ensure consistent submission of customer feedback. You can see a template here.
In both cases, make sure you categorize feedback the same way you do for support tickets. This will make your life so much easier when it’s time to analyse all of this.
Once you have the data from all these channels, bring them together, but don’t group them. In your report, it’s important to keep data sources separated. As mentioned before, you want to be able to tell a story and answer questions like:
what are the pain points of new users?
what are the main reasons why we’re losing deals?
are these the same reasons for churn?
is the feedback from NPS detractors the same as from churned users?
So keep sources separated, and then show trends at the end.
Sharing Results
How you present the data depends on your company size. Your main stakeholders are the Product team, the Leadership team, and the Customer Success team. How you present the data depends on the company size. In the early days at Typeform, I had a monthly meeting with both Co-founders and the Marketing lead. Later on, it evolved to a presentation with Product Managers and the Leadership team, followed by a slot in the all-hands. Keep the group small to facilitate Q&A. Below you can see the agenda from my last presentation:
What’s important is not the format, but the consistency of the data you present. If you use a tagging system to categorize your support tickets, don’t change it every 3 months. Or rename your sales blockers every now and then. The most value we got from this report was seeing how the feedback changed quarter over quarter. But above all:
Make it relevant: Segment and aggregate to identify trends.
Make it actionable: Kind feedback is only good for the ego. Only collect actionable data.
Make it visible: Each department only knows one chapter of the story. Put everything together and share.
Conclusion
I hope this guide helps you create or improve your VoC program. It's a practical step-by-step guide with real and useful examples. Some things will apply, others won't, and that's fine. My goal is to offer you a different framework so you can adopt relevant tactics for your startup.
If this is the first post you’re reading, remember to check out the previous ones: