“If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford
Despite the questionable attribution, this quote gets thrown around a lot in the business world—but not as a rallying cry for innovation. Instead, as justification for not listening to customers.
Because what do they know? They’re too busy thinking about what they know to consider anything truly innovative. Right?
But you can’t understand anything about your business if you don’t listen to your customers—what they think about you, what they know about you, what they want in the marketplace. Everything about running your business well begins with the customer. Unfortunately, most organizations these days simply don’t work that way.
Why aren’t people doing VOC?
Don’t get me wrong: if you asked any organizational leader, they’d agree Voice of Customer (VOC) is important. Their board rooms and internal documents are full of “Customer Backed” and “Insights Driven” ideas. But when you dig into where those insights come from, the results are rather thin. They send out an email survey every few months and think that’s enough. Or worse, they do a bunch of research, then lean on those insights for the next 10 years.
This reticence to perform solid, comprehensive customer listening has many reasons:
It’s not embedded into the development process
Product and service development projects come with strict timelines and clearly defined steps. As such, VOC is often viewed as an afterthought. Something you’ll get to eventually. But in the meantime, the team has deadlines to hit. So, you keep pushing the project forward, designing based on your own experience and intuition. And by the time you get around to talking to customers, it’s just to validate the work you’ve already decided is complete.
They are doing VOC—but they’re doing it wrong.
For organizations that acknowledge the importance of VOC but don’t want to spend the time or money to do it right, they find a way to sneak it in. They ask their salesforce to slip in a few questions when they talk to customers. Do marketplace analyses and try to make some guesses as to what the results could mean. They do just about everything they can—short of actually sitting down to talk to their customers.
Customers don’t know what they want.
Think back to the Henry Ford quote—and the sentiment at the heart of it. If you truly want to wow your customers, you can’t listen to them about what they want. Because you’re going to give them something they couldn’t even imagine. So, you insulate your experts, remove your customers from the equation, and keep your development in a vacuum. This is called inside-out thinking, and it’s a surefire way to fail in the market.
How to do VOC that really makes a difference
It’s easy for many organizations to believe that VOC doesn’t move the needle. Maybe they’ve invested in the past but not seen the return they expected. So they write it off completely. But 99 times out of 100, if your customer listening process doesn’t lead to a more profitable product or more market success, it’s not because VOC doesn’t work—it’s because you didn’t do it right.
So how can you ensure you’re doing VOC the right way to guarantee your ROI?
Prioritize customer listening first: Customer listening should always be the first step. Who are we designing for? What do they really need? You have to understand who your customers are, segment them accordingly, and understand their mindsets and attitudes before you do anything else.
Segment your audience accurately: Start by talking to customers in your marketplace and finding out why they did or did not buy your product, why they chose a competitor, or why they chose not to buy anything. Then divide them based on likeness of sentiment. To build good products or services, you have to understand their pain points.
Use the right research modality for the right circumstance: Good VOC is collected using multiple research modalities. Ethnographic, quantitative/qualitative, indirect customer listening, usability testing, etc. Each of these can help you understand the actions a customer takes purchasing and using your product, and outline the pain points in detail.
VOC research tools and when to use them
So how do you choose? If your organization isn’t dedicated to VOC and customer insights, and it isn’t a dedicated step in your development process, how do you know what tool to use for the job?
Here are some of the tools and methodologies you can use to perform the VOC you need, and when to apply them:
Exploration & Discovery Phase
In the early stage of development, the goal is to get to know your customers as best as you can: understand their needs, their pain points, and the opportunities you have to solve them. These research methods will help you define the problem space and put you into your customers’ context to understand the emotional drivers of their purchasing decisions:
- Interviews & Ethnographic Research: Gather rich, qualitative insights into the “why” behind customer behavior, understanding every emotion and pain point across the customer journey.
- Focus Groups: Explore attitudes or reactions to broad concepts.
- Social Listening & Review Analysis: Spot emerging needs or dissatisfaction themes.
Concept Development & Validation
As you brainstorm and develop ideas, it’s important to keep an open line of dialogue with your customers to shape your ideas, test early-stage concepts, and prioritize features. Use these quantitative and qualitative research methods to help you home in on a concept that will truly move the needle for your customers:
- Surveys: Quantify preferences, satisfaction, or priorities at scale.
- Conjoint Analysis: Identify which features or benefits customers value most.
- Customer Advisory Boards: Engage groups of key customers for iterative feedback.
- UX Low-Fidelity Concept Testing: Give customers access to an early, unrefined prototype to gather feedback on overall concept acceptance.
Testing & Optimization
With your direction clear, it’s time for the serious development phase to begin. But there are a million complex decisions between here and a finished product. Instead of leaning on past conversations with your customers to infer what they think of your work-in-progress, you can use these methods to refine your solutions, optimize the experiences, and measure its performance with your target market before you go to market:
- Usability Testing: Watch customers interact with high-fidelity prototypes to find friction points and areas in need of refinement.
- Journey Mapping: Confirm the entire experience flows smoothly and exceeds customer expectations.
- In-App or Real-Time Feedback Tools: Capture quick reactions in the moment using digital tools.
Continuous Improvement
It’s important to remember that the lifecycle of your product or service doesn’t end as soon as you ship it out the door—and your VOC shouldn’t either. Use these data collection methods to track ongoing satisfaction with your new creation and monitor for customer needs like new features, solution improvements, or new products based on unmet needs:
- NPS & CSAT Surveys: Measure customer loyalty and satisfaction regularly.
- Customer Communities & Panels: Solicit long-term, iterative input from a select group of engaged customers.
- Support Tickets & Chat Logs: Gather passive but powerful insights for continuous refinement.
Sure, if you’d asked some people what they wanted out of their horse travel experience, they would have said faster horses. But Ford missed the point: A smart innovator would have heard customers say they wanted a faster horse and imagined a car. Taking the time to really understand your customers—not just listen to what they say, but what they’re not saying, how they’re saying it—is the only way to really learn how to serve them best. Instead of wasting time and money creating something you only think they want.
Making a cultural commitment to customer listening is an investment—but one with a major payoff. If you’re ready to put your customer’s voices front and center in your development process, reach out to us. Our team of expert designers will help you get started.