We don't have a Voice of Customer program. 1. How do you get buy-in and 2. What does an MVP of a VOC program look like?
You can make the case on paper, but you can also spin up an MVP to affirm the value of a VOC program. 1. In my previous experience, I gained buy-in by outlining all the ways programs like this can drive product feedback, referral of new customers, retention of current customers, and upsell/cross-sell of products. 2. We ran an MVP at our yearly summit by inviting top spending/high potential customers to do a roundtable with our execs and heads of product. We learned what's top of mind in their world, what's working with our product, what's not, and what problems we AREN'T yet solving. This was a great MVP, and we continued these discussions at regional events throughout the year. Having a seat at the table helped the product team get buy-in, which is critical b/c they need to be accountable to listening and testing new ideas/solving for new problems.
Great question! Voice of Customer programs are incredibly important to keeping a pulse on your customer base, and ensuring your product/service is meeting the needs of customers.
Gaining buy-in can be a challenge, but I'd recommend a few things:
- Set the vision for your VOC program. Ideally this can mean a few objectives to focus on initially, and some medium-to-long-term objectives to expand to once you see initial success.
- Tie VOC objectives to core business goals and objectives. Great VOC programs exist cross-functionally, and impact a wide variety of business goals. As you start, ensure you know what those objectives are, how they're measured, and consider some of the ways VOC can impact those objectives positiviely.
- Work with stakeholders to set appropriate expectations. Especially when starting a big cross-functional program, you'll need a lot of buy-in -- and part of doing that will mean setting the right expectations with how different people and departments participate. Think about the value to Product Management, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and outline specific needs and time investment for all the participants you're expecting.
- Show each stakeholder the value they'll get from a VOC program. More specifically, talk through the ROI of the VOC program and how it will specifically help them and their objectives. There are plenty of ROI calculators and stats out there you can find with a search as well.
Once you have buy-in, you should leverage tools you have to collect customer feedback like NPS/CSAT already, or evaluate tools if you don't currently have one. Then determine who will own collection, analysis, and dissemination of this data on a regular cadence. One part of VOC that's talked about a lot is the collection of feedback -- but just as important is the analysis and collaboration on that feedback to make change. Finally, the feedback loop back to customers is critical so they feel involved and a part of the process and that their feedback matters.
To gain buy-in for a Voice of the Customer (VOC) program, you need to first convince stakeholders of the value of the program. I like to start with a simple proof of concept, which could be as straightforward as conducting a handful of customer interviews to get feedback on areas like NPS or product capabilities. The insights from these interviews can serve as a tangible example to demonstrate the types of insights that can be gleaned from a broader VOC program. Once the organization recognizes the benefits of these customer insights, you can begin to expand the scope of your program as different teams ask for additional insights.
Over time, you can start allocating resources to providing more extensive VOC. The evolution of the program could look like this:
Start by tapping into the reservoir of existing customer data that's already available in your CRM or other databases. With relatively lower investment in the program initially, this ensures that you're not starting from scratch and are leveraging assets you already possess.
From there, transition into setting up additional customer interviews. These will provide more granular, personal insights, deepening your understanding of the customer experience, specific customer pain points, or other areas that you’d like to understand.
As momentum builds, you can invest in more extensive customer data collection methods and tools for more comprehensive and continuous feedback. One area that has emerged in the last couple of years is tools that help to gather customer feedback directly in the product.
From there, you can implement more systematic ways to conduct customer surveys. This allows you to gather consistent data from a broader customer base on an ongoing basis.
Over time, this can be further expanded to include programming, such as user groups that can bring customers onsite or to virtual events to drive further engagement.
Finally, to ensure a comprehensive and unbiased perspective, consider engaging in third-party external research. This can fill any gaps in your internal understanding of the customer and provide further validation to your findings.
An MVP of a VOC program should be simple to start with and quickly deliver valuable insights. I would start by selecting a few representative customers to conduct open-ended interviews with and sharing the findings from these interviews. Many people are surprised by the level of novel insights that can come from just a number of interviews that are conducted well.
In parallel, I would also dive into readily available customer data from your CRM to see if you can synthesize the information in new and insightful ways. Many companies document information on the customer experience and customer feedback in their CRM, but never take the time to parse through this information and share insights across the organization. You’d be surprised by how much this off-the-shelf information can help with identifying patterns, trends, and areas of interest or concern across your customer base.
Once you've gathered these insights, share your findings across the organization in a way that really highlights what customers truly think and need. Encourage feedback on these insights from various teams, which not only validates your findings but also helps to refine your VOC process based on what was helpful or not. This will create more interest into what other findings a more extensive VOC program could bring and help set the foundation for a broader VOC program.
Love this question and I’m often surprised by how underutilized customer research is within companies. The issue is that research takes time which explains why a lot of companies shy away from it. But the right intel can accelerate your business multiple orders of magnitude by informing - priority product bets, competitive differentiation, geo expansion, pricing strategies, strategic narratives, validating personas (and so much more)!
First, tie the research hypotheses to defined P0 business priorities to demonstrate value quickly and tangibly. Second, the question you’re ultimately helping your organization figure out is this - how to design digital products that people/customers actually want? Align your business priorities and customer needs to demonstrate ROI (measurable outcomes aka KPIs) of a VOC program internally. Rule of thumb - always show value before asking for resources. Sharing some tangible ideas to build and scale a VOC program.
MVP of a VOC program and Getting buy-in:
Carve time: Allocate a small % of the team’s time to understanding customers. Formalize it.
Run lean research: Join customer conversations through sales/customer success calls, run qual focus groups & quant surveys (free tools like User testing, Survey Monkey, Google surveys, landing page intercepts), engage with online user communities, review product analytics data (e.g. onboarding, engagement, churn) meet industry analysts, volunteer at your company’s events booth, run win/loss interviews ... you get the gist. Every chance you get, sit with the customer and actually listen to them.
Synthesize! Not everything you learn will be of value. Determining which insights could be potential needle movers is the secret sauce that skilled PMMs bring to the fore.
Socialize: Schedule time (e.g. quarterly cadence) for “Lunch and learn” sessions that anyone across the org can join to hear directly from customers/prospects (ideally) or for a shareout by PMMs. This could serve as a beta version of a future ‘Customer Advisory Board’.
Create a knowledge hub: Create a “Customer Insights” newsletter, build a wiki page, and socialize case studies with stakeholders to showcase insights and how the learnings were applied to strategic business initiatives to diffuse customer insights throughout the org.
Find X-functional champions to serve as ambassadors of the VOC program across teams. Involve them in sourcing customers, survey design, and interview sessions to keep them involved in the build phase of the VOC program.
Break org silos: A VOC program could be that trojan horse for breaking cross-organizational silos and push deeper thinking on target markets, ICP and messaging.
Once the MVP version takes hold, then scale by investing budget and resources towards a more robust version of the program (ie. external agencies, paid reports, paid tools, dedicated Research team).
I'm glad you asked about MVP, because I tried to boil the WHOLE ocean and build a massive VoC program a few years ago. We tried to collect every piece of information that anyone in the company was collecting from the market. It was way too ambitious and my CEO asked us to stop doing it after a summer of work.
That was a huge failure, but going back to basics and building a win/loss program was the best choice for me. I mapped out the 12 areas of VoC that we eventually wanted to cover (e.g. customer feedback from reviews sites, data from churned customers, product usage data, analyst feedback, etc) and then just picked 1 area every quarter or two to focus on. I honestly spent an entire year just doing win/loss, but it got tons of traction and we were able to move on to another area because we got so much buy-in. It was the most popular channel we had.
The most important advice I ever received: a VoC program needs to be actionable. Start with the end in mind. Are you trying to enrich marketing campaigns? Provide input into the roadmap? Improve CSAT or win rates? Build the program that fits your outcome. Then, make sure that the goal of the program is not insights, but action. Identify in advance the team that is going to use the data, and build the program in a way that they can easily pull the data from your source. You don't want to be stuck doing "roadshows" around the company to train everyone on the insights.
If win/loss is an area you want to start with, I actually just wrote about this last week in a Linkedin article because I wanted to get it on paper:
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