Right now we're building a learning plan for a product we are considering to launch. We've done some surveys and tied it back to existing customer data, but we still have a set of known unknowns that we want to have answered to remove risk from the project.

By listing out these questions in order from highest risk to least, and tackling each group with the appropriate tool, you can iteratively arrive at a go/no go for a new product launch. Usually each question that needs to be answered will have an appropriate VoC mechanism for it.

For example:
Are our customers interested? Can be answered through an early access test, and look at sign-up volume and work with BI for analysis.
What is the right price - can be done through price sensitivity surveys
What do our customers do today around this market problem? Surveys and 1:1 interviews for a combination of quantitative and qualitative data.
What is the retention rate? A pilot project for early access customers who qualify to see if the proposed solution ads value.

etc. Until we have enough data to put together a reasonable revenue model and go/no-go

Youtube tutorial videos
Reddit posts
Other social media

When people take time to talk about or review your product online for free you should pay attention to what they are saying.

Stop looking for the customer to give you the perfect solution or the answer you are looking for. If it was easy they would do it themselves.

Ask them how they spend their time and money. Understand what they value. Understand how they are solving their problems now, gauge how likely they are to make a switch.

When marketers go out looking for the silver bullet, they usually come up empty.

If dealing with some kind of technology/app experience, I am OK with doing online because the customer usually has everything they need. This case I think is best when the user is going to be doing something themselves 1:1 with the technology.

When it comes to a physical product or if there is any value to ‘wisdom of the crowd’ where people coming together for an in-person focus group will give better feedback by hearing each others’ ideas real-time, I would invest the extra time and budget in an in-person experience, like someone else was talking about earlier. An immersive tactile experience may bring the best feedback if what is being evaluated isn’t something that can be best understood virtually or alone.

I think a viable VOC alternative is to try and tune in to OTHER customers of similar products or at least general trends. This might not yield specific enough insights to help us make our own product decisions but can at least point us in the right direction and also potentially point out a gap and opportunity in the market.

One method I've used in the past in a B2B context in early-launch products where we were trying to find market product fit is to find early-adopters and work deeply and collaboratively in a pilot, in order to build out requirements and gain feedback quickly, but keep in mind that some might be specific. As the pilot progressed, these findings would be validated with the broader sales team, and technology solution teams, as well as other mechanisms such as Customer Advisory Boards and Customer Success.

Another I've used and had good feedback with are prototypes such as mockups or 'smoke-and-mirrors' prototypes along with an interview of potential customers for feedback.

A Customer Advisory Board can become a key element of an holistic VoC framework. Customer Advisory Boards can require a lot of effort, but can be hugely rewarding. The best Customer Advisory Boards consist of a trusted circle of your most strategic customers, who can provide early, candid feedback on your roadmap and new offerings. Furthermore, they can strengthen the connection and build loyalty among your customer base, as you offer a direct, influential channel to your product team.

The challenge we have at Namecheap is gathering voice of the customer at scale.

when doing VoC in a small startup, direct methods are feasible, however at scale obtaining the same quality of insight becomes more deliberate.

right now a combination of Surveys, Interviews, and Focus Groups as well as product data give us a reasonable handle on VoC prior to a product launch.

post launch, again surveys, interveiws and focus groups as well as being in a support escalation channel to have a pulse on issues requiring product changes or persistent bugs.

We are
also testing the effectiveness of early access sign up to a potential product to assess customer response prior to launch.

Recently we have introduced free access to a product prior to selecting a vendor to service that product in order to ensure customer success.

Recently asked for volunteers from our customer group who would be interested in giving us their thoughts on features and roadmap. Identified a strong group of customer advocates that have been very open about sharing what they like, but more importantly what they would love for us to do next. Always have this run by our product managers so they hear first hand voice of the customer.

We deliver products-solutions to wine & beer producers and try to get information on what they need, they are looking for.
Direct meetings. Multicustomer events ...
We usually map customers (by geography and potential) and map contacts inside in order to achieve information on how we can get value from production / from Quality / from Product Development - Innovation / or Finance
I found similar approach when customers are pharma companies in past experience.

I am in the integrated chips / semiconductor industry.
I can look at the market from custom (big customer oriented) vs catalog (mass market oriented) perspectives.
To develop custom products, it's a key to engage with those top "teaching" customers who have the technical/end user insights and will support the volume when product in production. Of course, we need to have our OWN judgement of what are essential requirements (e.g. cost, and one or two key performance metrics) and what are "good-to-haves", but overall the product market fit is straightforward since if those big guys buy in, then you have a selling product.
To develop mass market oriented products, it's key to identify the key applications and engage with insightful customers to summarize common denominators (features) and create products based on them. There will be a lot of trade-offs to make and the requirements are usually bits and pieces and here and there. So it needs a good product managers to make these trade-offs.
In both cases, it's often that you don't get it right the first time, so a quick spin would do the work and make products selling.
Also magically, a product that was targeted to sell to specific customer groups or sub-markets end up being sold to different set of customers or markets.
Market/customer insight is never enough.

If is a question you are wanting an answer to I would not use a survey. The reason is that if you are not the person writing the question then you can easily get an answer that doesn't line up with the other data you may have. I have seen survey questions skewed to the point of worthlessness more than onc

If is a question you are wanting an answer to I would not use a survey. The reason is that if you are not the person writing the question then you can easily get an answer that doesn't line up with the other data you may have. I have seen survey questions skewed to the point of worthlessness more than once.

While some people I have talked to have said that Focus groups are not a good way to get feedback I find them invaluable to peeling the onion. It is much easier to have a conversation and ask nuanced questions in a focus group versus other methods.

Our current strategy is to do a number of Focus groups and customer surveys. In the past, I have used software to allow customers to put in new feature requests and I have even allowed customers to force rank those feature requests through up or down votes. The latter is what I usually like the most however the current product I am working on is at a startup so there is not as much opportunity for that yet.

We channel part of the support tickets and feedback tickets through the product team. Getting the information firsthand helps understand better the problems. Channeling everything through a PM includes some noise and sometimes loses some caveats.

In terms of market research, depending on what I wanted answering I would use different research learning tools. If needing to get a sense of scale e.g. levels of consideration, the drivers/barriers to uptake for a service etc I'd prioritise (quantitative) survey tools. If wanting to get under the skin of something and understand the how/why then a (more qualitative) tool like UserTesting is great for running video interviews.

We try to not miss the opportunity to meet the consumer and collect feeback,s, insight and expectation:
Sales and presales are invited to collect information and share it with marketing/product manager
Marketing and Product managers are present in forums and congress to discuss with Customer.
Foster the Attendance of product team member in customers meeting with sales and marketing to develop the customer empathy and understad more the messages transmitted by marketing and product managers.

A marketeer's core role is to keep a hawk's eye on the market and its trends. This includes customers, users, prospects, and influencers. We do a 360-degree of listening of the customer and the influencer group across multiple forums.

1. NPS is the proven established way to get structured feedback on the product from customers. The entire process is handled by a team that never interacts with customers in the foreground.

1. Strategic Product Governance (SPG) Group is a nominated group of customers that work closely with the product management team and has a say in the product roadmap. Since they are actual product users, the roadmap is enriched to handle the latest industry trends and features required to keep the product on the leading edge of the curve.

• We regularly do an Annual Market Survey of the market as a whole to find out customer expectations.
• 
  
• We have Social Listening (mostly LinkedIn) tags that are set to give us the feed on industry opinions, likes, dislikes, and recommendations. I must say, social listening is still in the infancy stage for us.

• Review sites, blogs, and forums are also great places to get anonymous but frank reviews of your products. We regularly monitor the same and get insights.

While we look at all this, we also regularly win/loss analysis to get insights on the pros and cons for the product.

"Customer-Obsessed" is a term that is often thrown around our team these days. There are a few ways we are attempting to execute on this...

1. 1. Historically, we have routinely tried to gauge customer sat at the end of an engagement. Often this is with an automated survey that may or may not be directed to the most appropriate person and may or may not be filled out. It's a terrible measure. Right now I am leading an effort to inspect and uncover quality issues in our customer-facing work during the actual work in order to gather that feedback and course correct.
2. 2. I am guiding those whom I work with to step back from technology when exploring VOC needs. When speaking in the context of existing applications, you almost always miss opportunities and gaps to provide value. When taking those out of the equation and really focus on what the customer is trying to do, there is where the gaps are uncovered that possibly could be met with existing or new technology.
3. 3. We are broadening the definition of 'customer' and also including other constituencies in examining potential ROI. If there is some kind of systemic problem that is affecting your customers, for example, that they cannot access the services and answers they require when calling in to your service staff, not only is your customer sat declining... your employee sat is probably degrading as well. By looking wider, arguments for addressing VOC-identified initiatives become even more compelling for investment if there are other benefits that will arise. Especially during this time of such widespread attrition, anything we can do to boost our employee sat as part of our VOC efforts makes those decisions all the more easier and higher priority.

Never pitch a new product when you are trying to get Voice of Customer. The customers like you and will tell you that your new product is super and they may buy it in the future. This information is useless. New product demo's are their own category.

When attempting to get VOC, ask about problems and how they solve them currently. Ask about customer's typical day. Ask about frustrations and how they handle them now. Don't pitch your newest product.

Talk to someone who doesn't use your product. Establish a new relationship to the company rather than rely upon existing relationships.
Too often researchers and marketers are too 'scared' to go outside the existing business relationships to get insight. Its hard work and yields many more negative responses than working with the typical friendly customers.
However, if you really want to learn something new talk to someone you haven't spoken with before!

We have a great sales team. They are experts at turning customer problems into need statements for our current product offerings.

In order to truly be able to listen, you need to eliminate the sales staff from VOC on site visits. The sales team wants to act as the gatekeepers, but you must either work with them or around them, to get to the customer in a relaxed and non-sales conversation.

The customer has their own 'truths' or 'perceptions.' Sales wants to 'educate' them on why they are mistaken or wrong. True VOC does not judge, educate or pitch new products.

VOC has no judgements, it only records the answers. In order to capture it accurately, you must eliminate the sales staff from the conversation.

We have plenty of channels for consumers to express their feedback and request features or improvements of our platform and products. These channels are very typical (not necessarily traditional) which are through feedback forms, star ratings, social media messaging, e-mails and whatsapps that consumers send, etc.

What we do to meet the Voice of Consumers is to put those needs into our Product pipelines and define the viability of their needs and evaluate the impact. Sometimes we take those ideas and showcase them as poll questions on Instagram to see the consumers' reactions (ie. Would you like us to include X?)

Once we implement a new feature, if it came from a user or range of users, we send them an email, letting them know what is coming (right before we launch it). This way we make sure we are letting them know we hear them and we are working for them.

Voice of the consumer is key because the consumers are the ones that will make or break your product. Every idea that we receive is replied and if an idea is not selected, we let the consumer know the reason why. It usually is because we do not have the current resources to develop it. However, we keep those ideas and requests in a board and we come to them every month to see if there are ideas from consumers that we should be focusing on.

UserTesting is our go-to platform for the majority of early stage discovery work - it can be used for both light-touch and in-depth customer feedback. Lucky Orange is a platform we use primarily for heat mapping our websites (although it can do more than that). We use surveymonkey to host our NPS and any ad-hoc customer research surveys we run. All of the solutions can do a lot for very little financial outlay. We've looked into Intercom, which feels like it could be a really powerful solution, but it's also very expensive for a young business.

Our voice of the consumer is really used to help inform and prioritise our product roadmap and limited resources. As well as helping provide direction, it also reduces the risk that HiPPOs have undue influence on key decisions. We have a number of different data sources which feed into VOC - NPS feedback, online reviews, customer exit surveys, customer testing and analytics. We also have to be mindful that one particular source of VOC isn't unduly influencing decision-making - e.g. customer complaints can feel high priority issues to the support staff dealing with the complaint but this needs to be considered within the context of the thousands of customers that haven't complained about an issue. As a relatively young business, we are still in the early stages of building out our VOC - the next would be to have some form of representative customer panel we can tap into even more regularly than we can right now.

RLT Yes

• I'm approaching a new market or launching a new product/line in a space I'm new or I have little awareness
• I have a short Time to market and absolute need to launch by a certain date
• I have no internal organization to build my own data analytics strategy

RLT no

• I've a good knowledge of the market and a tight relationship with the customers
• I've consistent availability of Internal Data to build my alternative strategy
• I don't need to change market/product and approach unexplored market information
• 
  

The increasing availability of data related to the products space (market data; geographic info; pre-sales campaign; launch; customers interactions, compliants, public databases,..) enable companies (both Small and Medium Enterprises and Corporates) to build on top of them custom data analytics (predictive AI, ML, Business analytics,...). This could be accomplished by an internal department (for bigger companies with CIO/Innovation/Data science organizations) or outsourcing to ICT companies whose the market offer is full.
I think this is the most viable alternative to pre build traditional RLTs

Tech Giants have set a very high bar in terms of customer relationship and service level agreement (i.e. see amazon on line support).
Wether we are talking about a B2B or a B2C product and indipendently of the specific industry we are talking about , I think this is the right route to follow to meet the Voice of Cusstomer s need: LISTEN and BE THERE

As noted in the first theme - specificity creates the best data. For us, experiential events are fantastic for surgeons because we innovate in an area that they work every single day - so communicating relevance and need aren't difficult, and gaining feedback while working 'in-context' comes pretty naturally. Patients however, don't see the benefit of an experiential event until they're injured, and your window to communicate to an injured patient is very very small and logistically is the last thing they want to do.

We host educational events for our medical device technology - a critical part of these events is our ability to allow a customer to experience our technology 'in-context' a very hands-on way. These events allow us to probe for what is good, what is bad, and what more we could be pursuing with our technology. By doing 150+ of these experiences a year across the US, we are able to maintain a constant mindset sampling - continuing to challenge or reinforce ideas and directives.

We still utilize traditional tactics such as polls and KOL panels. However, in the medical device (orthopedic) space we have at least three different 'customers' - 1. the surgeon, 2. the hospital/insurer, and 3. the patient. While there are some shared needs/desires - there are also many needs/desires that are unique to each 'customer'.

Our surgeon customers give insights to opportunities from their perspective, and we have a very integrated sales team to solicit direct feedback. These can be helpful for things like tool or implant design, reimbursement/insurance problems or solutions, as well as educational insights. We also give a lot of focus on peer reviewed publications from orthopedic subspecialties paying particular attention to noted complications from literature - these failures are obvious places for innovation. This feedback comes from multiple channels, from organic conversations, directed email surveys, panel discussions, and through social media interactions.

We also look for patient groups on social media to monitor. While the surgical experience is often short term, the patient experience is longer term and is experienced as a part of life, not as a single procedure. Therefore, listening to the what people take time to post or respond to leads us to areas where the patients themselves are looking for more innovation.

The importance of establishing free-flowing, responsive Voice of Customer channels cannot be understated. They are essential in building a vivid picture of product usage, customer sentiment, emergent gaps and unforeseen difficulties. Furthermore, Voice of the Customer channels work best when seen as two-way conduits - opportunities for customers to engage with their most vocal customers, seek early feedback on new ideas and products and conduct highly targeted research.

Optimal VoC Channels 
In my experience, the optimal Voice of Customer (VoC) mix adapts to the company context. The VoC should ideally reflect the go-to-market motions of the company. 

For high-touch, Enterprise sales, VoC is best served by regular dialog between front-line Sales and Customer Success teams and the Product Development teams. Building a trustworthy, continuous conversation here is of enormous value. Sales and Customer Success teams can amplify the needs of their customers directly to the Product team, whereas the Product team can gain real-time feedback from the most strategic customers.

For self-service Product sales, with no direct intermediary, VoC tends not to have a single point of focus. Instead, a Product or Research team may invest in a variety of customer engagement activities to solicit customer feedback and sentiment. Online discussion forums, surveys, in-product questions and direct customer feedback can all contibute to building a rich VoC canvas. Additionally, the Support team is typically a strong proxy for the Voice of the Customer and should be embraced for their knowledge and insight into product usage and sentiment.

Operationalizing VoC
Building Voice of the Customer channels that can reliably tap into customer sentiment and convey product feedback is a great start. However, unless the feedback is reviewed, collated, interrogated and prioritized, there is a risk of a circular, negative spiral emerging. 

Invariably, product feedback and requests will always outweigh the capacity to deliver, so the focus of VoC must be to sift through the feedback and extract the most valuable nuggets of information. At a minimal, tools to store and track feedback will help with ordering and searching feedback. Then, defining a triage and prioritization system can provide a map of which feedback will be actioned or not. In many cases, the feedback or request from a customer should not be taken literally, but rather a clue that something is confusing or some other unmet need is apparent.

Voice of the Customer channels should have robust feedback mechanisms. If feedback is truly valued, it must be acknowledged and customers should expect a level of response for their input. This can be in the form of an indicative roadmap or a description of how feedback is analyzed. Or, when possible, a starting point for a conversation with the customer: why do you need this improvement? What are you trying to achieve? 

Many companies view their stack of unaddressed customer requests and feedback as a major headache. On the contrary, it is a privilege. There are companies that can only dream of having such an engaged customer base that cares enough to share feedback and see the product improve. The trick is to reframe this feedback and treat it as a competitive advantage to product development.

The first challenge in building a "Voice of customer" culture in the company is to ensure all leadership team goes away from personal opinions to trust more voice of the customer. To achieve this

1. Always use data in all your communications, what did you find from meeting customers or from research
2. For any debate or arguments, DON'T push your opinion, always refer to "Will test with customers and get back"
3. Make all customers feedback and research data available and easy to access for everyone, So, that every leader or new joiner can always access these data and link to his/her question

Once you setup the culture of "VOC", set the process to ensure you are always getting customers feedback, share it with leadership and your team and make most of your decisions based on this data

• Collect customers feedback as much as possible and for different touch points
• Never go live with a new campaign or a new feature without real customers testing
• on-going testing and tweaking your campaign based on customers feedback
• use right tools for reporting and create dashboard for transparancy with all stakeholdets

Just an advice, it is really a challenge to shift company culture, just ensure to over communicate about the results from customer research and how it help your product or your marketing campaign success

Before starting any VOC research, it is vital to understand "who" you'll be asking (the customer group) and "who" you'll be telling (your internal audience). Choose whether your audience will be more informed by quantitative vs. qualitative findings. Do not overlook the power of video, both in-person and recorded interactions, when presenting your research. Keep in mind, age groups may respond differently to comfortability on camera, provide alternatives to those who wish to provide feedback without showing their face.

We use four platforms to conduct our VOC research. Typeform allows us to design surveys in a multitude of ways, it is a very flexible and easy-to-use platform for data collection. CrazyEgg provides feedback on user interactions on web pages, providing insights into customer frustration with your website's design and interface. UserTesting combines live user recording of interactions on your website, adding an additional layer of usage response and immediate user feedback. Lastly, VideoAsk (a sister product by Typeform) uses asynchronous messaging and question/response in three interchangeable formats: video, audio and textual.

The first step is getting buy-in from leadership on the value of VOC. Next, choose a platform to (a) seek participation, (b) collect data in an easy and straightforward way, and (c) report conclusions efficiently. Lastly, conveying the findings in an easy-to-understand format to apply to current and future projects, disseminating the results to as many employees as possible, without compromising confidentiality or company regulations.