The Ultimate Guide to Building a Voice of Customer Program

Hey, I’m Jack! I work at Enterpret, where I help some of the best companies in the world build their Voice of Customer programs, scale customer insights, and get the most from their customer feedback.

My team at Enterpret and I analyzed thousands of hours of conversations from the last three years at Enterpret to extract the best practices for running an effective Voice of Customer (VoC) program.

This guide will walk you through everything you need to build a Voice of Customer program. It also includes tactical advice from our customers at Notion, Figma, Apollo, and more.

What is Voice of Customer?

At Enterpret, we believe Voice of Customer (VoC) is about more than software. The true value of VoC comes from integrating it into your processes. At Enterpret it’s of the utmost importance to understand what we call Voice of Customer Occasions—those key moments when teams engage with customer feedback.

Let’s use this diagram to explain. First, let’s focus on the partnerships team. They might monitor feedback around brand partnerships and examine friction points in the rewards journey. Meanwhile, the product team meets every Monday to review bugs and identify opportunities, and the support team examines CX highlights and chatbot performance.

Our mission at Enterpret is to create specific artifacts that support these activities. If the product team reviews bugs on Monday, we build a dashboard showing the top issues broken down by platform, OS, or geography. It's about making the data actionable.

My teammate Matt Miller provides additional insight, ”Not every team has regular VoC engagements, and that's a missed opportunity. We push teams to establish these occasions. We start by asking what questions they need to answer, then create the right artifacts—dashboards, Slack summaries, etc. We pilot these solutions and iterate based on feedback, ensuring the insights from the program drive real impact.”

How to Get Started with a Voice of Customer Program

Many companies aspire to be customer-obsessed but often don’t know where to start. Here's the framework we recommend companies use to launch a Voice of Customer program.

1. Decide if it’s a good fit
2. Get buy-in
3. Operationalize

Is a Voice of Customer Program a Good Fit for your Company?

Voice of Customer is for you if:

• You sell a tech product or tech-enabled service;
  • Analyzing customer feedback isn’t your core product/service.
• You use a formal support ticketing system like Zendesk, Intercom, Zoho, or Salesforce Service Cloud and:
  • Need an analyst to tell you what is going on
• Your sales team records calls with prospects through systems like Gong or Chorus,
  • and you want to maximize the insights from these calls.
• Your EPD team is large enough that no person has all the details of what’s being built in a given week.
• One of your company values is “customer-obsessed,”
  • You believe you can improve on delivering value to customers and solving their pain
  • You want to up level how you’re listening to and acting on customer feedback

Voice of Customer is not for you if:

• Your company is small enough that one person can review all customer interactions in a day or two.
• You believe understanding customer pain points shouldn’t be part of a product manager’s job.
• You already know everything about your customers.

The #1 Thing You Need to Make a VoC Program Work: Buy-in

To run a successful VoC program, you need real buy-in from cross-functional stakeholders that customer feedback matters. This must be a top-down decision led by the head of product.

Do this by getting buy-in in these four key areas mentioned in the beginning:

• Achieve Better Alignment: Ensuring better alignment between GTM (Go-To-Market) and EPD (Engineering, Product, and Design) teams on company priorities.
• Ship Faster: Delivering impactful customer-facing improvements with confidence and speed.
• Delight Users: Solving problems and creating memorable brand experiences for their users.
• Improve Development Pace: Enhancing the pace of execution for development teams.

Here’s advce from Shek CPO at Apollo.io on getting buy-in“Use data to demonstrate the program's potential impact on key metrics like gross dollar retention and cost reduction. Design the program for specific outcomes to strengthen the case for implementation. Estimate the impact by understanding how reducing friction through a VOC program can improve retention and lower service costs. At Apollo, we knew reducing the human inquiry rate by 40% would positively impact retention. Getting buy-in became a tactical step after that.” (Read the full post here)

Operationalizing Voice of Customer

Voice of Customer is a Team Sport

It starts with the people. A successful VoC program requires a centralized team of insight producers and a decentralized team of insight consumers. This structure ensures the whole company is aligned on top problems and focus areas, while development teams can move quickly with self-serve insights.

1. Insight Producers: Align your entire company around the top pain points customers are facing
2. Insight Consumers: Insight consumers take action based on customer feedback insights

The Flywheel Effect of a Properly Structured Team

An empowered centralized team aligns the whole company on top problems and focus areas, which means that development teams will work on high-impact strategies. These teams can move fast with self-serve insights, while the centralized team avoids getting bogged down with ad hoc questions.

How to Run an Effective Voice of Customer Program

These are the 5 steps to follow to ensure your VoC program is robust and impactful:

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1. Identify Where Your Customer Conversations Are Happening

Start by mapping out all the channels where your customers interact with your brand. This includes social media platforms, customer support tickets, feedback forms, surveys, and review sites. Understanding these touch points helps you gather comprehensive insights from various customer interactions.

2. Create a List of Top Customer Pain Points

Analyze the feedback collected from different channels to identify recurring themes and issues. Categorize these pain points based on frequency and severity. This list will serve as the foundation for prioritizing which issues to address first.

3. Get Buy-in from EPD and GTM Teams on the Data List of Pain Points

Collaboration is key. Present the data-driven list of pain points to your Engineering, Product Development (EPD), and Go-to-Market (GTM) teams. Ensure they understand the importance of these issues and secure their commitment to addressing them.

4. Address These Pain Points

Develop and implement solutions to the top pain points. This could involve product updates, feature enhancements, or process improvements. The goal is to alleviate customer frustrations and enhance their overall experience with your brand.

5. Repeat Step 2 Over and Over

VoC is an ongoing process. Continuously gather feedback, update your list of pain points, and address them in a cycle. This iterative approach ensures you stay attuned to your customers' evolving needs and expectations.

Voice of Customer Rituals and Operating Cadences

As we mentioned in the beginning, it's important to identify VoC Occasions. Keeping your VoC Occasions top of mind will help your teams focus on the moments when they engage with customer feedback. Establishing rituals and operating cadences within your organization ensures that VoC insights are consistently integrated into your business processes.

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Here's how to set up an effective cadence:

Product/Company/Team Planning

Integrate VoC insights into your regular planning sessions. This ensures that customer feedback is a core component of your strategic decision-making.

Monthly/Quarterly Top 10 Lists

Create and share lists of the top 10 customer pain points each month or quarter. This helps align EPD and GTM teams on the most critical issues by surface area, ensuring that everyone is working towards common goals.

Weekly Summaries

Push weekly summaries of customer feedback to development squad working Slack channels. This creates ambient awareness of general themes and highlights major trends or anomalies that need immediate attention.

Anomaly Detection and Alerting

Set up systems to detect and alert teams to anomalies in customer feedback. This could involve sudden spikes in complaints about a specific feature or unexpected issues that require rapid response.

Product Launches

Use VoC insights to guide product launches. Prove the impact of new features or updates by demonstrating how they address identified pain points. Follow up quickly with customers to close the feedback loop and show that their input directly influenced the changes. Here’s a  Product Launch Readiness Guide to help streamline the launch process and ensure readiness.

Planning and Prioritization

Back your strategic planning and prioritization with insights derived from customer feedback. This ensures that your roadmap is aligned with what your customers truly need. See how we do it at Enterpret!

Ad Hoc Rapid Research

Empower your team to quickly unblock themselves by self-serving information. Whether it's a spontaneous question or reacting to a CEO's observation, having the ability to access and act on customer feedback promptly can accelerate decision-making and problem-solving.

New Teammate Onboarding

Integrate VoC principles into your onboarding process for new teammates. Familiarize them with your feedback channels, pain points, and how customer insights drive your business decisions. This ensures that new team members are aligned with your customer-centric approach from day one.

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Achieving Success with a Voice of Customer Program

Signs your Voice of Customer Program is Working

It'll be pretty apparent if your program is working. The easiest way is metrics, of course :)

But also, keep your eyes on these four areas to see if your program is working. Here are four key indicators: 

1. Positive feedback from customers about closing the loop.
2. Decreasing trends in recurring issues.
3. Speed of execution - how quickly are we solving problems
4. Team alignment

Voice of Customer Advice from the Experts

Michael Nguyen, Figma —Head of Voice of Customer

• Customize to Optimize: Start by diving deep into the intricacies of your existing product development cycle and organizational culture. Grasp how customer insights are currently woven into each stage. This foundational knowledge will empower you to craft a VoC strategy that's not just effective, but tailored to your organization's unique strengths and needs.
• Think Infrastructure, Not Gatekeeper: Design your VoC program as a scalable platform that serves the entire organization, rather than a bottleneck or a function limited to one department. This mindset shift is crucial for avoiding common pitfalls and for enabling cross-functional success.
• Minimize Friction, Maximize Value: The goal is to make engagement with the VoC program as effortless as possible for all roles involved. Whether it's a straightforward feedback capture method for sales or real-time insights delivery to product teams via tools like Asana, aim to add value without adding complexity or extra steps.

Kayla Eliaza, Notion — Head of User Insights

• Identify Feedback Silos: Figure out what feedback silos currently exist and bridge them. Silos often emerge when different departments or teams collect and analyze customer feedback independently, resulting in fragmented insights and a lack of cohesive understanding.
• Set clear goals and expectations: Expectations should be set both internally and externally, for what happens with feedback. There’s a lot to unpack there and it will always be an ongoing conversation as the business, team and customers evolve.
• Identify Core Customer Needs: Understand that someone might be asking for a faster horse or a stronger ox, and building a car solves the problem for both of them. People on the product and research side probably understand this, but it’s important that customer-facing teams also understand it. Understand the underlying problem, not just the user or agent's idea for a solution

Mitch Louie, Ironclad — Customer Success, Strategy and Operations

• ‍Defining what VOC means to the company and the scope of the program: Since the inception of our program and now, the definition of VOC has changed. Your stakeholders are coming from different companies that likely had their own version of VoC. None of them will be the same so it’s important you get everyone together to align on what it will mean at your company. From there you can figure out what will be in scope. 
• ‍Expose Other Groups Early Sometimes you need to get started early with just a few groups, but it’s important to expose other groups to the program you’re building (e.g. Sales, Marketing, etc). The goal of voice of customer is to represent what customers and prospects need. To help facilitate it’s helpful when other teams want to participate which also means you have additional resources you can rely on. 
• ‍Decentralize: Although I wouldn’t consider it a mistake, VOC programs are time consuming and I find myself potentially being a single point of failure. A VoC program might need more than one drive so try and recruit teammates who are willing to get more involved and are passionate about product feedback.
• ‍Executive Sponsorship This is so crucial to ensure the success of the program. We’ve been fortunate to engage with VPs and Execs which has 1) led to features landing on the roadmap and 2) driving accountability top down.

Lyn Li Chi, Apollo — Business and Product Operations

• "Set achievable outcomes or goals. Setting up good feedback loops takes time, be realistic about what you can achieve from the start. Maybe you're not trying to solve every single customer problem off the bat; you're going to focus on what you can achieve, e.g., ticket reduction or reducing lost details.”
• "Get a sense of what exists with data. Garbage in, garbage out. Make sure you have a good understanding of the data, where it's piping into, where the data is coming from, etc. Work with your data and RevOps teams to create a repository of all of the data that exists and figure out what you want to pipe in to begin with."
• "Create a template to set expectations with key stakeholders about what outputs will look like. This will make sure everyone is on the same page about what concretely will come out of this and also get folks on the same page about format, etc."
• "Be nimble and open to feedback. Focus on delivering the MVP to start with and iterate from there, figuring out what data you can add and how to pivot the data to fit what folks want/need to see."

How companies are using Enterpret to build Voice of Customer programs that drive impact

Canva leverages feedback to build products that delight over 170 million users: “Enterpret aligns everyone around the top issues or requests. Together, these elements create a healthy push and pull for Voice of Customer and Closing the Loop.” Jesse Walker, Head of Insights and User Advocacy

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Notion supercharges its product feedback loop with VoC: “Enterpret helps us have a holistic view from our social media coverage, to our support tickets, to every single interaction that we're plugging into it. Beyond just keywords, we can actually understand: what are the broader sentiments? What are our users saying?” Emma Auscher Global Head of Customer Experience

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Figma leverages AI to scale its product feedback loops: “With Enterpret powering Voice of Customer we're democratizing feedback and making it accessible for everyone across product, customer success, marketing, and leadership to provide evidence and add credibility to their strategies and roadmaps.” Michael Nguyen Head of Research Ops and Insights

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Feeld actively listens to feedback during product launches: “Enterpret is one of the most powerful tools in our toolkit. It's very Member-friendly. We've been able to share how other teams can modify and self-serve in Enterpret. It's bridged a gap to getting access to Member feedback, and I see all our teams finding ways to use Enterpret to answer Member-related questions.” Dina Mohammad-Laity, VP of Data

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Boll and Branch transforms feedback into customer loyalty and revenue: “Enterpret has allowed us to stitch together a full picture of the customer, including feedback and reviews from multiple data points. We now can super-serve our loyal customers in a way that we have never been able to before.” Anna Esrov, VP Customer Experiences and Loyalty

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Descript bridges quantitative and qualitative insights to innovate for millions of users: "Enterpret democratizes customer insights by putting calls and conversations from different teams on the same level as user research and making it accessible. Everyone can keep a pulse on customer sentiment. When writing a research report, I can pull in snippets from conversations, Grain sales calls, and Zendesk support tickets. PMs can do the same when gathering feedback for a PRD. ”Mike McNasby, User Research Lead

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The Browser Company reimagines the internet and closes the loop: “At The Browser Company, closing the loop is critical to providing the ideal member experience. Using Enterpret, I can grab the people who requested a feature or fix and then send a bulk message that their feedback has been implemented” Adena Bauer Head of Membership

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Apollo.io grew 9x by mapping customer feedback to revenue: “We saw a significant improvement in self-service pretty soon after rolling out VoC+ RCE initiatives. Having one central VoC/RCE program with the tools set up and the insights flowing in means that all teams had access to the four issues they needed to concentrate on to drop their HIR. Enterpret centralized VoC and saved time on the cross-organization coordination.” - Abishek Viswanathan CPO

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The Voice of Customer Maturity Model

If you’ve started building a Voice of Customer program and want to know where you stack up against the gold standard, we wrote up another post to help you know where you stand read all about the Voice of Customer Maturity here.

Need help setting up your VoC program?

A Voice of Customer program isn't just about collecting feedback—it's about integrating customer insights into your organization. By following this guide, you'll make VoC a dynamic part of your growth strategy.

Success hinges on cross-functional buy-in, continuous engagement with insights, and adaptability. Companies like Canva, Notion, and Figma have shown that a well-structured VoC program can significantly boost customer satisfaction and drive product innovation.

At Enterpret, we help you turn feedback into actionable insights, aligning teams and tackling top pain points. A thriving VoC program transforms your business and exceeds customer expectations.

Ready to elevate your VoC game? Dive in, iterate, and let the feedback loop push you. With the right approach, you'll create exceptional customer experiences and drive real impact.

Get in touch if you’d like some help from us at Enterpret or just want to chat VoC!