Voice of the Customer Template
Create standards to understand and improve your customer experience.
About the Voice of Customer Template
A voice of the customer (also known as a “voice of the customer translation matrix”) helps you learn more about what your customers think about and feel for your products, services, or business.
A voice of customer research initiative can help shape your buyer personas and customer journey map.
Customer research can help you go beyond number-based measures like profits or traffic and probe your ideal buyer’s desires and feelings. Did you meet their expectations? Will they become a repeat buyer? What can you improve on for the next time they interact with your business?
For teams new to voice of the customer, it’s worth thinking long-term. Customer-centric company culture is an iterative commitment that happens over many years, where practices are refined, data analysis becomes more complex, and taking action is an organization-wide situation.
What is a Voice of the Customer
Voice of the Customer (VoC) describes the feedback customers give businesses about their experience and expectations with your product or service. As a customer-centric framework, it helps you figure out who your customers are, their needs, expectations, understandings, and how you can improve your products and services for them.
When businesses hone in on their customers’ needs and preferences, they can deliver targeted (and successful) experiences every time.
Also known as a customer translation matrix, a voice of the customer framework will typically reveal ...
Verbatim or customer comments: what are customers saying, in their own language?
Customer needs or issues: what do customers say they need?
Customer requirements: what do customers need to fulfill their requests successfully?
When businesses and brands become familiar with their customers’ needs, it becomes easier to navigate the complexity of brand perception, marketing interactions, managing negative feedback, and product development. The customer feedback collected in each framework can help deliver successful personalized experiences repeatedly.
When to use the Voice of the Customer Template
A Voice of the Customer framework can be useful for UX researchers who need to ...
Quantify customer feedback: You can rate the insights by importance or how likely it is to best serve the end-user.
Verify customer feedback: You can rate the insights by importance or how likely it is to best serve the end-user.
Launch new strategies: You can use insights to inform new product designs or price-setting strategies.
Keep up with industry or behavioral trends: Weighing up how to offer customers meaningful connections and maintain profitability can help you make sure your product or service offering matches up against competitors.
Voice of the Customer can also help UX researchers rally leadership and teammates around:
Understanding customer needs
Making customer-aligned business decisions
Finding market-fit and timing product launches accordingly
Improving brand reputation
Increasing customer retention over time
Finding new ways to transform negative feedback or customer experience into positives
You can also translate the customer insights found in your Voice of Customer to a tree diagram, such as an Opportunity Solution Tree to give the data more context.
Create your own Voice of the Customer framework
Conducting your own Voice of the Customer research is made easier using Miro’s virtual collaboration platform. It is the perfect canvas to create and share your VoC framework. Get started by selecting the Voice of the Customer Template, then take the following steps.
Collect your customer feedback from relevant primary resources. Revisit customer surveys, product reviews, or website analytics to pinpoint how your customers talk about your products and services in their own words. You can also import survey results directly onto a digital board in Miro using forms and survey integrations.
Add your customer feedback to the Voice of Customer grid. Add one insight or piece of feedback per sticky note. “Verbatim” and “Need” can be expressed in one sentence. Turn requirements into one-word insights. Want to develop this into a workshop session for your team? You can type “http://workshop.new/” into the URL section of your Miro browser to set-up a collaborative board.
Analyze your customer feedback as data. As a team, figure out if you can connect the insights to customer profiles such as buyer personas. See if you can also identify patterns or trends in language and sentiment.
Decide on next steps and actions with your team. How can you tweak and optimize your products and services to be more customer-centric? Is there anything that needs to be rebuilt completely? Adjust your product roadmap and any project management plans accordingly. You can link to related Miro Boards in this template for easier access and schedule a follow-up workshop session to discuss progress or obstacles as a team.
What is meant by Voice of the Customer?
The Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a customer-centric framework that helps you figure out who your customers are, their needs, expectations, understandings, and how you can improve your products and services for them. The Voice of the Customer describes the feedback customers give businesses about their experience and expectations with your product or service.
Why is the Voice of the Customer important?
The Voice of the Customer VOC helps businesses better understand what their customers think and feel about their product or services. Having this crucial information allows businesses to hone in on customers’ needs and preferences so that adjustments can be made to product offerings or services. This will increase the chances for success and longevity.
Get started with this template right now.
SIPOC Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Strategic Planning, Mapping
A SIPOC diagram maps a process at a high level by identifying the potential gaps between suppliers and input specifications and between customers and output specifications. SIPOC identifies feedback and feed-forward loops between customers, suppliers, and the processes and jump-starts the team to think in terms of cause and effect.
Prune the Product Tree Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Product Management
Prune the Product Tree (also known as the product tree game or the product tree prioritization framework) is a visual tool that helps product managers organize and prioritize product feature requests. The tree represents a product roadmap and helps your team think about how to grow and shape your product or service by gamifying feedback-gathering from customers and stakeholders. A typical product tree has four symbolic features: the trunk, which represents the existing product features your team is building; the branches, each of which represents a product or system function; roots, which are technical requirements or infrastructure; and leaves, which are new ideas for product features.
Screen Flow Template
Works best for:
UX Design, Product Management, Wireframes
A screen flow (or wireflow) brings together a multi-screen layout that combines wireframes with flowcharts. The result is an end-to-end flow that maps out what users see on each screen and how it impacts their decision-making process through your product or service. By thinking visually about what your customers are looking at, you can communicate with internal teams, stakeholders, and clients about the decisions you’ve made. You can also use a screen flow to find new opportunities to make the user experience frictionless and free of frustration from start to end.
SMART Goals Template
Works best for:
Prioritization, Strategic Planning, Project Management
Setting goals can be encouraging, but can also be overwhelming. It can be hard to conceptualize every step you need to take to achieve a goal, which makes it easy to set goals that are too broad or too much of a stretch. SMART is a framework that allows you to establish goals in a way that sets you up for success. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. If you keep these attributes in mind whenever you set goals, then you’ll ensure your objectives are clear and reachable. Your team can use the SMART model anytime you want to set goals. You can also use SMART whenever you want to reevaluate and refine those goals.
Project Canvas Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Documentation, Project Planning
A project canvas is a management tool that helps you summarize, visualize, and share all necessary information about your project. It can be used by all team members—from facilitators to project management professionals—at every stage of project development. The project canvas template allows you to keep all stakeholders in the project development process in the loop. By using a single platform for all project-related discussions, you can build a clear project overview and improve collaboration.
Wardley Mapping Canvas Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Strategic Planning, Mapping
A Wardley Map represents the landscape in which a business operates. It's made up of a value chain (the activities required to fulfill user needs) graphed against the evolution of individual activities over time. You place components with value on the y-axis and commodity on the x-axis. Use a Wardley Map to understand shared assumptions about your environment and discover what strategic options are available. Easily communicate your understanding of the landscape to your team, new hires, and stakeholders.