As a business owner, you need to know how your current customers feel about your company. How often do they purchase your products? How loyal are they to your brand? What influences their decisions? By conducting a voice of customer (VOC) survey, you can collect customer insights to improve your company’s products, services, and customer satisfaction.
Read on to learn more about voice of customer surveys, and how to make your own voice of customer questionnaire.
What is a voice of customer survey?
A voice of customer survey is a type of survey methodology. The goal is to collect information about how your customers perceive your brand and products, their decision-making processes, what they need, and how your company is meeting those needs.
VOC surveys can gather both qualitative and quantitative feedback from your customers. Quantitative questions might ask customers to rate their experience or your products on a scale of one to five (also known as a Likert scale), or to determine whether your company met all of their needs during a customer service ticket.
Qualitative feedback can go more in depth. Asking open-ended questions enables organizations to collect detailed information from consumers—and might even bring up issues of which you were unaware. Using Voiceform’s multimedia survey response tools, such as voice responses, can encourage consumers to offer more detailed and candid feedback than you’d get from a Likert scale alone.
How to use a VOC survey
Your VOC survey allows you to identify pain points throughout the customer’s overall experience—but it also lets you know what you’re doing right. These surveys can be used as part of a post-purchase bid for feedback, or for longer, in-depth qualitative surveys. How you use your VOC survey depends on your company’s specific needs, such as budget, desired participant pool, detail required, and other considerations.
For example, a company might ask customers to fill out a quick customer satisfaction survey right after they’ve completed a purchase or resolved a support ticket. These VOC surveys often consist of close-ended questions, such as rating an experience on a scale of one to five. This information can provide a quantitative overview of common pain points.
The upside to close-ended, short VOC surveys is that customers are more likely to respond, if it only takes a few clicks. Furthermore, you can invite qualitative feedback by adding a catch-all “is there anything else you’d like to share?” text form at the end.
Sometimes, however, you need more in-depth feedback from longer surveys. This is the perfect opportunity to capture qualitative feedback with Voiceform’s text or voice-based survey response tools. Because this requires significantly more time and effort on the respondent’s part, consider incentivizing their responses with discounts, swag, giveaway entries, or other tools that will encourage them to give more in-depth responses.
Qualitative VOC surveys typically ask open-ended questions like “Describe how you use our product,” or “What features would you like to see us add?” Some people may not feel comfortable communicating their thoughts in writing—but using voice feedback can encourage them to give more detail. Better yet, you’ll be able to collect non-verbal impressions, such as their expressions, body language, and tone of voice.
Voice of customer questionnaire tips and tricks
Before you start creating a VOC survey, keep these tips and tricks in mind:
- Survey goal: First, identify your survey goals. Do you want to identify issues in the customer service experience? Find out which new features to add to your products? Better understand your target audience? Once you know your goal, you can work backwards to form your questions.
- Survey audience: Next, decide who you’d like to respond. This might be longtime, loyal customers, people who are brand-new to your products, or people who recently used the customer support platform. Depending on your survey goals, an audience can be as broad or narrow as you need.
- Feedback type: Do you want easy-to-analyze, easy-to-collect quantitative feedback, or in-depth qualitative feedback, or a mixture of both?
- Simplicity: Keep your questions simple and easy to understand—customers are more likely to read and respond appropriately.
- Answering options: Consider whether you should use multiple choice, checkboxes, or open-ended text or voice response options.
- Following up: Finally, consider whether your survey will require follow-up, whether you’re emailing respondents a discount code or contacting them to resolve any issues they cited.
Best voice of the customer questions
These voice of the customer questions will help you create your own VOC questionnaires.
Quantitative questions
These questions are great for gathering quick, quantitative feedback during the customer journey:
- Did customer service resolve your issue?
- Did you find the products you were looking for today?
- On a scale of one to five, how likely are you to shop with us again?
- On a scale of one to five, how likely are you to recommend us to others?
- How satisfied are you with our products/service?
- How satisfied are you with the time it took to resolve your issue?
- Which products are you most/least likely to purchase again?
- How likely are you to switch to another brand?
Qualitative questions
These questions require a little more effort to answer, but can provide great insight:
- When you think about our company/product/service, what comes to mind?
- How would you describe our company/product/service?
- What kind of features would you like to see us add?
- Why did you choose to shop with us?
- What would encourage you to shop with us again?
- How would you describe your experience to others?
- What else do we need to know?
Create powerful VOC surveys with Voiceform
When you’re ready to collect customer insights using a voice of customer survey, Voiceform’s survey platform offers feature-rich data collection and analysis. Whether you choose multiple choice, text-, voice-based responses, our automated transcription and analysis tools will help you discover real-time insights. Get more out of your surveys—learn more about our product or schedule a demo today!
