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.
Customer Problem Statement Template
Works best for:
Ideation, Design Thinking, Product Management
Put yourself in the shoes of your consumers with a customer problem statement. Figure out their problems and how your product or service can solve those problems and make their lives easier. As a bonus, you’ll better understand your customers throughout the process.
Business Model Canvas Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Agile Methodology, Strategic Planning
Your business model: Nothing is more fundamental to who you are, what you create and sell, or ultimately whether or not you succeed. Using nine key building blocks (representing nine core business elements), a BMC gives you a highly usable strategic tool to develop and display your business model. What makes this template great for your team? It’s quick and easy to use, it keeps your value proposition front and center, and it creates a space to inspire ideation.
Timeline Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Flowcharts, Project Planning
A timeline displays a chronological order of important dates, and scheduled events. Timelines help product managers, project managers, and team members tell visual stories about progress and obstacles. Timelines enable teams to see at a glance what happened before, what progress is happening now, and what needs tackling in the future. Projects or products with specific purpose or deliverables should be based on a timeline to be successful. Use the timeline as a shared reference for start dates, end dates, and milestones.
Status Report Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Documentation, Strategic Planning
A status report provides a snapshot of how something is going at a given time. You can provide a status report for a project, a team, or a situation, as long as it emphasizes and maps out a project’s chain of events. If you’re a project manager, you can use this report to keep historical records of project timelines. Ideally, any project stakeholder should be able to look at a status report and answer the question, “Where are we, and how did we get here?” Use this template as a starting point to summarize how something is progressing against a projected plan or outcome.
Technology Product Canvas Template
Works best for:
Product Management, Meetings
Originally created by Prem Sundaram, the Technology Product Canvas allows product and engineering teams to achieve alignment about their shared roadmap. The canvas combines agile methodologies with UX principles to help validate product solutions. Each team states and visualizes both product and technology goals, then discusses each stage of the roadmap explicitly. This exercise ensures the teams are in sync and everyone leaves with clear expectations and direction. By going through the process of creating a Technology Product Canvas, you can start managing alignment between the teams -- in under an hour.
UX Research Plan Template
Works best for:
Market Research, Desk Research, User Experience
A research plan communicates the fundamental information that stakeholders need to understand about a user experience research project: who, what, why, and when. The plan ensures everyone is aligned and knows what they must do to make the UX research project a success. Use the research plan to communicate background information about your project; objectives; research methods; the scope of the project, and profiles of the participants. By using a UX research plan, you can achieve stakeholder buy-in, stay on track, and set yourself up for success.