Voice of the Customer (VoC) Techniques

Voice of the Customer (VoC) techniques play a vital role within the front-end of an organisation’s innovation process as they help bridge the gap between what customers need and what can be delivered at a competitive price. However, with a number of different techniques available, many organisations are faced with the challenge of knowing which one to implement. This post shares a snap shot of how five best practice VoC techniques can be used, so individuals can improve their level of understanding and weight up which will deliver the most value to their organisation.

Which VoC techniques should you use?

Customer Interviews should be conducted to not only gain insights into existing products/services, but to help form the content of New Product Development briefs. You should talk to as many customers as possible, as often as possible, and about whatever is relevant to the future performance of the business. Don’t ever assume you know what consumer thinks or that they think in the same way you do. How you carry out the interviews will impact your findings so carefully plan where they will be conducted, who will be there and how the insights will be recorded.

Crowdsourcing is at the intersection of Open Innovation and Social Media, and can be seen as complicated, unpredictable and, at times, a bit of a gamble. Whether you are a B2B or a B2C organisation, when embracing crowdsourcing you need to be prepared for a steep learning curve. However, as well as creating wider and deeper customer relationships, Crowdsourcing is a great method to improve internal engagement through launching employee ideation campaigns.

Lead Users, a term developed by Eric von Hippel, are like the crystal ball within innovation as they tend to experience the future needs of a certain consumer months or even years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them. For this reason, Lead Users tend to be at the cutting edge of product launches. By conducting Lead User analysis both during product development and post product launch, a full consumer plan can be generated and used to structure future developments.

Outcome Driven Innovation offers a more pragmatic VoC technique for uncovering the unarticulated unmet needs, and identifying which of these needs are most important to the customer. By observing and analysing the job that a consumer needs to get done, underserved needs are uncovered and potential opportunities revealed. This provides factual evidence to those who need to fully understand the problems in order to solve them.


Focus Groups are interactive group sessions where participants can freely share their perceptions and experiences towards any given product or service. It is vital to gain a rich understanding of key customers before running focus groups, which can be achieved through prioritising key touch points through pre-interviews. This technique can highlight dissatisfaction drivers as well as customer preferences which can help shape the direction and focus of future innovations.

Each of these techniques works best when they are adapted to meet an organisation’s individual business needs. However, achieving good insights via VoC are worthless unless the technique used is managed effectively. Therefore, make sure you define the reasons why you want to engage in VoC techniques and choose the right platform for your needs, and for your culture.