Who Owns Voice of the Customer (VOC)?

The answer to the question of who “owns” the voice of the customer (VOC) isn’t as simple as this person or that team.

To get the most value from customer feedback, VOC should be integrated and leveraged across your organization to improve customer experience. But that can be hard without the proper structures and technologies and if your research team is overwhelmed and under-resourced.

In today’s data-driven landscape, Generative AI (Gen AI) can help clear the murky waters of customer feedback. The technology speeds up complex analysis and breaks down access barriers, meaning insights can be harnessed strategically for product innovation, business growth, and decision-making.

In a recent webinar hosted by Thematic, Xperiente’s Managing Partner Musa Hanhan and Thematic’s VP Customer Operations Nick Stroud discussed the ongoing challenge of who truly owns the customer’s voice to leverage customer insights effectively.

In this summary, we cover the key topics discussed, including:

• Defining customer experience (CX) and VOC
• Best practices for effective insights governance
• The role of AI-powered analytics in modern businesses
• Thematic’s approach to customer insights using GenAI

To watch the full webinar, visit our YouTube channel.

Defining Voice of the Customer (VOC)

Ask Google, “What is voice of the customer?” and you’ll quickly discover that VOC and CX often get lumped together. But, as Musa explains, there are critical differences between the two concepts.

“Customer experience is a broad discipline – it’s a way of doing business,” he says. “Voice of the customer is a component of your overarching CX strategy and is a way to connect customer insights to business outcomes.”

Let’s break the definitions of CX and VOC down further:

• Customer experience encompasses all the different ways your customers interact with you and how those experiences impact their perception of your organization. Various factors influence these interactions, such as product quality, customer service, price, and brand reputation.
• Voice of the customer is collecting and analyzing customer feedback from multiple sources to learn about your customers’ preferences – and how you can improve your products and services.

Ownership and Accountability in VOC

It starts with leadership

Traditionally, VOC ownership and accountability have sat within CX teams. The challenge with this approach is that it buries all the valuable customer data that already exists within your organization, and teams start wasting time, resources, and customer time gathering the same feedback.

Nick says the organizations that do CX really, really well are the ones that take a top-down, organization-wide approach. This shift towards making VOC an intrinsic part of an organization’s culture highlights that it isn’t just a function or set of activities.

When used strategically, feedback insights can impact various aspects of the wider business. It’s why more and more organizations are forming cross-functional teams to collaboratively leverage VOC and enhance service delivery, product evolution, and customer interactions.

Connecting VOC to organizational goals

For this unified approach to work, VOC programs rely on executives who prioritize customer insights and align them with organizational goals, making them more responsive and adaptable to customer needs.

This alignment ensures your organization uses customer data ethically and effectively, and insights directly support business objectives like improving customer satisfaction, reducing churn, or informing product development.

“Like everything in business, there’s a cost involved. To stay accountable to your stakeholders, you need to be able to explain what you’re doing with feedback insights,” Nick explains.

This is when data and insights governance must work together.

“You need accurate, maintained, and secure data (data governance) and guidance around how insights are generated from that data and drive business outcomes (insights governance),” Musa says.

“When the metrics are good, nobody argues or complains. When the metrics are poor, people will argue with the methodology, how it’s conducted, and who did it,” Nick adds.

“If that governance structure is in place first, regardless of the metrics you use, people will stand by them, trust them, use them.”

Make insights "consumable" with Generative AI

So, how can your organization shift VOC ownership from CX teams to broader organizational accountability and make the insights “consumable” so internal teams can use the information to inform decision-making?

Artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly speed things up.

VOC is an essential tool for connecting your organization’s different functions. However, one of the hurdles to leveraging VOC effectively is data silos. Utilizing AI-powered, shared analytics platforms can help team members access and interact with data, promoting a unified approach to customer insights.

“You want everybody in one place where they can share, collaborate, and look at the insights from varying perspectives,” Musa says.

Transforming VOC Data Management with Thematic

Traditional ways of handling customer data and insights have often fallen into siloed traps, where data remains isolated within specific departments. How do you combine and align those disparate groups in one shared vision when they usually work independently? Nick says the answer is Thematic – and while he might be a little biased, he’s not wrong.

How Thematic’s Generative AI works

Firstly, Thematic centralizes and organizes feedback data from different channels – think surveys, reviews, social media comments, and customer support interactions.

Then, by deploying natural language processing (NLP), the thematic analysis software analyzes your datasets quickly and accurately for patterns and sentiments. This makes it easier for teams to extract the actionable insights they need to drive the business outcomes they’re working towards.

As well as powerful analysis tools and shareable dashboards, Thematic has multiple features that leverage Gen AI to get true value from your feedback:

• Answers – simply ask questions like “What drove down customer satisfaction this month?” and receive a rich summary with visuals using trusted data.

• Summarization – get a bird’ s-eye view of customer feedback with helpful, accurate summaries. You can filter by date, customer segment and feedback category.

The Benefits of Enhancing Customer Insights with Thematic Analysis Software

Thematic themes and categorizes customer feedback by type and sentiment, which your research team can validate for accuracy. That data is what Thematic’s Gen AI features use, meaning you’re always getting accurate and consistent answers.

Using Thematic’s Gen AI features significantly enhances the quality and depth of customer insights. The key benefits include:

• Scalability. Thematic’s Gen AI can handle exponentially more data than human teams, so you can scale your data analysis efforts without increasing human resources.
• Real-time analysis. With Thematic’s Gen AI, you can analyze customer feedback in real time. This means you can take immediate action on emerging issues or opportunities.
• Accuracy and depth. Thematic’s Gen AI reduces human error and provides deeper insights through advanced analytics techniques, uncovering hidden correlations that inform strategic decisions.

Breaking Down Data Silos with Thematic’s Generative AI

All the chatter around the ownership and accountability of VOC underscores its undeniable value in strategic decision-making and business innovation. The conversation also highlights the repercussions of siloed departments and their effect on customer experience and business growth. Generative AI tools like Thematic have tremendous potential to change how organizations approach VOC strategies by breaking down those silos and aggregating and analyzing customer feedback from disparate sources in real-time.

Remove data silos and empower your organization with actionable customer insights. Chat with our team today, or watch our demo video to see Thematic in action.