Why Our Voice of the Customer is Better Than Yours
Summary
- The powerful relationship between support and user research
- Dovetail’s definition of the voice of the customer
- The process of gathering high volume feedback to generate succinct insights
- The impact of the voice of the customer at Dovetail
- How different teams can use the voice of the customer
Key Insights
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Bridging support and product feedback creates a more holistic voice of the customer.
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Using the company’s own research platform (Dovetail) increased engagement and streamlined feedback storage.
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Defining a company-specific voice of the customer is crucial for relevance and shared understanding.
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Multiple feedback channels—Slack, emails, in-app buttons, NPS—must be unified for comprehensive insight.
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Monthly and quarterly VoC stories help summarize themes and influence decision-making broadly.
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Making VoC reports fun and visually engaging encourages team involvement and empathy.
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Involving non-customer-facing roles like engineers improves product alignment with real user needs.
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A flexible and evolving VoC process is necessary in fast-moving startup environments.
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Cross-functional collaboration fosters ownership and drives actionable responses to customer feedback.
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Starting conversations about VoC ownership helps kickstart and sustain the process within teams.
Notable Quotes
"I thought it was really important to start closing the gap by collating monthly themes and sharing them with the wider team."
"We realized that everyone kind of has a different definition of the voice of customer and that we needed to define our own to make it relevant for us."
"Our monthly voice of the customer reports we call Stories in Dovetail; we share them with the team every month."
"Making our voice of the customer stories really fun and engaging is important because sometimes feedback is frustrating, and this helps keep it relatable."
"The ultimate goal is that feedback leads to actual actions, whether quick wins or longer strategic roadmap changes."
"It’s not all sunshine and rainbows; being new and working in a fast-moving startup means our process needs to stay flexible and adaptable."
"We want this process to be collaborative and cross-functional, involving engineering, design, sales, marketing, and customer success."
"If you have a sense of ownership in the work, you naturally feel more engaged with the outcome and output."
"We believe the responsibility for the voice of the customer should be shared by everyone on the team."
"We don’t just want to make customers satisfied, but provide an amazing experience and get those around us excited about what we’re doing."
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