What Happens When the Voice of the Customer is Wrong?

If you do anything with data in 2023, double-triple-quadruple-check that your voice of the customer program is backed by data, not intuition. ??

Why this matters:

It matters because the voice of the customer is only as reliable as the data that informs it. Uninformed decision-making can lead to inaccurate customer feedback and product decisions that don't reflect what your customers want. It can also send your brand down a long path of headaches, missteps, and lost revenue.

What does the Voice of the Customer even mean?

The voice of the customer (VoC) is the collective narrative of how your customers feel about your brand.

It’s what they say publicly about your product, service, executives, employees, and everything you do in the market. It’s the emotions they feel when they pass by your product in the mall or while scrolling through their newsfeeds.

VoC insights come through analyzing data–primary research, web analytics, text and speech analytics, and CRM.

You can also look at this through a different lens.

Instead of analyzing your existing customers, look at potential customers. Instead of analyzing your brand, look at the larger category. This can uncover market white space.

Let’s look at a real example.

I spent the last two weeks in Italy. My daughter Milan Brito is a senior at UCSB, and she’s studying abroad in Florence this quarter.

We had amazing food–gelato every night, pasta, pesto, bread, pizza, cappuccinos, and wine. I wanted to eat pizza every night but rarely get my way. I love pizza ... but, whatever.

The experience did get me thinking. Does everyone love pizza as much as I do? My gut tells me yes. But what about pizza do they love? I wanted to see how the different generations, namely Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X (proud Gen Xer here), feel about pizza. ?

Voice of the Customer Analysis

I used Infegy's new narrative tool to analyze contextually what each generation was saying about pizza. Here are a few interesting insights.

Gen Z likes to eat cold pizza while gaming (Overwatch, specifically) and drinking various substances like wine, beer, coke, and more. It depends on their mood, I guess. They eat pizza at the beach and crave leftovers all the time. They like eating Domino’s, and their pizza palate ranges from pepperoni and pineapple to vegan.

The millennial pizza experience is different. They tend to eat pizza centered around family events and activities–date and movie nights, watching episodes of their favorite series on Netflix and Hulu, and family gatherings with mom and dad at the park. They also like various types of pizza–frozen, mushrooms (yuck!), and Hawaiian style. And there’s a conversation among them about pizza etiquette–should you eat pizza with your hands or utensils? I prefer my hands, but in Italy, I used a fork. They like Papa Johns and Pizza Hut.

Gen X is all about convenience. They want their pizza delivered. They also love peppers, onions, and olives. And at times, they feel confident and make their own pizzas using traditional Italian recipes. However, pizza is their guilty pleasure. They express a lot of regret after eating pizza and often talk about different ways they plan to burn off all the calories. I can relate.

There are some advantages and disadvantages when combining each generation into one analysis. The advantages are that you can find commonalities that span across each group. The disadvantages are that the insights are a little harder to come by without filtering the data. Take a look below and you'll see what I mean.

So, going back to the question at hand: What happens when the voice of the customer is wrong?

There are two camps that have very different points of view when asked this question. The larger camp is of the mindset that the customer is always right. The smaller camp says no, they are not always right. I take the easy way out and say it depends.

Let’s dissect this for a second.

In the above analysis, we are looking at the conversation around pizza. If I'm a pizza retailer, these are my customers and potential customers talking about a product I sell. Pizza.

Remember, we’re observing their behavior. Their conversations. We want to understand the context. They are not wrong for feeling a certain way about their pizza preferences. Well, except for the mushroom part.

The questions you need to think through are the following:

• Who is your priority audience?
• Are there any hidden narratives, topics, or themes you can align with your marketing messages?
• Are there any insights you can use to adjust your product/service (ingredients, in-store experience, delivery, payments, etc.?)

Remember, this is white space. On the flip side, you can do the same analysis but only include mentions of your brand. The data will tell a very different story, though. Embrace all the feedback, good or bad. Taking action on customer feedback builds brand loyalty. It's a fact.

In either case, these are both valid data points you can use to understand the true voice of the customer.

Insights & Actionable Takeaways

Data is always more insightful when comparing audiences. In this case, we looked at three distinct generational audiences and compared their conversations about pizza. There are other ways to do this. You can compare Gen Z audiences in different regions, channels, and affinities. For example, it would be interesting to see how Gen Z talks about pizza on Twitter compared to Instagram and TikTok. These types of insights can inform a content and channel strategy.

Words tell a story. The language in the text analysis represents verbatim keywords and phrases clustered together based on social media mentions of the audience. In any healthy relationship, both parties need to relate to one another and use the same language. They need to be on the same page. It's no different with the brand and its customers. The more you know about your customers, the more you can create content that aligns with their interests based on the keywords they've used in the past. This also helps with visiblity in Google. Who knew that you'd get relationship advice in this newsletter.

Not all Gen Zers are the same. This is true for all generations. Just because you read a report about a certain age group doesn’t mean it holds true for everyone. It’s a best practice to segment your audience into sub-groups. I call this audience segmentation. This approach can unlock deeper insights. See the below Gen Z analysis. The audience segments are clustered based on common affinities of Gen Z.

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