How to Build a Solid and Actionable VOC Program

A good Voice of the Customer (VOC) program doesn’t begin with a survey. It starts much earlier. Before asking your clients anything, you need to ensure you clearly understand who they are, what they actually experience, and how your internal teams perceive that experience.

Most organizations have the best intentions but start the process too late. They launch a questionnaire, wait for answers, and then wonder what to do with the data. The result? Data is collected, but rarely leveraged. To avoid this pitfall, a VOC program must be built on a shared strategic foundation.

Align perceptions before measuring

The first step in a VOC program is conducting internal strategic preparation through co-creation workshops. You start by defining a clear and nuanced persona—the typical customer, in all their complexity. Then you map their current journey as it is and compare it to the ideal journey you want to deliver. These two views allow for open discussion with your teams: what works, what doesn’t, and what needs improvement. (See: Persona, Customer Journey).

This work should include not only customer-facing staff, but also those who influence the experience behind the scenes (e.g., marketing, logistics, sales). Add an empathy map to project what the customer thinks, feels, hears, sees, fears, and hopes at each stage.

This collective exercise often reveals two things: areas of consensus (where teams share the same understanding of the experience) and significant gaps between departments, between levels of seniority, or between internal perception and customer reality.
This foundational work is critical. It allows you to form structured hypotheses to test with customers and helps clarify the strategic intent of your VOC program. Without it, your data won’t lead to meaningful insights.

The VOC survey: a validation tool, not a discovery exercise

Once your hypotheses are well defined, you can build a structured perception survey. The idea is to validate what you think you know about your customers. The VOC survey takes the form of a 360° questionnaire—around 26 questions—covering the full customer experience, from initial discovery through to after-sales support.

The goal isn’t to obtain a general satisfaction score, but rather to identify 1 or 2 critical weak points—stages in the journey where the experience breaks down, expectations aren’t met, or perceived value drops. These points become your VOC KPIs.

This is where discipline comes in: you’ll measure those 1 or 2 pain points every 3 months, using the exact same questions, with the same audience, under similar conditions. This regular cadence allows you to track progress over time, observe the impact of your adjustments, and embed a culture of experience-driven management.
Important note: you don’t track strengths. It’s not your strengths that drive improvement—it’s your organizational friction points that deserve attention.

A full benchmark every two years to assess global impact

Every 24 months, you run the full 26-question survey again. This broad check-in serves as an organizational impact benchmark. It allows you to:

• See if your weak points have become strengths
• Detect new friction points
• Reassess the alignment between your brand promise and actual experience
• Most importantly: measure the true impact of your strategy on customer satisfaction, team engagement, and business performance

This dual-speed approach (quarterly KPI follow-up + biannual global assessment) helps maintain balance between short-term action and long-term vision. You avoid knee-jerk reactions and foster a sustainable culture of customer experience.

Conclusion: Measuring is good. Understanding is better.

A well-designed VOC program is much more than a measurement tool. It’s a strategic lever to align your teams, operationalize your values, and transform your organizational culture around customer experience.

But for it to work, you must first listen to your internal teams. It’s with them that you’ll shape the right questions. Their insights will inform your hypotheses. And by involving them in the process, you’ll ensure real follow-through.

Yes—listen to your customers. But start by listening to the people who interact with them every day. That’s where change truly begins.