Building a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program: A guide for Customer Success Teams

For customer success managers, operationalizing a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is key to driving retention, identifying revenue opportunities, and influencing company-wide improvements. Yet, many companies either overlook VoC or fail to implement it effectively.

This post covers:

• What a VoC program is
• When to run one
• How to use VoC data to shape your CS strategy
• How Avoma helps maximize VoC insights

What is a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program and why do you need it?

Voice of Customer (VoC) is the process of collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback to improve products, services, and overall experience. It helps businesses understand what customers truly need—beyond assumptions or internal perspectives.

Customers don’t churn because of how you run QBRs. They churn when they have a poor product experience, lack essential features, or weren’t the right fit in the first place. While many of these factors are beyond a CS team’s control, you can use VoC data to influence them.

VoC is a proactive approach to capturing customer sentiment—whether about your product, brand, or teams.

A VoC program helps you systematically gather and act on customer feedback, removing guesswork and reducing churn. High-growth companies rely on VoC to build better products, improve sales, and enhance customer experience.

How Do You Gather VoC Data?

VoC data comes from multiple sources:

• Surveys (e.g., NPS)
• Customer calls/meetings
• Live chat interactions
• Social media posts
• Support queries
• CRM insights & community discussions

Capturing and centralizing this data ensures that no critical insights slip through the cracks. It also helps align sales, CS, marketing, and product teams on meeting customer expectations at every stage.

Who owns the VoC program?

VoC data benefits every team by strengthening customer relationships. But like many cross-functional initiatives, it raises a key question: who owns the collection and distribution of this data?

Our research shows that VoC programs work best when customer-facing teams—like Sales and Customer Success—take the lead in gathering feedback. Larger companies often take a different approach. They build cross-functional Customer Experience (CX) teams with members from marketing, CS, and product, dedicated to collecting and analyzing VoC insights.

No matter who collects the data, it must live in a single source of truth—not scattered across tools and dashboards. Centralized data makes distribution easy, but acting on customer feedback is the real challenge. We’ll cover those challenges—and how to solve them—in the next section.

If you're a CSM at a fast-growing startup, you might be wondering: Is a VoC program the right initiative for my team? Let’s explore.

At what stage should you run a VoC program?

There’s no fixed rule—any company can start a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. What matters most is your commitment to understanding customer needs, leadership buy-in, and team bandwidth.

Larger companies have more teams, customer interactions, and data to manage, making a structured VoC program essential. They often use advanced customer feedback tools to collect and analyze feedback. But you don’t need expensive software to run an effective VoC initiative.

In reality, most of businesses already gather customer feedback—through sales, marketing, or support interactions. Even if you don’t have a formal VoC program, you’re likely capturing valuable insights every day. The real challenge isn’t company size or strategy—it’s the willingness to listen, organize feedback, and act on it.

As Ferdinand Goetzen, Co-founder & CEO of Reveall, puts it: Companies that ignore VoC shouldn’t claim to be customer-focused.

A good starting point? Observe how often and through which channels you engage with customers. Then, make it a habit to document those conversations and share key insights across your organization.

Best practices for implementing VoC

A well-run VoC program aims to achieve three major objectives:

• Capture
• Analyze
• Implement

When you achieve these goals and align them, you can drive meaningful changes in your organization—improving your CS strategy and shaping the product roadmap.

1. Capture customer feedback

Gathering customer feedback isn’t just about sending NPS or CSAT surveys every few months. It happens across multiple touchpoints, and to truly understand the customer experience, you need to collect data from all these channels.

Fortunately, you already have tools to capture feedback in real time. Use HubSpot CRM to track customer conversations, Mention or Meltwater to monitor brand mentions on social media, and Retenly for structured NPS or CSAT surveys.

But feedback isn’t just about surveys—it happens in every interaction. That’s why documenting it consistently is crucial. AI-powered note-taking can help automate this process, making your Voice of the Customer (VoC) research more systematic and actionable.

To get specific insights:

• Ask direct, clear questions.
• Schedule customer surveys and roundtables twice a year.
• Gather feedback after key events like onboarding, upgrades, renewals, or churn.

Follow up when needed, but don’t overwhelm customers with too many surveys. Find the right balance—too few, and you miss key insights; too many, and you risk frustrating your users.

And don’t overlook churned customers—their feedback can be just as valuable in improving the experience for those who stay.

2. Analyze the data

Once you’ve gathered VoC feedback, the next challenge is organizing it in a way that makes sense. Keep your tech stack lean—jumping between multiple platforms can slow down decision-making.

For larger organizations, centralizing data is even more critical. Bringing all feedback together ensures that every team—customer success, product, sales, and marketing—can analyze it from their perspective and align on priorities.

A company-wide discussion of VoC insights can help teams make informed decisions. You might also compare your data (NPS, CSAT) with industry benchmarks to see where you stand. But remember, these are just reference points—don’t get lost in generic industry stats at the cost of your customers’ actual needs.

Most importantly, focus on what truly matters. Customers often say what they want, but their real needs might be different. Your job is to distinguish between the two.

3. Implement the feedback

Not every request should go straight to the product team. Engineers and product managers are already managing feature backlogs, bug fixes, and long-term priorities.

Before pushing for changes, ask yourself:

• Is this issue urgent, or can it wait?
• Does it align with the product roadmap and company vision?
• Will it generate meaningful revenue or improve customer retention rate?

Prioritize based on impact and feasibility. Some insights will lead to immediate improvements, while others should be logged for future iterations. A well-structured VoC program helps ensure that customer feedback drives meaningful action—not just a flood of unfiltered requests.

Turning customer feedback into actionable insights

At Avoma, we use a structured product prioritization framework to priortize features that have the biggest impact on customers. But gathering feedback is only the first step—you can't take it at face value. Once collected, feedback must be analyzed, validated with other teams (including leadership), and prioritized based on its potential impact.

As a Customer Success Manager (CSM), you often have to act as an analyst, turning raw data into actionable insights. As our VP of Customer Success, Mark Stagi, puts it:

"Data without actionable insights is just noise. As a CSM, you have to put on your analyst hat and synthesize the data for it to make sense."

One of the biggest challenges in acting on customer feedback is getting buy-in from other teams. CS can gather and present the data, but decisions often lie with other departments. Your role is to inform the customer success strategy and influence teams that may already have their own hypotheses about improving the customer experience. The Voice of the Customer (VoC) data you provide can either validate their decisions or introduce new priorities.

Not all feedback leads to product changes

A common misconception is that every piece of feedback should result in a product update. In reality, the best solution is often outside of product development.

For example:

• If new customers churn quickly without clear reasons, should sales adjust how they position the product?
• If product adoption is slow, should marketing run more webinars to showcase value?
• If customers want faster support resolutions, should the help center be expanded or a better ticketing system be implemented?
• If expansion and renewals are low, is pricing the real issue rather than the product itself?

Successful VoC programs don’t just improve the product—they align with go-to-market strategies to enhance the entire customer experience.

Ferdinand Goetzen, CEO of Reveall, shares an insightful example. At a previous company, his team was working on a major new feature they believed would be a game-changer. But when they consulted the sales team, they learned the biggest blocker to closing deals wasn’t an innovative feature—it was the lack of Single Sign-On (SSO).

For the product team, SSO wasn’t an exciting development, but for customers, it was a dealbreaker. This kind of insight only emerges when you engage with customers and observe their workflows closely.

The takeaway? Customer input is valuable only when viewed holistically. It’s not just about fixing issues—it’s about driving meaningful change across your entire business.

Turning VoC insights into action

One of the biggest challenges with Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs is putting insights into practice. To drive real impact, you need to analyze findings through a business strategy lens—not just collect feedback.

Get leadership buy-in early

VoC programs work best when leadership is involved from the start. Before collecting data, communicate with executives about what insights you’ll gather and how they will be used. For example, you might track why sales teams win or lose deals or identify gaps in the onboarding process that impact customer experience.

Use data to drive change

Once you complete VoC research, use the findings to drive improvements across teams and strengthen product-market fit. Some solutions may be quick fixes that don’t require product changes, while others could shape long-term strategy. As recommendations are implemented, track their impact—whether by monitoring NPS scores through in-app surveys or analyzing support tickets to identify persistent issues.

VoC data can also highlight positives. If customers consistently praise a specific feature, compare their direct feedback with product adoption metrics in tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel. If usage data confirms strong adoption, it reinforces that VoC insights are aligned with real user behavior.

Measure the right outcomes

While granular insights matter, VoC ultimately impacts high-level retention metrics like Churn, Net Retention Rate (NRR), and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). However, these numbers take time—often quarters or even a year—to reflect change. While VoC alone won’t directly drive revenue growth, it provides distilled insights that fuel strategic improvements.

Prove small wins to gain long-term support

To keep leadership invested in VoC, showcase quick wins—like improvements in retention or customer satisfaction. Demonstrating early success increases executive buy-in, making it easier to secure resources for regular VoC research (e.g., every six months). Over time, VoC insights can inspire internal workshops and strategic initiatives that drive company-wide improvements.

How we use Avoma to implement VoC strategies

At Avoma, we don’t have a formal Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiative—but we don’t need one. Our product already helps us capture the most valuable customer insights in a searchable, shareable format.

Unlike other VoC tools that focus on just one stage of the process, Avoma covers the entire lifecycle: capturing, analyzing, and acting on feedback. And we’re not the only ones using it this way. Many of our customers—especially CS and product teams—run effective VoC programs using Avoma’s features.

How Avoma Helps Capture Customer Feedback

Avoma automatically records, transcribes, and organizes insights from every customer call and meeting. It integrates with Google and Outlook calendars, joining meetings by default unless you change your settings.

Beyond AI note-taking, you can create playlists for common feedback themes—like feature requests, pain points, or positive and negative comments. These playlists can be shared across the company, allowing teams to subscribe and stay updated.

How Avoma Helps Analyze and Share Insights

Avoma’s CRM integration ensures that customer conversations are logged automatically. You can analyze feedback directly in your CRM or set up Slack alerts to flag key topics. For example, you might get notified when a meeting includes churn-related keywords like “leadership change” or “champion left”.

No CEO or CS leader has time to sift through hours of calls or pages of transcripts. That’s why Avoma provides AI-powered one-page summaries, highlighting key insights under relevant topics.

You can also create snippets—short clips of recordings—to share with teammates, tag colleagues, and add contextual comments.

Turning VoC Data into Action

With Avoma, your conversations become a single source of truth for feedback from customers. You can track churn risks, monitor sales and CS interactions, and even score team performance to improve coaching.

Your team talks to customers every day—but are you acting on those insights? If not, now is the time to start.

Sign up for Avoma or schedule a demo with the product specialist and turn your customer feedback into real impact. You might be surprised by what you’ve been missing!

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