It is up to marketing
VoC tends to be the responsibility of a marketing team. Marketers are often hesitant for fear of customers regarding advertisements as misleading, or their having bad experiences with the product (in stark contrast to successful case studies on the web), as a result of which their disappointment will escalate into complaints.
Marketers tend to start with research and create an aggregated quantitative customer feedback survey. However, a better option might be focus groups with customers because these provide qualitative insights which quantitative studies cannot.
Focus groups
In group discussions you have real customers with real voices. However, it is usually possible to focus on only a small number of topics which, as a rule, will be connected to product design, branding or customer service expectations. So even this voice is not really the full Voice of the Customer. Obtaining an overall picture would require a large number of focus group meetings to be held. Can we realise such an enormous number of conversations with customers?
In fact, we can via social media. But there the voices are often those of angry customers, disgruntled former or current employees and a few eccentric individuals.
Customer voice chamber choir
There is usually no such thing as an average or typical customer. That is not how things work. The VoC song is sung by a choir, not a solo performer. For this reason you need to pay attention to all those different parts. The VoC comes through multiple speakers and media. It is not always obvious but you still need to be alert and spot all patterns. All customer comments are valuable, according to an article on the business2community.com website.
-jk-
