What is voice of customer research for a small B2B team?

Do you need a formal survey to do voice of customer research?

No. A survey is one way to collect customer words, and a small B2B team usually has more of them in call recordings and support threads than a survey would return.

The pages that rank for this term, from Qualtrics, Medallia, and SurveyMonkey, describe enterprise programs with research staff and survey licenses. A five-person team needs a habit it can keep, and enterprise software is not required for that.

Copywriter Joanna Wiebe made a similar point in a Copyhackers tutorial presented live on March 13, 2018. She said you do not need a whole customer survey project, since you can embed a survey on your thank-you page and wait for answers. Then she goes through the answers one by one, looking for "sticky language", for objections, and for the drivers that made people say yes, in what she calls a simple 7-minute exercise.

For a team that sells on calls, the recordings you already keep hold the same things Wiebe looks for, and nobody has to fill in a form.

What is the difference between active and passive voice of customer methods?

Active methods ask the customer something, and passive methods infer how they feel from what they do. CustomerGauge uses the word passive for the second group, and its tip is to combine methods.

On the asking side, CustomerGauge lists surveys, with NPS first and CSAT and CES as alternatives, and customer service conversations through live chat, troubleshooting, and customer calls, where it says recording all the exchanges will be crucial. Its 2021 report The State of B2B Account Experience found 41% of B2B organizations use NPS in their VoC programs.

What CustomerGauge calls passive VoC methodologies infer sentiment from behavior, such as how often customers log into the product or whether they attend business reviews. Sales calls belong on the asking side, next to the customer calls CustomerGauge lists under service.

How much time does this take a five-person team?

Our suggested routine is about one hour a week, owned by one person, with a few minutes at a meeting you already hold. That hour is our estimate from how we work, not a measured figure.

If you are reading this with a folder of call recordings nobody has opened since the deals closed, that folder is where we would start. Here is the routine we suggest, using a hypothetical five-person startup and its last 20 customer calls.

1. Pick one owner, usually whoever runs most of the sales calls, and give them the same hour every week.
2. Read the last 20 call transcripts and copy every phrase a customer used to describe the problem, word for word.
3. Tag each phrase with a theme, such as a pain, an objection, or a reason they bought, in one shared sheet.
4. Each week, add the new calls and support tickets, and count which themes keep coming back.
5. Bring the two most frequent themes to the Monday meeting and decide who acts on each one.

What do you do with the feedback once you have it?

Put the customer's exact words where buyers read, and weigh each theme by what the account is worth. A complaint from your largest customer and one from a free trial are different amounts of evidence.

CustomerGauge defines voice of the customer as "the practice of systematically gathering customer feedback across every account and touchpoint, then acting on it to reduce churn and grow revenue." It also says that in B2B an effective program weighs feedback by the value of each account.

An objection that keeps showing up in calls belongs in the FAQ on your pricing page. A phrase a customer used to describe the problem belongs in the first line of a post, because the next buyer will probably describe it the same way.

There is a content reason too. In HubSpot's marketing industry trends report, 83.5% of marketers say they are expected to produce more content, and 35.7% say much more, with higher expectations because of AI. A team writing from its own call notes has something to say each week that a competitor cannot copy from the same search results.

What we have not settled is how to weigh a theme that comes up often among small accounts against one raised once by the largest. CustomerGauge says to weigh by account value, and we agree, but we have not found a clean rule for when volume should win.