In my last role as the Marketing Director at Predictable Revenue I was challenged to create the voice of the customer program (VOTC) for our company. And while it can be time consuming it is well worth it when mapping out content along a buyer’s journey.
What Is A Voice Of The Customer Program?
Part of a marketing team’s role is to create content to address a buyer’s need along their buying journey.
A VOTC program is a way to gather information from customer’s to ensure that you are addressing their needs. The VOTC program ultimately will drive what type of content the marketing team will create through problem education, solution research and solution selection.
How To Set Up a VOTC Program
Work with the different departments that speak to customers on a daily basis at different phases of their journey. From initial conversations (this could be anything from discover or demo calls), to sales calls, to customer service calls.
In my role at Predictable Revenue our sales team would send us 2 weekly sales calls to listen to. Our coaching team would then send us 2 coaching calls to listen to. The marketing team members who were in charge of content marketing would then carve out at least 4 hours a week to listen to all 4 calls. We would then review the customer’s questions with our larger revenue team once a week.
In addition, our CEO would conduct annual calls with all of our customers. I reviewed their notes and was going to participate in the calls the following year. Another way to ask question of your customers is timely surveys.
VOTC Set Up Steps
- Discover Where Customer Information Is
- Create A Cadence To Listen or Read This Information
- Disseminate It To The Marketing Team
- Create A List of Questions To Address
- Use The Question List For Content Marketing Campaign Planning
How To Use VOTC Information
We would take information that we heard in calls and then discuss as a team if we should add information to the website to address these questions up front. Updating an FAQ section with customer’s questions or concerns is a great place to consolidate this information. We would then also take questions heard in calls and plan out our quarterly content marketing problem education initiatives to address them.
