Capturing and Actioning the Voice of Customer

ddharth here from VWO. I take care of marketing for the US region. And I’ve been a marketer for the last 10 years and something that I’ve always believed is is speaking with customers and really understanding from them how they’re using the product, what is it that they like, and a lot more and, to that end, I was fortunate that Ali could join us and talk about voice of customer in a very structured and methodical manner. At VWO, we do a lot of learning sessions for Marketers, Product Managers, UI UX folks to really up their game.

And, today, we have Ali Good. She’s the Global Head of Strategy and Product Marketing at Quizizz. I’m really excited to have her on board, and she’s gonna talk about the voice of customer. Thank you for joining in. It is gonna be interactive.

There are a lot of polls. This is a very fun session. So, hope you all have solid takeaways from this. And with that, Ali, the stage is all yours.

 

Ali Good: Oh, thank you so much. I am absolutely just full of gratitude to be here today. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I often don’t take the time and the space necessary to really sit with marinade and think about those ideas and issues that are so incredibly fundamental to all the work that we do. And so just having the opportunity to prepare for this hour and to spend this hour together has forced me really to take that time, and it’s been quite the gift. So thank you so much for the chance to be here. I appreciate it. 

Voice of customer. Honestly, of all the actions that we take as marketers, I feel like the voice of  customer is hands down the most fundamental. I mean, whether we’re doing positioning, pricing, packaging, messaging, deciding what campaigns we’re gonna run to hit our revenue goal for the year, writing a demo script, deciding whether or not to send that email, developing a social or content strategy. Like, all of these activities need to be fully rooted in that soil, that is, the voice of the customer.

Unfortunately, I think sometimes we think like, oh, I just don’t have enough time to do voice of customer, and it’s gonna slow me down too much, or the product team wants me to be more agile. And I would argue that the voice of customer actually gives us that agility that we need and allows us to really work from a place of confidence of knowing, and ultimately will lead to more success than if we don’t take the time. So part of what I’ll be encouraging all of us to do is just bake in a few maybe 1 to 2 hours every week, every week where we just engage in this voice of customer work. The other objection that I sometimes hear, and this happens less these days, but there used to be that in the marketing circles people would share this story that I think is apocryphal, that Steve Jobs didn’t care about the voice of customer.

And, I don’t know if that’s true. But here’s what I know. I know that I’m not Steve Jobs, and I need a little bit more scaffolding in order to really, feel confident and feel like I have what I need in order to work well. And I also know that the marketing that came out of Apple during Steve Jobs’ tenure, maybe they weren’t interested in what customers said that they wanted. But they were really tuned in, obviously, to those core values, those core needs, those fundamental, like, deep heart reasons why the customer was making any choice that they were making.

And that comes through in their marketing for sure.  And I think that one way that we can make sure that that comes through in our marketing is to tap into this voice of customer. Now some of you might be scratching your heads like, wait, did she just say that we don’t need to be interested in what the customer says that they want? I thought that’s what the voice of customer is.

Which leads me to I’ll just pull up the agenda here for today. Let’s start by making sure that when I say voice of customer and you say voice of that we understand exactly what we mean by those words. If voice of customer has taught me anything, it is that we should not assume that what I say and what you say are the same, that we always need to validate that. So we’ll start there. And then from there, we’ll move into some how-tos.

Like, how do we collect voice of customer? And then most importantly, in my opinion, what do we do with that information? How do we make sure that if we’re taking the time to gather it, that we have a plan to act upon it? So with that, I will just jump right in and get us thinking about what really is voice of customer, and it may not surprise you at all to learn that in preparation for today I spent a lot of time talking with y’all.

I did a survey and I did, I got some I got some voices to include. And the first voice we’re gonna hear is from a dear friend of mine, Heather Taylor. You can connect with her on LinkedIn by pointing your phone right now at that great QR code right there that’ll take you right to her. She’s currently the Director of Product Marketing at Top Hat. And she’s actually hiring, and I promised her that I would give a little pitch.

So if you’re looking for a gig, and you like what Heather has to say, give her a click over there on LinkedIn and connect with her. Here we go. Let’s hear how Heather defines voice of customer. And thank you so much, Heather, for doing this for us.

 

Heather Taylor: Hi. I’m Heather Taylor. I’m the Director of Product Marketing at Top Hat. And I think one of our greatest opportunities as product marketers is to be able to advocate for our customers, to be able to capture that customer voice and then infuse it into all parts of your organization. When I think about some of the moments in my own product marketing career, one that really stands out to me that I’m super proud of is a time that I championed the customer voice, and I was able to go to our product team and advocate for a feature request that was coming up a lot in conversations with customers and ultimately be able to back it with both the qualitative and quantitative data why we needed to release this feature.

And ultimately our product team agreed and the product team reprioritized the roadmap and was able to release this feature in record time in a way that was still super compelling and valuable for our customers. And then I got to be the product marketer to launch it, and there’s really nothing more rewarding than getting to surprise and delight your customers. So, my advice is to keep talking to customers, talk to customers every day. It’s one of the most important things that we can do.

 

AG:
Thank you, Heather, for that. I agree. One of the points that Heather made is a point that I’ve heard come up again and again and again in this survey, which is we’ve got to care about, we I’m sorry. We need to understand what customers care about, and we must bring those insights to the rest of the organization. And so that doesn’t just simply mean bringing those insights to our marketing arm.

It also means taking those insights back to our friends and product. And, of course, everyone else, customer success sales, everybody in the org can really benefit from understanding what customers care about. Another definition that was offered up by you is this 1. And I love the parenthetical here. The wants, the needs, the feelings, the thoughts, of a customer or pre-customer about products or services.

This was a definition of what is voice customer. And I love the fact that they included feelings and thoughts there as well as wants and needs. Finally, here’s a 3rd definition that you offered up. Voice of customer is listening to and acting on what your customers think about your brand, about your product, about your experience. I’d love to know what you think.

Let’s do a quick poll. So how is this gonna help me here? Which one of these definitions that we just looked at best resonates with your definition, voice of customer? Is it understanding what customers care about and bringing those insights to your org? Is it the wants, needs, feelings, and thoughts of a customer or pre-customer, or is it listening to an acting on what your customers think about your co your company brand, etcetera? I’d love to hear from you.

Which one best resonates with you? I’m watching some of the responses roll in. If you haven’t yet voted and you wanna take a quick, a, b, or c poll, go ahead and do that. I am gonna move forward. When I was thinking about what I mean by voice of customer, I guess for me, Yes. Voice of customer is what customers say and say that they want and say that they need, but I’m human, and I know that I sometimes don’t know what I want or even what I need.

And so what I often look for in voice of customer is actual customer behavior. What people do can tell me so much more about what they’re gonna do next sometimes than what their words can. So I look for words, but I also really try to take opportunities to look for behavior. These allow me to really dig into what their assumptions are and what their values are. And if I can be incredibly in tune to my customer’s assumptions and values, then I can really make choices about my marketing that are rooted in those fundamentals for them, and my marketing is gonna be that mirror to them that feels authentic.

And that is authentic because I am reflecting back to them that which they care about most. Voice of customer, though, doesn’t just mean the customer self, we often use this as shorthand to refer to them, to the methods that we use to gather voice of customer. If I say I’m doing voice work might mean I’m doing a survey, right, or I’m doing a focus group or an interview, or I’m looking at a heat map, or I’m doing some A/B experimentation, etcetera. And oftentimes, I think in our circles, we use VOC or voice of customer to be a shorthand for that body of work that we’re engaging in. More important than all of these, though, I think are the actions that we take once we have all this data in hand.

What do we do with this information that is really when we see voice of customer come alive? So with that, let’s go ahead and listen to…

 

Allison Rona:

You wanna know why incorporating the voice to the customer is important? Well, put simply, it’s a form of social proof that you can add and incorporate and weave through all of your messaging. So an easy way to do this is to look at review sites like G2, Tara, TrustRadius, and the like, and see the actual language that your customers are using to describe your product. What value is that bringing to them? And use those words if you’re messaging. When you do that, you avoid making your messaging too marketing-ish and avoids having that jargon that can sometimes creep it.

 

AG:
Thank you, Allison Rona, for this reminder that in order to gather voice of customer, and to be able to use that voice and customer effectively, we can find that in places that are readily accessible to us daily. That’s a great intro into this idea of how do we go after voice of customer and how do we collect that information? Where do we collect it? How do we find it? So I’ve kind of divided this section up into what I think are, like, 3 basic avenues, that we can point our canoe at, if you will.

One is kind of what I think of as the old skool, the reliable, the the ways we’ve been doing it for a long time. Right? Surveys, focus groups, interviews where you’re gonna get that incredible qualitative, snapshot of your customer’s voice. I love surveys, focus groups, and interviews. And in fact, try to bake into every week having at least 1 or 2 conversations with customers or pre-customers, as one of you called them.

I love that. I’d love to know how many of you have engaged in some sort of old skool or qualitative research recently. Have you done a focus group, a survey, or an interview in the last 12 months? I’d love to know. And, Siddharth, as the results are coming in, will you let me know what they are?

 

S:

Yes. I can do that.

 

AG:

Thank you. I’d be interested. How many folks are on the call? What percentage of people have done a survey and interview or a focus group in the last year, let’s say.

 

S:
So it’s been 40 seconds since the poll has been live. 65% of people have voted out of which 70 now, out of which 90% have said yes and 11% have said no. 89 versus 11.

 

AG:

Interesting. Okay. That’s great to hear. Thank you so much. Feel free to keep voting if you haven’t voted, but we are just gonna end for the sake of time.

I wanna make sure people have a chance to ask questions or, you know, have a little Q&A at the end if we want to. Trucking forward here, I wanna talk about best practices for conducting surveys, focus groups, and interviews. Some of the first work that I got to do as a baby product marketer was to write surveys and conduct focus groups. And I actually spent a great deal of my time when I was an early product marketer doing these activities, and I had a great coach. Her name is Laura Cody.

Just shout out to Laura Cody who really I mean, honestly, at the time, made me kind of angry, but I feel like I learned so much. She was the one who insisted, for example, that every question be open-ended. I wanted to hear the words. I wanted to see them. I wanted to read them, and she was like, Ali, it’s just not scalable.

It’s not realistic, and your audience is gonna grow tired. She convinced me. And now I know so well she was so right. We’ve got to be kind to our customers and our pre-customers and we need to make sure that we’re providing them with a variety of question types so that they don’t get survey fatigue and we can’t expect them to take the time and energy to really answer every question with an open-ended, like, fullness in that way. So use those only when you must and try to reserve only having 1 or maybe open-ended questions for the survey would be Laura’s recommendation.

That first best practice there. Know you’re in, what we’re talking about there is make sure that you’re gonna get the number of responses that you need in order for this survey to have the impact that you need to have across your org. If you’re gonna do a survey and you’re gonna get 10 responses and your product team is like, yeah, that’s not enough. Right? 

Ten people, and they’re gonna cast sort of doubt or shade on your work. You need to make sure that you’re sending that survey out to enough customers or free customers that you’re gonna get an account that’s going to lend some credibility and reliability to your results. My experience has been that I usually get about a 25% return rate on surveys.

And that may be better than the industry standard. I’m actually not sure what the industry standard is. If anybody knows what industry standard is, feel free to drop it in the chat. The part that you might wanna be on mute, friend. Okay.

For focus groups and interviews best practices. Here is a great hack. That you can use when you’re doing your focus groups and interviews. Have a survey that you’ve crafted that they never see that they do not click anything on, but that you are coding the responses as you hear them. I’m gonna say that again.

It’d be like, if we were in an interview right now over on my side screen, I would have a survey that I’ve crafted  with my questions that I’m gonna ask you. And I’ve already put in a, b, c, d, e, the kinds of answers I think you’re gonna give. That last little box would be “Other”. I would capture some of your actual words in that other box regardless of which answer I started coded there. But that would allow me to as soon as we get off the phone or as soon as we get off that Zoom to jump right into being able to share those responses with others, and I can move from that capturing the voice of customer to action immediately with this little hack. It works great.

We at Renaissance, we used this for someone loss analysis that we did, and it just, again, allowed us to move much more quickly than if we’d had to go back, re-listen to those interviews, focus groups, hear yourself speak, which if you’re like me, you never wanna do that. It can be really painful to have to go back and do that. So if you can capture it along the way, you can move more quickly. And then for both surveys and focus groups and interviews or for all three rather, I would say this. And these are good Laura Cody tips too.

One, ask people not about what they want, but about behaviors that they’ve actually engaged in or behaviors that they plan to engage in. When you keep the focus on behavior, you can draw conclusions about people’s desires and about those things that actually matter to them. And then, ultimately, this one is so important because we want to always be kind to our customers. Make sure that we’re only asking questions that you’re gonna actually do something with. If it’s nice to know, then don’t bother your customer with it.

Just try to find out the answer in another way. If you’re really truly curious and I know you are, but the best way that we can be kind to our customers is to only take up their precious time by gathering information they were actually gonna act on. Okay. If you have questions, by the way, you can feel free to go ahead and drop them into the chat. And we can address them as we go . We’re a small but mighty crew here.

So I think that that’s totally doable. The second way that we can easily attain voice of customer information is through what I think of it as maybe it’s not too new these days, but kind of the new skool way, which is all of this quantitative data that we have coming at us from every direction. This is engagement, statistics, click through rates, open rates, click through rates. If you’re doing video as a key strategy, like, how deep are they getting into the video? Where are they dropping off?

You can look at analytics from your website. You can look at analytics from the product. Like, how are they behaving in-product that can tell you so much, that will allow you to make wise and informed choices as a marketer. Curious. And again, so, Dorothy, if you can help me out here by launching this poll – Have you used analytics?

We saw about 90% of folks had used these more qualitative methods. How many of you are using these quantitative methods? You’re looking at open rates of emails. You are looking at traffic to your website.

You are calculating as Allison Rona suggested, like, going to places like TrustRadius, etcetera, and checking out your reviews and you’re using that data. How many of you are doing that? Let’s take a quick poll. 

Siddharth, I really appreciate that you put the results of the last poll in the chat for all of us.

That was super helpful. If you wouldn’t mind doing the same for this one, that’d be great.

 

S:

This poll has been live for a minute. 67% of people have responded. Two-third, yes. One-third, no.

 

AG:

Okay. Nice. When we’re thinking about best practices for looking at analytics, If you’re like me and you are… I assume that you probably are a naturally curious person. It’s really easy, I think, to get into analysis paralysis. Oh, there we go. Nice.

With these analytics. And I can spend a lot of time looking at the analytics and then not necessarily know what to do with them. So I think the trick is before you ever look, go ahead and set up your success metrics. Like, go ahead and know what you’re gonna be looking for even prior to, say, sending that email And if you’re doing any sort of website traffic analysis, or even if you’re looking at email traffic, or email open rates over time, track those metrics month over month to discover trends that you otherwise might not see. And I think you can do those two things. So, A:  you’re trying to establish metrics prior to looking at least to what the metrics are.

So that you have a sense of like, oh, this is this is green. This is good. Here’s what I’m gonna do. Or this is yellow. I don’t know if here’s what I’m going to do. Or if it’s red. Here’s what I’m gonna do, and you can kinda have a preconceived notion of that.

That’s what’s gonna allow you to not get caught in that analysis paralysis. Establish expectations before going into look. Don’t read the last page of the book first. Before you have a hypothesis, alright, and have a plan. And again, tracking metrics month over month or or some sort of over time, whatever that makes sense or whatever that means to you might be different depending on your sales cycle, etcetera.

But that can allow you to see some trends that you otherwise wouldn’t see, and it can really inform future outreaches to customers. If you find that your customers kind of go sort of radio silent, during a particular window that can help you to make choices about what you’re gonna do in the future that are truly informed. What ultimately leads to greater success when it comes time for web analytics and you’re looking at those web analytics, I would say there’s a couple of things that we could do better as marketers. One is make sure before you look at the data, that you all agree on, like, what is the purpose of the website and that you’re evaluating it for that same purpose.

If you think that the website is really top of the funnel and meant to sort of drive demand, but someone else is hoping that the website is gonna be more lead gen and actually get people to agree to a demo. You’re not coming at that analytics from the same place. So make sure that everybody’s sort of lined up or at least clear on what they’re looking for. When you’re looking at those web analytics, be sure to look for surprises. And I’ll tell a quick story.

It’s a good time here. Yep. I’ll tell a quick story. When I was at Renaissance, we were looking at some web analytics, and we discovered that there was a page on our site that was getting almost all organic traffic. Most of the folks that were coming to our site were coming to our site because they were searching for us by brand name.

And that’s how they were arriving there, but this particular page was getting all of this organic traffic of folks who weren’t looking for us, but were landing on us. This is a total demand gen opportunity that we didn’t even know that we had until we saw that surprise. And guess what? We hadn’t updated that page in, like, a really long time. It was a complete opportunity that we were unaware of, because we hadn’t dug into those analytics and looked for those surprises.

So look for surprises and then start measuring for those magic moments and try to optimize those magic moments. How do you start if you’re seeing that happen, how can you escalate that and make it work even better? For product analytics, I think the same is true. Look for those magic moments in-product. What is leading people to use the product with higher fidelity? What can you connect any of those product usage metrics to retention rates or churn rates?

Here’s another concrete example to sort of bring this one alive just recently at Quizizz where I am now, we learned that teachers… We’re an ed tech platform. That teachers who assign homework on our platform were much more likely to be retained. Like, that customer was much more likely to be retained. And so we’ve been developing a campaign.

Thanks to our friends and life cycle. Shout out to Todd. To work on a campaign to sort of nudge customers in that general direction. Right? Let’s get people using the platform in that way if we know that that’s gonna lead to retention. So look from those surprises, start to measure and optimize for those magic moments and make sure that if you can, you’re connecting those magic moments to either  win rates, retention rates or churn rates and and act accordingly. Alright.

We’re cooking right along here. Next level. I feel like this for people who are kind of on the cutting edge, this has been a thing for a while. And clearly our friends at VWO have this on lockdown. But how many of us are actually doing truly experimental work?

Like, how many of us are being really agile and engaging in A/B testing, using heatmaps, making micro changes, optimizing for that. I’d love to know. Have you engaged in any of those experimental ways of acquiring voice of customer in the last 12 months? Have you done an AB test? Have you used a heat map to look at your website traffic, for example, or your product usage traffic? I’d love to know.

Alright. I’m not surprised by the poll results. 28% of us have, and most of us have not. And I’d be interested to know, is this something that you’re planning on doing in the next 12 months? How many of you are planning to sort of level up and do some experimentation, whether that’s A/B testing? Making those micro changes and watching traffic happen differently? Using heat mapping or any of these, like, total next level?

Entry points into engaging with our voice of customer. How many of you are planning to do it in the next year? Feel free to keep, but up there we go. A lot of people are saying that they would like to and 28% of us are saying, heck yeah, I’m committing.

Like, this is the next level. I’m ready to level up as I wanna make sure that I’m staying on top of the game and maybe even ahead of the curve a little bit in this case. So here’s some best practices. For taking on these kinds of next level ways of acquiring the voice of customer. I think the trick with A/B testing is to make sure that we’re testing subject lines of emails.

That’s the easiest, I think, entry point. For AB testing is, you know, try to take 25% of your send. You pull it to the side. You give one subject line A, one subject line B, you send it out to that 25%. Maybe even 10% if you have a small send in count. You see which one does better in terms of open rates and click through rates, and then you use that subject line for the remainder of the email sent. Now what you might discover is that you can get a really provocative subject line and people open but then if they don’t click through, right?

So don’t stop just at subject line testing. Like, if you get people to open up and there’s a disconnect between what they were expecting to see and what they see, you’ll see that in your click through rate kind of being in the toilet. So don’t be afraid to then go in and tweak that content to make sure or even tweak the subject line. If you have to give up a little bit of your open rate to make sure that click through rate really comes through, that’s the way to handle that.

Right? So don’t just stop at subject line testing. Start there, but don’t stop there. You can certainly use a tool like VWO, the sponsors of this webinar. Thank you, I have to level up.

This is exactly the kind of service that they provide. Tools for handling AB testing, heat mapping, etcetera. When it comes to heatmaps, I mean, the cool thing about heatmaps is you’re really visual people like me, you can just kind of see really quickly, like, what are the literal hotspots? Where are people spending their time where they are really getting the clicks on your website? What is that pathway through say your website or your product?

I think I often say this to other product marketers: we want the product that we build to be the product that we market. That’s the product that’s getting implemented with our customer success counterparts. And ultimately it is the way our product is being used. Heatmaps can tell us if all of that is true. Is the product that we’re building, the product that we’re marketing, the product that we’re implementing, and the product the way our customers are using it.

If our customers aren’t using it in that way, something’s amiss. Right? Like, do we need to work on implementation? Do we need to change our marketing? Like, how can we and maybe we need to change something in-product.

Right? Like, how can we make sure that we’re creating that really kind and accountable through line for our customers? What they’re using is what we’re building, is what we’re selling, is what we’re implementing. Heatmaps can help us to discover that kind of quite literally at a glance. You can see those magic moments, those hotspots. If your customers are spending more time in places that you weren’t expecting, look at those.

What can you learn from them? How can you build upon that heat and really stoke that flame there? Know what actions you’re gonna take next when you go in to look at those heatmaps too. Again, if you’re looking, you’re expecting a hotspot and you don’t see it there, what are you gonna do? What happens if you find a hot spot you weren’t expecting?

Have a plan for that before you get into potential analysis paralysis. Right? Know what you’re gonna do with the information prior to opening it up and looking at it and you’re able to act more quickly. And that’s how you can really assume an agile approach. And make sure that the voice of customer doesn’t slow you down, but instead allows you to speed up and move more quickly.

Alright. I mentioned that I did a survey prior to this call today in preparation. I don’t think that you’re gonna be surprised to discover that all the survey responses really reflect the exact kind of poll responses we got here today, which is to say that most of you, if not all of you, are doing some sort of qualitative or “qual” as we call it in the industry research. Many of us are doing analytical research, and then the best opportunity we have to level up as product marketers or as marketers in general is to step up and do more experimentation like, not be afraid to do sort of micro optimization and really refine our knobs. I feel like In some ways, these sizes tell us, like surveys, focus groups, and interviews can give us a real sense of, like, what are the big knobs that we have to turn?

What should those knobs be? Like, what are the labels on them even? The analytics can start to get us at sort of, like, more rough hewn refinement. But then if you wanna get really tuned in, if you really wanna get refined, leveling up and doing those experimentations is gonna be key for all of us. Alright.

Great. What do we do with all this information? Like, how do we really start to fly with the voice of customer? I asked All of you in the survey. Okay.

So you’ve done all this research. What are you doing with it? And here’s what you told me. Most of us are using voice of customer research. Maybe this was no surprise to validate messaging.

I was surprised to find out that only 20% of us are using the voice of customer to help influence the road map. Road maps should largely be driven by the customer’s needs, making sure that we’re fully aligning ourselves and our products with our customers’ needs and reflecting to them, that the product is in fact aligned with their most idealized versions of themselves. And for that reason, we ought to be using voice of customer somewhere more strongly and go to market. And so I would say in terms of, like, our opportunities that I feel like I’ve seen, one is let’s all level up and get really nuanced and refined and how we’re how we’re gathering the voice of customer. And then let’s start using it for more than just messaging because it can be so incredibly powerful.

I would love to just go ahead and share Mason Cosby, and, man, grab that QR code. This cat is doing such cool things with voice of customer, and I wanted to share it with you. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the Director of Growth at Mojo Media Labs. And, he’s on LinkedIn. He’s all over LinkedIn.

Actually, and the way that he’s using the voice of customer is so meta and so rad and just a real inspiration. So I wanted to share his voice with you. Here we go. See if I can get this to play.

 

Mason Cosby:

Hi. My name is Mason. I am the Director of Growth over Mojo Media Labs. And one of the ways that I’ve been able to really embody the voice of our customer for our company is through my personal podcast, The Marketing Ladder. I invite our ideal customers to talk through their career journey, the struggles that they had as they were looking to grow their career, the way that they think through marketing.

And then at the end of the episode, we actually talked through the roles that they’re actively hiring for. So I don’t just understand the needs of the customer from the perspective of they need to hire an agency. But I understand how they think, what they truly are looking to do with their organization, and every single piece that comes together to truly form the cohesive strategy that is their approach to marketing. So as a result of getting to know the person on a deeper level, I have a better understanding of the voice.

 

AG:

My Internet was lagging a little bit there. I hope that came through for you. Just to recap, so he’s working for… He’s Director of Growth. And their goal is I mean, I think that they really just sort of like they sell, like, ABM style. You know, they support ABMs go-to-market.

His podcast is focused on individual people and how they came to be the role that they have in the industry. So it’s not directly related to what they’re selling. It’s not a direct line, but instead, what he’s doing is he’s really unpacking those core, like, those core heart reasons, right, he’s really getting to know their potential customer in a way that you’re not gonna get otherwise. It’s cool stuff that he’s doing. I strongly encourage you to check him out.

I feel like of all the people I’ve met, Mason definitely has that bias for action. And what he’s doing is allowing him to run the future in a way that’s incredibly unique. That’s my kiddo, by the way. I love that picture. 

Here are some I just wanna we’re closing down here in the end. Right? How do we actually earn on the voice of customer and I just have some strong recommendations for us all to think about. This one is when I’ve kind of this is a note that I’ve been playing throughout the presentation today, which is you gotta have an action plan before you collect the voice of customer. If you don’t, two things can happen. One, you can get caught up in that paralysis of just, like, looking at the data, looking at the data, looking at the data, and it’s hard to get out of that sort of a cul de sac, right, to get back on the highway.

The second thing that can happen if you don’t have an action plan is you can end up wasting your customer or your pre-customer, and that’s just not nice. And I know that you’re a nice person, and that you wanna be kind to the customer. And so the kindest action we can take is making sure that we have an action plan before we ask them to spend their time with us. Whether that time is in an interview, whether we’re looking at their activity on our site, we need to know. Right? We need to always have their best interests at heart and know what we’re gonna do with their information in a meaningful way to make their experience better. That’s number 1.

Number 2 – Make sure that as we’re thinking about those action plans, and we’re planning in advance of acquiring that voice of customer that we’ve aligned the action plan so that it’s not just a dotted line, but it’s a direct line up to the outcomes of your revenue outcomes for the year. The goals that you have to achieve those ultimate outcomes.

Maybe it’s like we’re gonna increase retention rate to 87% or, we want to shorten the sales cycle by 10% or maybe it’s that you want to improve or ameliorate your brand perception. Make sure that whatever your action plan is that you’ve got, you’ve directly linked it to your outcomes, your goals. And, ultimately, whatever KPIs or OKRs or whatever system you’re using to measure for those larger outcomes and goals, make sure your action plan aligns with those as well. That is so important because that’s what’s gonna allow you to get by-in. If you can direct connect the work that you’re doing to those larger business outcomes, goals, and metrics, then when you go around and you start to socialize what you’re gonna do and you should, you can socialize not only how you’re gonna gather voice with customer but you can also socialize your action plan, and you can couch it or frame it in terms of, like, we’re doing this to help the business in these ways.

This is exactly how this lines up with our larger goals. And if you set it within that framework, people will understand it more quickly. They’ll be less likely to drop a bomb on it or get in the way of it. And they’ll be more likely to help you move more quickly in your action plan after the fact. Wrapping it up here.

Basically, we have a couple more of these. Communicate those early results. It can get people really excited. You can kinda create some teasers and people get excited and they’ll be hungry to hear the actual results. Make sure that you’re keeping your own bias in check and you’re not just looking for what you wanna see. Having the action plan in advance will help you to do that by the way. Because it creates an opportunity for you to look for any number of results. 

And then finally, finally, finally, make sure that you take the time to show the insights that you learn. Set up meetings with people who need to hear it, who need to see it, to tell them what you’ve learned, and then to kick off whatever actions you’re gonna take as a result. And if you, you know, have a Slack channel on which you’re regularly communicating, I would encourage you to do a quick little video and drop it on there so that people can go back and reference it. And make sure that you share the insights out in some sort of format on some sort of channel so that they can self-serve that information later.

You want people to be returning to these insights and finding recursive value in them and to be able to act from them. So that the next time you do them, they’ll be on board from the beginning. Alright. That is kind of the end of my presentation. There’s my LinkedIn, make friends with me if we’re not already.

The more people we know, the bigger our network is. And the bigger our network is, the more good we can do. I do believe that. So feel free to link to reach out to me. I would really appreciate it. And I would be delighted.

I think we have just a few minutes left to take some questions or comments in the Q&A or the chat. Is that right, Siddharth?

 

S:

Yes. Thank you so much, Ali. We do have a couple of questions that I would like to ask you. So one question is, do you think the VOC activity performed by marketers and product managers differ in how they understand customers?

 

AG:

Do I think that the voice of customer activity is performed by product managers and product marketers differ in how they understand the customer.

 

S:

Yes.

 

AG:
Yeah. That’s the question. And the answer is yes. And I’ll tell you why. Product folks are largely concerned about understanding what problem they’re solving for.

That’s really important. Right? If we’re not solving problems, what are we doing? Right? But as marketers, our customers look, life is hard, y’all.

Nobody wants to be reminded about their problems. Marketing, in my opinion, should never scratch at that pain or the problems that people have. Marketing should shine a light up and remind people about what they’re going for, right, to their future. They’re idealized versions of themselves. They’re who they are at their best today, like, who their mama thinks they are.

Right? Like, that’s what marketing should do. And so, yeah, we are maybe using the same same insights, but in different ways. And I think that that difference is really, really key. Do you feel like that answers the question?

If it doesn’t, I don’t know who asked it. Feel free to ask a qualifying question.

 

S:

Yeah. Muhammad had asked the question. Muhammad in case, I think that that’s a very well put answer, but, of course, if you have any follow-up questions on that, feel free to, discuss further here on the chat, or maybe I can even unmute you. Give me a moment.

Yes, I’ve unmuted you. So whenever you feel like asking, please go ahead. I’ll in the meantime (indistinct)

 

Muhammad:

Hi, Ali. 

 

AG:

Hi!

 

Muhammad: Thank you very much for making that distinction. I actually asked that question because I think I just want to sort of get your own opinion on that because when we think about it, what’s customers, I think, obviously, as a product manager and a product marketer, you might have the same framework or the same methodology of collecting the purpose of the customer. I just want to understand that in terms of your goal or what you’re trying to achieve might be different as a product manager and as a product market.

I mean, I’m a product manager, but I think it’s just trying to understand, like, you might have that different goal when you’re trying to understand. But I think product managers are also about understanding what it is that product marketing wants to achieve and understanding the ideas or what it is trying to achieve… I mean we are acting on behalf of the customer, isn’t it? So I think it’s just very important to have that distinction. Just one more thing. Are there any other things that you, in terms of what type of customer that you noticed between product managers and also product marketers? I’m talking about you. Is there any other thing that you’ve noticed within your team?

 

AG:
First of all, just coming to your comment around you’re a product manager and you really wanna understand product marketing and, like, what their goals are and what they’re going for. I mean, first, that’s my love language friend. So, thank you. Like, with more product managers like you… 

To answer your question around the second question you asked, I do think I’ve observed some differences. And I think that one is if you’re looking to validate that there’s a problem that needs to be solved, you may not need as that in count we talked about may not need to be as big as as it is if you’re trying to really tap into understanding things that people don’t say or that aren’t as visible. The trends may be a little more obvious in the marketplace than what if you’re really trying to tap into the psychology of your customer. So that might be a difference. And then, I don’t know that I’ve observed a great deal of other differences, but sometimes these things happen in silos.

Right? Sometimes you have products doing their research over here and you have product marketing doing their research over here. And somehow these two things don’t come together in some cases, like, maybe they could or in my opinion, should. We would all be better off if we’re doing this kind of research if we’re sharing it widely so that everybody can make use of it. Yeah.

 

Muhammad:

Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you.

 

AG:

Siddharth, what else?

 

S:

Yeah. Thank you so much. So we have another question, which is, how useful are heatmaps on a weekly basis? Not changing too much.

 

AG:

I probably would not be inclined to look at a heatmap on a weekly basis, but you probably know more about that than I do, friend. What do you think? Do you think that people should be looking at heatmaps weekly, or are they better off looking at them in a more longitudinal perspective?

 

S:

I think a heat map is an indication of what the current situation is. And if you think that changing a web page or the market scenario or the competition not changes doesn’t change much, then the impact on your static page is not also going to change much. So it really depends on how often you are updating the page and how often is the market that you’re operating in evolving or changing for you to actually make or observe some drastic changes. So I hope that answers the question. Looking at a map weekly will not make so much sense, essentially.

 

AG:

If you are changing weekly, that feels like a lot to me. Like, I mean, maybe if that’s the cadence that your customers are really coming to you in, then I guess if that’s one thing, but I haven’t worked in an industry where people are moving that quickly. But, like, I think I mentioned, I work in EdTech and we may be probably a wee bit old school.

 

S:

Perhaps, one industry where this data might be useful is eCommerce when you’re doing event-oriented sales because then the whole page will change probably on a daily basis. And if you are able to get a heat mapping tool that provides you data, not just for the page, but for the segment of users for a particular page. That’s gonna be a gold mine.

 

AG:

That’s a really good point. I think we only probably have 2 minutes or so left. Are there any other questions that came through?

 

S:

Yeah, I think that’s about it from the audience. I have one question. For folks who are here, do you recommend any books or any knowledge sources that they can, that you really refer to every once in a while very often?

 

AG:

Yeah. No. That’s a great question. I appreciate you asking. For me right now, the main source of my information and help is coming largely through my network on LinkedIn, and I really appreciate it.

I appreciate Mason Cosby’s podcast – number 1. I appreciate there’s a few other podcasts that I listen to on the regular. Those, I think, helped me to feel connected to the other people in our industry and to also provide a way for me to kind of compare myself in terms of, like, it’s really validating to hear somebody that you really love speak. And then you’re like, oh, yeah. I’m doing all that.

Right? Like, that makes you feel good about your day to day. And I find that to be incredibly useful. And if we have product marketers on the line who aren’t yet affiliated with the Product Marketing Alliance… I don’t sell them. But you’re the PMA ambassador for India. That’s how we got to meet.

It provides an excellent opportunity to make friends and to be able to have opportunities that we otherwise don’t to build our network in really meaningful ways. So, they’re not paying me to say that. Just total shout out to the value that I’ve garnered from that organization.

 

S:

Same here. To that, I want to add 2 points. There are no geographical boundaries in such communities.

 

AG:

Can you say that again? Yeah. Oh.

 

S:

There’s also some work going on. So, yeah, better.

 

AG:

We don’t hear it. I don’t think, so, you know, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of background noise.

 

S:

There are no geographical boundaries. And the conversations that I have been having in the Product Marketing Alliance, the community, the slack group, are not publicly available. So this is the most refined experiential learnings from individuals that are not blogged or documented anywhere else on the internet. Getting into these communities definitely is really helpful. And that’s how this session has come to be.

 

AG:

That’s exactly how this came to be, and it’s been great for me. I hope that folks got something out of it as well. Yeah. Again, just even just taking the time to sit for me, the preparation was really helpful and really validating. And, hopefully, even if all you the participants learned today was like, heck, yeah, I’m killing it. I’m right on trend with everybody else, then that’s a good thing to learn. And I think we can all feel challenged to be more progressive and more exciting and do some things like you folks at VWO are doing. Thanks for the inspiration.

I really appreciate it.

 

S:

Thank you so much, Ali. This has been a great session. Not the session, but for me, also, the entire experience of working with you was really good. And I’m sure all our folks here have at least one solid takeaway from the session, and that’s what really matters. Right?

As Ali said, the more voices we have, the more we’ll be heard and the more we’ll feel heard. It’s absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much, Ali, once again, for being here with us and sharing your thoughts, your well-researched, well-heard presentation for all of us over here. Thank you so much.

 

AG:

Thank you.

 

S:

Folks, thank you so much. Once again, thank you for joining. And we do a lot of such knowledge sharing sessions with our audience and it’s always a pleasure to have you guys on board. Thank you so much. Bye. Have a great day.

 

AG:

Bye, everyone.