Voice of customer vs customer experience

Both voice of customer and customer experience are different yet associated disciplines. The difficult par to understand here is what contributes to the voice of customer and how the collected data is used. As said earlier, businesses plan a voice of customer to understand the customer perceptions and expectations which they work on to deliver a better customer experience. That being said, the one thing that makes both of them sound similar is their way of gathering information from the right people on the right time and in the right place. 

The Voice of the customer is not an entire view of the customer. Moreover, it is just focused on one problem that arises in the organization for which the management has regulated the voice of the customer program. Whereas when a customer experience professional takes a look at the tools that gather customer voice like surveys, website analysis, text mining, etc. they realise these things don’t provide them with the information that they are looking for. Customer experience is basically used to gain customer demographics, purchase insights, product usage patterns, and so on. So this gives us that both of them work on, if not more but slightly different objectives. 

Putting both voices of customer and customer experience in one bucket can be highly risky for your customer-oriented company. As your customers are a vital part of your brand, you wouldn’t want to miss out on anything that might be important to the customer. That is exactly why you shouldn’t overlap the two. 

Customer experience runs way beyond the voice of customers to understand every customer interaction and what they are trying to tell. Voice of the customer is just a listen – understand – respond program that focuses on what customers think about a particular topic. Customer experience is a cover-it-all practice whereas the voice of the customer is a focus-on-one-problem discipline.