Voice of customer (VOC)
Identify your customers’ expectations to make the right decisions
For more than 30 years, our specialized team has been supporting companies in their voice of customer projects to guide their strategic decisions, whether testing a new concept with potential customers, gathering opinions from existing customers, or refining a development strategy.
They trust us
The key success factors of a voice of customer
The Voice of Customer (VOC) is a methodology based on listening to the market and to customers, whether they are existing customers of an existing offering, or potential customers of a new offering. It involves gathering and understanding their opinions, feelings, perceptions, needs, experience, etc. to guide the development of a product/solution, refine a concept or validate a marketing strategy. When applied to an innovation, a Voice of Customer is based on several key success factors:
The main aim of these approaches is to listen to what the customer thinks, so it is essential to adopt an open attitude and approach, avoiding our own biases of perception, and without giving in to the temptation to enter an argument with the customer. This starts with a phase of getting to know your customer, his environment and his problems and issues in general. This first stage enables you to understand them better, gain information about their context and create an atmosphere of trust that enables you to go further in your questioning.
At what stage of the project is it worth launching a Voice of Customer? How can you be sure that the results obtained answer the question?
The profiles to be interviewed do not necessarily have the time or inclination to respond to all the requests made by them. It is therefore essential to add value to their participation and their time. A good understanding of the issues at stake enables this added value to be passed on and a win-win situation to be created for both the parties involved and the customer.
How can a Voice of Customer approach be valued by its customers? How can you bring value to the people you interview?
While purely quantitative approaches provide a good snapshot of customer opinion, they can be limited when it comes to investigating a new offering, because they do not address the why behind this opinion, or how it might change. Alcimed’s semi-quantitative methodology makes it possible to gather opinions and feedback in order to channel the needs of potential customers and/or improve the existing customer experience. Semi-structured interviews can be used both to identify trends in the people we talk to and to provide descriptive explanations of these trends, so that we can better anticipate and adapt the new offering to its future market.
How can we make the most of customer feedback and maximize its value? What rationales explain this positioning?
How we support you in your voice of customer projects
Alcimed has been supporting its customers for nearly 30 years in their innovation and new market development projects, and regularly uses “Voice of customer” (VOC) approaches in its projects.
The diversity of our clients (large industrial groups, SMEs, start-ups, institutions, etc.), the geographic areas we explore, the sectors in which we operate (healthcare, agri-food, aerospace and defense, energy-environment, mobility, chemistry-materials, cosmetics, etc.) and the types of projects we develop, gives us in-depth expertise in Voice of customer (VOC) methodologies.
What they say
"The Alcimed team has allowed us to structure the project appropriately, to plan it in the best possible way, and to make sure that every single step of the project was successful."
Federico Bianco
Head of the Special Care Unit
"Alcimed made it easy for us to the search for clients and helped us adapt our concept, our value propositions and verify the viability of the proposed solution in terms of business."
Hervé DUJARDIN
Innovation & technology Director
"We wanted to support our customers with charging infrastructure, so it was important for us to approach Alcimed to get an exploratory view of the market, and to find out where we should position ourselves in the value chain."
Laurent Javey
Services & Network Development Director, France
Examples of recent voice customer projects carried out for our clients
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To go further
Founded in 1993, Alcimed is an innovation and new business consulting firm, specializing in innovation driven sectors: life sciences (healthcare, biotech, agrifood), energy, environment, mobility, chemicals, materials, cosmetics, aeronautics, space and defence.
Our purpose? Helping both private and public decision-makers explore and develop their uncharted territories: new technologies, new offers, new geographies, possible futures, and new ways to innovate.
Located across eight offices around the world (France, Europe, Singapore and the United States), our team is made up of 220 highly-qualified, multicultural and passionate explorers, with a blended science/technology and business culture.
Our dream? To build a team of 1,000 explorers, to design tomorrow’s world hand in hand with our clients.
The concept of “Voice of customer” (VOC) is a methodology based on listening to the market and to customers, whether they are existing customers on an existing offer, or potential customers on a new offer. It is therefore a matter of collecting and understanding their opinions, perceptions, needs, experience, etc. on one or more parameters that may vary from one situation to another (opinion on a new product, user experience and satisfaction on a new application, expectations on a purchase path, etc.) in order in particular to guide development of a product, to refine a concept, or to validate a marketing strategy.
In most cases, the most common parameters to capture are the needs of potential customers, their expectations and their pain points, or their receptivity to a concept, a technology, a product or service offering.
The Voice of customer (VOC) methodology can offer many advantages to a company depending on the situation. It allows both to capture opinions and feedback from potential customers on a given concept at a specific moment in the life cycle of the product, to co-construct new offers with its customers or future customers, to retain existing customers by involving them in strategic thinking, or to ensure the existence of a market.
Our clients regularly call on our team using this method to:
- Test a new offer concept with potential customers (new product, new service, new business model, etc.) before its creation or deployment
- Collect the opinions of existing or potential customers on the evolution of an existing offer
- Co-construct a new offer with customers or prospects
- Evaluate the satisfaction of existing customers on specific elements of an offer
- Capture feedback and experiences from current customers on an existing offer and identify levers to remain competitive in its market
- Understand the “willingness to pay” of potential customers with regard to an offer
- Prioritize market segments or geographies for the business
- Validate or challenge a product or service launch plan
- Collect the impressions of potential customers and their user experience feedback on the functionalities of a platform, an application, a web interface, …
- … and many other types of projects depending on the situation!
Building a good Voice of Customer methodology is based on 4 key steps:
- Define the approach: define the final objectives, define the scope of the investigation (geographical scope, number of interviews, etc.), identify the profile of the targets to be interviewed;
- Build the exploration guide;
- Carry out the survey;
- Analyze the results and draw the relevant conclusions.