6 Types of Voice of Customer Sources and the Role of Each One for Your Customer Insights Analysis

Voice of customer work touches many different sources, and it helps to be clear about what each one is actually for before pulling reports together. These sources are all relevant, and each has its own peculiarities. Used side by side, they complement each other rather than repeating the same story, and for a product launch specifically, knowing which source to open first can save you real time.

Ratings and reviews

Ratings and reviews are the backbone of this kind of work. For a product launch, they are especially useful for benchmarking a new launch against direct competitors already on shelf. They also help validate whether a product is delivering on its core promises at scale, and they let you track performance continuously in the weeks after launch rather than at a single moment in time. Working through that volume by hand is unrealistic once you are covering more than one product, which is why ai for customer review analysis exists, to sort comments by topic as they come in instead of reading them one by one.

Social media

Social media is a different kind of source. It is very good, specifically for launches, at capturing real-time reactions when a campaign or a product goes live. It is also more aesthetic, more visual and more emotional than ratings and reviews, especially on platforms like Instagram, which makes it useful for identifying trends in user-generated content. Because that emotional read is hard to judge from a raw count of posts, a customer feedback analysis tool that scores tone helps show whether the launch conversation is excited, skeptical or confused.

Forums

Forums, with Reddit as one of the main examples, are good at giving candid and unprompted opinions and experiences about how people understand and experience certain products and categories. They are also good at surfacing how enthusiasts and early adopters compare products to alternatives. Because forums often have dedicated spaces for specific categories and for people passionate about certain topics or industries, they are also good at revealing open questions, unmet needs and niche use cases.

YouTube

YouTube is partly a social media source, but it is kept separate because it behaves differently. It is very good at demonstrating and showing the product used in real life, since the videos show how people are actually using the product in an unscripted way. The comments section, similar to Reddit, is also useful for surfacing questions that users still have, which makes it a handy list of what your own product page or messaging might need to explain better.

Contact center

Contact center is another important source, and a very different one. It is a direct line to your customers, especially for understanding real pain points related to quality issues, defects and safety issues. It also helps reveal gaps between what the messaging is delivering and what customers are experiencing and how they are using the product, which makes it the best source for identifying root causes.

Trustpilot

Trustpilot is also a review source, but it is different from ratings and reviews of the product because it focuses more on the brand. It is not specifically about the product, but about the overall brand experience, including how delivery works and how the contact service performs. It is often used by customers doing final due diligence before choosing a product, which makes it the best source for understanding overall brand credibility.

Summed up simply, ratings and reviews focus on product experience and are best for benchmarking versus competitors. Social media is more emotional and best for reading launch day reactions. Forums are candid opinions and best for understanding the why behind certain views. YouTube is best for seeing the product in use. Contact center is operational data best for identifying root causes, especially quality issues. Trustpilot is about brand experience and best for understanding overall brand credibility.

Bringing these sources together in one place, rather than checking each one separately, is what Wonderflow, voice of customer platform is built to do, and it is also what makes it possible to move from one source to another when a signal in one needs to be checked against another. For teams that need a single view across products and categories, a consumer insights platform keeps all six sources organized under one roof.

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