The market has the answer to everything. In one of the first articles about product-market fit, Marc Andreessen mentioned how your customer (or target market) could bring products out of your startup. This means your customers know the perfect recipe for your success with a new product. So, why not ask relevant voice of customer questions for new product development?
This article will share helpful questions you can ask your audience while starting market research for your new venture. So, let us begin.
What is the voice of customer (VoC)?
Voice of Customer (VoC) is a market research strategy that involves listening to the feedback of your customers and audience. Businesses can understand customer perception and derive insights into their expectations, needs, pain points, and more by listening to the voice of customer.
Voice of customer helps you match consumer expectations with your product to help you achieve product-market fit faster and promise customer delight.
Read More: Understanding voice of customer services
Why VOC for new product development?
Voice of Customer is a fantastic research tactic that gets you inside your customers’ heads. Marketers and entrepreneurs have used market research surveys for years to listen to customer feedback.
When it comes to new product development, you need a lot of data to validate your hypothesis. Essentially, you need to know the following:
- How big is the market for a product or service?
- Is there any competitor in the particular market?
- What are customers paying for the competitor’s product or service?
- Is there any gap or pain point that competitors need to solve?
- Do customers like using a paid product to solve their pain points?
These are just the tip of a massive iceberg. You need a lot of data to understand your customer and identify market opportunities if you want to succeed.
Listening to customers’ voices can help you test, launch, and improve a new product or feature. Customer feedback is at the heart of agile development or the continuous discovery process associated with new product development across industries. It helps business owners in:
- Identifying common pain points, loopholes, or problems of the customer in association with your product idea;
- Understanding the likes and dislikes of your audience;
- Discovering opportunities for ‘disrupting’ the industry or improving customer experience;
- Finding marketing angles, positioning, and mediums where you can succeed with a product;
- Achieve product-market fit and more.
Voice of Customer Survey Question for Developing a New Product
If you have an existing audience (think newsletter subscribers, social media followers, or customers from other businesses), it would be easy for you to start capturing the voice of customers. You just need a market research questionnaire and send it to your audience to start recording the voice of customers.
When thinking of building or launching a new product, you should ideally ask questions about:
- Customer’s behaviors, interests, and pain points;
- Market competition;
- Price sensitivity;
- Discoverability (marketing channels customers prefer);
- Pricing;
- Affinity or loyalty to a particular brand of products.
Here are some questions based on voice of customer best practices for new product development that will help you capture everything mentioned above.
General product-centric voice of customer questions.
These are a great way to start a conversation:
- What are your biggest challenges or pain points related to [product category/niche]?
- What features or benefits are most important to you when using [product idea]?
- What is the biggest reason you would choose a particular brand of products/services over others? Is it pricing, customer experience, or something else?
- How often do you use a [product/service] in a year?
- What is missing in existing brands offering [product/service]?
- What are your overall satisfaction rates with your existing [product/service] brand?
- Have you had any issues with [product/service]? If so, what were they?
- Do you want to see any changes or improvements in [product/service]?
- How much do you pay when you buy a [product/service]?
Voice of customer questions about competition.
Great options for surveying customers about the market:
- What are your current frustrations with existing products in the market?
- How do you typically use products like ours daily or at work?
- What would convince you to switch to a new product like ours?
- What are the most critical factors when evaluating a new product like ours?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors’ products from your perspective?
- What features or benefits do our competitors’ products offer that you find most appealing?
- What features or benefits do you feel are missing from existing products in the market?
VoC questions for evaluating marketing mediums.
Just two, but they are good:
- How do you usually discover new products in this category?
- What are your preferred channels for researching and purchasing products like ours?
Voice of customer questions for launching new features.
Need to launch some new features? Then use these:
- Does the new product/feature add value to your life? If yes, how?
- What elements do you consider while purchasing a product?
- What do you think when any new features are added to your favorite product?
- Do you think the [product/service] will be improved by adding new features?
- In your daily life, are you using similar products from any other brand?
- Do you think we should launch such a [product/service]? If that saves you time or money, will you use it?
Capture voice of customer in real-time with online reviews.
Sharing a survey to capture voice of the customer is a great idea in case you have an existing audience. But for small businesses, early-stage startups, or ideation-stage companies, getting access to relevant audience insights can be difficult.
Plus, conducting voice of customer surveys can be a time-consuming process, too. You can speed up the process by utilizing a voice of customer tool like GapScout.
GapScout scans all online reviews on autopilot and brings real-time insights, including detailed sentiment analysis. You can use it to track online reviews of competitors (or similar products) to understand what customers want. It helps understand what is lacking in the current market proposition, and get started without much effort.
All you need to do is sign up for the waitlist and get access to automate market research and voice of customer research for your new product.
Also Read:
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