Customer research

Customer Research — Voice of Customer

"Synthesise user voice"

When to use

• "Here are 200 reviews — what do customers actually care about?"
• "Synthesize these interview notes / support tickets"
• "What objections keep coming up?"
• Before positioning, landing copy, or ads — copy written without voice-of-customer is guessing
• Works on pasted text or files; optional upgrade: web search to mine public reviews and Reddit threads

Workflow

1. Ingest the corpus: pasted text, CSV/exports, or files. Note the source mix and any sampling bias (e.g. only angry customers write tickets).
2. Extract verbatims into four buckets: pains, desires, objections, buying triggers. Keep the customer's exact words — never paraphrase at this stage.
3. Cluster into themes per bucket; count frequency so loud-but-rare doesn't beat quiet-but-common.
4. Write JTBD statements for the top clusters: "When {situation}, I want to {motivation}, so I can {outcome}."
5. Build the message-market map: their words → your copy blocks (headline candidates, bullet candidates, objection-handling lines) — quoted or lightly compressed, never marketing-speak.
6. Flag the gaps: pains competitors' messaging ignores, plus anything surprising that contradicts current positioning.
7. Hand off: name the top theme a copywriter should lead with, and the one objection every asset must answer.

Output format

## Voice of Customer — {corpus, n items, sources}

### Themes by frequency
| Bucket | Theme | Freq | Best verbatim |
|--------|-------|------|---------------|

### JTBD (top 3)
1. When ..., I want to ..., so I can ...

### Message-market map
| They say (verbatim) | Use it as |
|---------------------|-----------|
| "..."               | Headline / bullet / objection-handler |

### Gaps & surprises
- ...

### Handoff
Lead with: {theme}. Must answer: {objection}.

Quality bar

• Every theme backed by ≥ 2 verbatims, quoted exactly
• Frequencies counted, not vibed
• Sampling bias of the corpus stated up front
• JTBD statements contain a real situation, not a demographic
• Map entries are usable copy blocks, not categories
• At least one finding that challenges the current positioning (or explicit "none found")

Example

Ask: "Analyze these 80 G2 reviews of my scheduling tool." Produced: theme table (top pain: "double-booked because integrations lag", 19 mentions), 3 JTBD statements, a message-market map with 8 ready-to-use lines, gap ("nobody markets to the assistant persona who actually configures it"), and the handoff note.