3 Ways CMOs Can Use the Voice of the Customer to Build Brands

This was originally published in Adweek.

One of the most important things I've done as an executive is to relentlessly focus on understanding the customer, even beyond traditional research. In my current role as CMO, I make time on my schedule to read my company's reviews once a week and meet with clients whenever I get the chance. When I was leading a product team, I created a group of our most vocal critics and asked them to give us feedback as we developed the offering. When I was at an ad agency, I would check a social media dashboard every morning to see what my clients' clients were saying. And when I was working in video game advertising, I wasn't just looking for gamers' online chatter, I was hosting chat rooms while simultaneously playing the games with them. And yet, when I look back on my career, I remain convinced that I could have done even more and that it would have paid off.

These small but important ways to "register" are just the tip of the iceberg for understanding what we marketers call "the voice of the customer" and using it for the essential components, such as intelligence, segmentation, messaging and even product. vision. The voice of the customer, by definition, describes the feedback your customers have about their experiences and expectations regarding your products or services. There are many ways to capture the voice of customers, such as customer interviews, surveys, review monitoring, social media analytics, recorded calls, and measuring your brand's net promote score.

Yet companies too often use qualitative intelligence and essentially store it in a box rather than using it as the lifeblood of their brands. When harnessed well and consistently, the voice of customers is an inordinate opportunity for marketers to gain competitive advantage.

Here are three ways to take it out of storage and put it to work for your brand:

Optimize your go-to-market strategyThe voice of the customer should guide the go-to-market strategy (GTM) for every new product or service launch. It starts with focusing on who your customers are and listening to what they value and how your products connect to them.

Truly listening to your customers—their wants, their fears, and even the language they use—is an art that, done right, can inspire your marketing efforts for years to come.

For example, Slack executives brilliantly identified that not only were emails time-consuming, but they also lacked engagement features for growing sales, marketing, and product teams . From its launch until today, the brand has listened to customer feedback to improve its product and boost its marketing. For the latter, its marketers have positioned Slack as a fun, easy-to-use system that keeps communication simple and allows users, according to its slogan, to be "less busy". Founded in 2009, it now has over 10 million daily users and is one of the top rated products on G2 with nearly 29,000 reviews.

Co-Creating Product and Marketing ExperiencesThe voice of the customer will be even more important over the next year as significant consumer privacy changes are underway with Apple's IDFA policy change and deleting cookies from one web browser at a time. These moves by major tech players severely limit advertisers' ability to reach the right audiences, as well as measure campaign performance. To meet these challenges, brands must co-create product and marketing experiences with their customers. The best way to do this, of course, is to give customers more of a voice. In a world without cookies, the brands that will shine will be those that grow their own audience, create platforms for sharing and collaboration, and grow communities of evangelists.

Salesforce, with its