If you can harness VOC, you have a real advantage: you learn what to try next. Discover a possible improvement, and you know what to measure with analytics, EUEM, and WIA. If you can adopt a mindset of quick iteration that collects and analyzes the voice of your customers, you’ll be much more likely to succeed online.

VOC is a poor substitute for actually interacting with your customers. As the Web shifts from a one-to-many monologue to a many-to-many conversation, there are less intrusive, less misleading ways to determine what your target audience is after. We’ll look at this in Chapters 11 through 14 of this book, when we turn our attention toward online communities.

VOC won’t be marginalized, however. It will be disseminated differently—through Twitter threads and Facebook groups. There will be a human element to it, as we invite social contacts to give us more detailed information resulting from a survey. Community managers will have several predefined surveys running at all times and will guide vocal community members toward them.

We’ve admonished operators for asking questions that can be answered elsewhere. Doing so is lazy and often less accurate than cross-referencing other data you already have. But we would be remiss if we didn’t recognize that there is a good reason this still happens despite a desire to keep surveys short and completion rates up: data compartmentalization.

In some cases, you may be legally prevented from associating VOC data (such as race, gender, or age) with a visitor’s identity (analytics, WIA). If this is the case, you have no choice but to collect data within the VOC system, even if it already exists elsewhere, because you can’t associate the respondent with analytics and EUEM tools without breaking the law. If so, we forgive you for asking visitors things you already know—just try not to do it too much.