People who are starting out on their first VoC programs often are not sure how much to write down and how to keep track of attributing comments to different speakers. While there are benefits to understanding the customer's responses and the context of their words, this is not your primary responsibility. Your main responsibility is to provide a verbatim transcript of the interview session, capturing the customer's responses in a way that sounds like the customer speaking; in other words, capturing the customer's voice.

To do this, you need to try and write down the interviewee's responses without attempting to interpret or translate their responses in any way. Try to capture as much of what has been said as possible. Any change you make to the words the customers says takes time and thought. Attempting to process and summarize what the customer has said tends to put you into the interview and this is not what you want. When you try and summarize what the customer has said, you end up drawing upon your own knowledge and experiences and that could color or change what the customer truly meant. This is particularly true if a customer says something you know to be false, and you may leave it out of the interview entirely. To avoid imparting your judgments or experience into the interview, it is safer to just write down as much of what the customer says in as much of its entirety as you can capture.

Something else that may seem a little unnatural at first, but offers additional benefits during the later phase of deconstruction of the interviews, is to always keep the original pronouns as they are used. If the person says, "I had an issue installing your controller," that is exactly what you should write. You should not say, "They had an issue installing our controller" or "had issue when installing controller." By keeping the original pronouns in the interview notes, you will always know it is the customer who is speaking and what their words are.

It will often be difficult to get everything that is said verbatim; however, getting key customer quotes is an integral part of the VoC process. It is absolutely necessary to identify those key passages where the customer makes a salient point. Make sure you do write it verbatim and mark the passage the customer said using quotation marks so there is no question as to whether these are the exact words shared by the customer or your interpretation of the customer's feedback.

One last word of caution when conducting an interview is to never let your feelings or emotions enter into an interview. Do not react to what the customer says by frowning, correcting a customer, shaking your head, and so on. Simply write or type what you hear.

Even the best note takers will invariably miss a point or two during an interview, and while it is acceptable to ask the customer to repeat something that has been said, it is best to only do it if absolutely necessary as this can interrupt the flow of the interview. Often it is better to ask any clarifying questions at the end of the interview, as this will not impact the customer's train of thought or flow of the conversation.