Why your content feels flat
Using Voice of the Customer data to make content that Connects
Shallow content doesn’t connect. Content that drives engagement requires the depth and emotion. This doesn’t come from the tagline summarizing your customer personas. It also doesn’t come from asking AI to simulate “millennial parents shopping online for children’s sneakers.”
It comes from voice-of-the-customer (VOC) research.
Summaries of customer insights become shallow and lifeless when the raw emotion is stripped away. This sanitized foundation leads to generic messaging erroneously designed to appeal to many but in fact reaching no one. To truly connect, we need to use language that people relate to, reflecting their lived experiences, and in their own words.
A common practice with generative AI is to simulate a customer persona. AI tools scrape existing material and synthesize an average. This average is often stripped of real feeling. You don’t want your brand to show up as average when you need to compete in crowded markets. You want your brand to stand out.
Relatable, VOC-driven content is one way to do that. Let’s explore how to use voice of the customer data to get there.
Mining online Conversations
When you have tight budgets and short timelines, a paid focus group isn’t an option. But a glut of AI-generated content makes it difficult to find online material that gets to the truth of human experiences. Forums like Reddit are goldmines for unfiltered conversation. They are not curated for likes or SEO. They are responsive, raw, and immediate. People go to places like Reddit to be real, vent, ask for help, and tell the truth about what they’re experiencing. This is where you can get voice of the customer research without the cost of a focus group.
Online conversations are like focus groups without the cost
Voice of the customer data infuses your content with language that your audience will relate and respond to. AI tools are invaluable for quickly locating large volumes of data and analyzing it in return.
Reddit’s AI tools confirm the power of voice-of-customer
As of June 2025, Reddit launched two AI-powered tools as part of its advertising suite:
Reddit Insights — a social listening tool that taps into 22 billion comments and posts to analyze audience sentiment and emerging trends.
Conversation Summary Add-Ons — which let advertisers display real, positive user comments beneath their promoted posts.
Sources:
Reuters — Reddit unveils AI-driven ad tools to help brands tap into user discussions (June 2025)
Axios — Reddit launches new “Community Intelligence” tools for advertisers (June 2025)
These tools are designed to help brands show up more authentically. While they are interesting, the real power comes from listening well.
A Practical VOC Research and Messaging Framework
You can do meaningful VOC research without a massive budget. What you need is structure and rigor. A strong VOC approach follows a clear logic:
Define the business problem VOC must solve. Start with decision you want to influence: clearer positioning, better lead quality, higher conversion, fewer wrong-fit customers. Without this anchor, insights stay abstract.
Lock the customer segments before you analyze. Emotions aren’t universal. Different customers fear different outcomes, even if they use similar words. If you don’t separate audiences up front, patterns blend and messaging quickly gets generic.
Map your VOC sources, don’t rely on one channel. Forums, reviews, social comments, support tickets, sales notes: all of these capture a different kind of truth. The goal is to triangulate.
Work with verbatim language, not summaries. Insight comes from phrasing, not paraphrase. The words people use reveal how they see risk, effort, and uncertainty. When that language is “cleaned up” it loses depth.
Look for patterns in interpretation, not just complaints. Strong VOC analysis goes beyond what happened to uncover how customers interpret what happened. This is where the emotion lies, especially fear, doubt, hesitation, and relief.
Identify micro-patterns that repeat across stories. One comment is anecdotal. Ten similar stories with the same emotional cues point to something structural. These micro-patterns turn listening into strategy.
Pressure-test insights against business reality. Not every loud complaint matters. Compare qualitative patterns to real-world outcomes: lost deals, stalled decisions, customer quality, retention.
Translate insight into usable messaging direction. Good VOC drives clarity: what to explain, what to normalize, what to correct, and where reassurance helps vs where precision matters more.
Build messaging that respects decision context. Early-stage uncertainty, mid-stage comparison, and late-stage commitment require different emotional language. Content should fit the moment.
Deploy insights where decisions happen. They payoff is better blogs, landing pages, briefs, sales scripts, and fewer misaligned leads.
Practical VOC Example
Camping enthusiasts discussing which camp stove to buy
From these 3 comments we gain insights that improve storytelling:
Is the extra $20 worth it
Wind resistance is important
Beach camping is a specific use-case
A reliable push-button igniter is important
It has a gas regulator while others do not
Cupped burner keeps stove lit
Why this works
Individual stories are real. Relatable. That’s what drives engagement whether you’re comparing SaaS solutions or buying running shoes.
When you find trends — similar stories, repeated pain points — you find a common problem. When you tell an individual story, you give that problem a unique voice. Not a generic aggregate that fails to connect.
Final Thoughts
Real content starts with real listening.
If your content feels flat, you’re probably starting in the wrong place. Don’t ask AI to pretend to be your audience. Go listen to them. They’re already telling you what they need. Online conversations make it easier to hear. AI makes it easier to gather and analyze the conversation data.
So before you brief your next blog post to your team (or ChatGPT), do yourself a favor: perform VOC research. Search a forum or subreddit your audience uses. Read. Understand. And capture verbatims to inform your messaging.
When you speak to people in their own voice using examples they can relate to, you build trust and drive engagement.
Interested in learning how to adapt this VOC research workflow for you or your team? I provide AI training. Set up a discovery call to learn more.