Copywriting: Voice of Customer

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Definition of Voice of Customer

Writing in your reader's language means using the same words potential customers use to talk about their problem and, as a result, describing what they want the way they would describe it themselves.

Imagine you're selling a consulting service for freelancers.

You could present your service like this: "We help you optimize your client acquisition process through a structured lead generation system."

Great sentence, very professional, grammatically correct... and completely useless.

Why?

Because a freelancer would never describe their situation that way.

If you listened to how they actually talk about it, you might hear something like this: "I never know where my next client is going to come from."

The problem is the same, but the way it's described is completely different because, while the first sentence describes the problem from the perspective of the person selling the solution, the second describes it from within the experience of someone who lives with that problem every day.

That's reader language.

Why Voice of Customer is So Important

One of the fundamental jobs of copywriting is to create a sense of recognition: before readers can become interested in the solution, they have to recognize their own problem in the copy you’re putting in front of them.

Let's take business management software and compare the company's language with the customer's.

• Company language: "Business management software that centralizes and automates administrative processes."
• Customer language: "I'm sick of having invoices in one place. Payments are somewhere else. I have to open three different Excel spreadsheets just to figure out how much money I'm making."

The first sentence explains what the product does, but I think everyone on this planet already knows what administrative software does.

The second sentence, on the other hand, shows what experiencing the problem actually feels like: the customer is "sick of it."

Their information is scattered across different places, and they have to open multiple files just to get an answer that should be simple.

These details are extremely important for a copywriter because when people read something that closely resembles what they think in their everyday lives, they recognize themselves in it.

Our goal, the reaction we want to create, is to make readers think, "Yes. That's exactly my problem."

With the first sentence, creating this sense of recognition is impossible because readers come across words like "centralizes" or phrases like "administrative processes" and have to make an effort to figure out what they actually mean in their everyday lives.

This translation, let's call it that, requires effort.

It's a small amount of effort and often happens without the person even noticing it, that's true, but on the web, even a minor obstacle is enough of an excuse to close the page and move on to something less difficult.

Where Can You Find Voice of Customer?

You'll find reader language primarily in places where people spontaneously talk about the problem:

• Online reviews: These are a great place to start. Pay close attention to how people explain why they bought a product and how they describe what they're finally able to do after buying it. Study negative reviews carefully as well because they reveal what causes frustration.
• Forums and communities: In these spaces, people are trying to explain a problem or ask for help, which is precisely why their language tends to be more natural.
• Social media comments: Pay particular attention to the comments under YouTube videos that discuss the problem your product solves. Look especially for moments when someone describes a specific situation from their own life.

If you're writing for someone else's company, you have access to a source that's even closer to the customer: the conversations the company has already had with them.

Ask to read customer emails, support tickets, and sales chats.

These are all sources that allow you to see how customers described their problem before the company suggested a different way of talking about it.

How to Write in Your Reader's Language

Let's look at how to apply this principle in practice.

Imagine you have to promote a dry cleaner that also offers pickup and delivery.

To advertise the service, you could write:

Professional dry cleaning with home pickup and delivery.

Just like in the example I gave you earlier, this sentence is perfectly clear, stylistically polished, and explains the service exactly.

But, as before, it doesn't start with the way the customer actually experiences the problem.

While reading negative Google reviews of other dry cleaners, you discover that a very common complaint is: "They say they'll pick up your clothes at a certain time, but then you end up waiting around for hours because you never know when they're actually going to show up."

At this point, you can start with that sentence and turn it into a promotional message:

No more wasting hours waiting for your laundry pickup. We give you a clear pickup window, show up when we say we will, and bring your clean clothes back to your door.

Now you're presenting your product or service using the same words and expressions your potential customers use.

So, whenever you have to write a promotional message, you can make your product more compelling by understanding how customers describe the problem that product solves.