It’s important to have a deep understanding of your customer base. To know what draws them to your brand and your products, what their expectations and experiences are, and why they are leaving to try other brands.

One of the best methods you can use to gain that insight is Voice of Customer (VoC) research. This systematic process enables you to capture, analyze, and act on customer feedback and perceptions. The goal is to deeply understand customer needs, expectations, preferences, and challenges to help your organization make more informed decisions about product development, marketing, customer experience, and strategic planning.

At its core, voice of the customer research is about listening to the people who matter most: your customers.

Why VoC Research Matters in the Building Products & Home Improvement Industry

In the building products and home improvement industry, understanding customer behavior isn't optional—it’s a strategic requirement. Homeowners, contractors, builders, dealers, and other customers all have distinct needs that evolve with market conditions, technologies, and economic shifts.  

VoC research enables brands to:

• Optimize messaging and positioning
• Identify unmet needs or gaps in product/service offerings
• Validate innovations before they hit the market
• Deepen customer loyalty and satisfaction

What Business Questions Can Voice of Customer Research Answer?

By systematically collecting and analyzing feedback, building products manufacturers and suppliers can make informed decisions that enhance customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and competitive advantage. Here are some of the questions you can get answered through VoC research:

• Why are customers choosing competitors?
• Why are contractors switching brands?
• Which product improvements matter most?
• What is driving customer loyalty?
• What pain points exist throughout the buying journey?
• Which customer needs are currently unmet?
• What messaging resonates most with different audiences?
• Which opportunities should product teams prioritize?

Can You Rely Solely on What Your Salespeople Report Back from Customers?

While salespeople offer valuable frontline insights into customer needs and preferences, relying solely on their reports can lead to an incomplete or biased understanding. Their perspectives may be shaped by individual interactions, incentive structures, or selective recall, which can miss broader trends or emerging pain points.

To build a more accurate and comprehensive view of the customer experience, it’s essential to supplement sales feedback with systematic Voice of the Customer research, such as surveys, interviews, and behavioral data analysis.  

How Voice of Customer Research Supports Better Business Decisions

Decision-makers and users of lower-incidence products are often tough to track down. That's where experience in reaching hard-to-find audiences makes all the difference.

The Farnsworth Group specializes in custom-built research for the building products and home improvement space. Our team blends qualitative techniques like in-depth interviews and focus groups with robust quantitative surveys to understand both the “what” and the “why” behind customer behavior. Each method has its own benefits and objectives, including:

• Qualitative: Uncover motivations, emotions, and unspoken needs.
• Quantitative: Validate findings and define behaviors with statistical rigor.

When you partner with TFG to conduct VoC research, you'll gain actionable insights that drive key business functions across departments, to use for efforts in:

• Marketing Optimization: Inform campaign direction with data-driven messaging.
• Product Development: Build solutions aligned with actual user needs.
• Strategic Planning: Identify high-potential market segments and unmet needs.
• CX Improvements: Pinpoint customer pain points to enhance service delivery.

Here’s a closer look at some of the goals of VoC research and how it can help you better understand your customers and make informed business decisions:

1. Understand Your Customers: Segmentation and Personas

VoC research often involves segmentation, which breaks your customer base into distinct groups, as well as the development of personas that guide targeting, media use, and messaging strategies. These segments can be identified in future research through the use of a type tool, which will allow your teams to better reach your ideal customer targets study over study. The result is a consistent longitudinal customer approach to insights and go-to-market strategies.

2. Improve Customer Experiences: Path to Purchase

Understanding how customers move from motivations to research to decision helps identify points of friction or delight throughout their process. This can help you determine what you need to say, when you need to say it, how you need to say it, and to whom to influence decisions along the customer journey. Outcomes of understanding the customer's path to purchase has a range of implications for building products brands, and it can influence business decisions related to channel, marketing, sales, product development, and branding.  

3. Build Better Products: Testing and Development

VoC is also critical for ensuring products fit the market. The Farnsworth Group helps clients gather pre-launch feedback on features, pricing, packaging, and appeal to improve the chances of success and increase sales. Product concept testing and validation is done through both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Outcomes will:

• Drive feature enhancements
• Illuminate preferred messaging when it comes to product benefits
• Provide insight on purchase interest at various price points

This data is determined based on feedback from highly qualified end-users of the product.

4. Strengthen Your Brand: Brand Health Tracking

What do your customers really think of your brand?  How do they compare you to your competition? The Farnsworth Group's VoC research helps uncover brand strengths, weaknesses, and white space opportunities.

There are often two perspectives organizations can take. One is more associated to customer satisfaction, where you capture VoC from existing customers or users of the brand. This is critical to understand how to retain customers and drive loyalty.

The other approach involves a sample of the broader market, making sure to capture not only customers of your brand but non-customers, as well. This perspective provides a more representative market view to help you understand where your brand stands in context of others, and what gaps you may need to close to capture more of the market.

When Should You Conduct Voice of Customer Research?

Voice of Customer research should be conducted at key decision points, where customer insights can directly influence strategy, product, or service outcomes. Doing it at the right time ensures you avoid costly mistakes and align with real customer needs and expectations.

For example, you should consider conducting a VoC study when you’re:

• Launching a new product
• Refreshing your brand positioning
• Seeing declining customer satisfaction
• Losing market share
• Wanting to improve customer experience
• Developing a new product roadmap
• Entering a new market
• Updating sales messaging
• Planning annual strategy

By weaving customer insights into product design, branding, marketing, and channel strategies, companies can act with clarity and confidence, not guesswork. The result? Less risk, more alignment, and a sharper edge in a market that’s constantly shifting.

The Role of Customer Research in Unlocking New Market Potential

Customer research also can be used to help you unlock new market potential by uncovering unmet customer needs and preferences, emerging behaviors, and other opportunities. Using data gleaned directly from your customer research, your team can design new products or features that match real customer motivations, identify currently untapped market segments, uncover differences in motivations across segments, and refine your positioning to appeal to a new or different audience.

Customer researcher allows you to reduce risk before entering into a new market. You’ll learn about the challenges that customers are facing and what they want from home improvement brands. With this information, your teams can make evidence-based decisions to tailor products and craft messaging that resonated with real motivations to tap into potential revenue streams. Additionally, customer research can help improve retention by closing expectation gaps and strengthening brand loyalty, which will also help your market position.

Your Next Steps in Conducting VoC Research

Voice of Customer research is more than just listening—it's translating what you hear into smarter strategy, stronger products, and stickier customer relationships. When done right, VoC becomes a compass for decision-making across every corner of your business.

Unlike generic market research firms, our research experts at The Farnsworth Group bring decades of building industry expertise to the table. That means sharper questions, better recruiting, and insights that make sense in your world, because they come from a team that lives and breathes it.

In the building products and home improvement industry, staying close to your customers isn't a nice-to-have, it’s a must. With a thoughtful VoC research approach, guided by experienced partners like The Farnsworth Group, you're won't be just responding to the market, but staying ahead of it.

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