A Voice of Customer Template You Can Copy

Most voice of customer templates are survey forms. This one isn't, because the highest-signal customer language is not sitting in survey answers; it is sitting in Reddit threads, Amazon reviews, and comment sections, already written, unprompted, in the customer's own words. This template organizes that language into something you can write ads from. It pairs with our full voice of customer research method.

The template

Six columns. Use a spreadsheet, a Notion table, or a doc, the format doesn't matter, the columns do.

| Column | What goes in it | Example | |---|---|---| | Verbatim | The exact quote, unedited | "I've tried every dry shampoo out there and my scalp still itches by 2pm." | | Source | Platform + context | Reddit, r/Haircare thread | | Theme | Pain, desire, objection, or trigger | Pain: failed alternatives | | Frequency | How many separate people said a version of it | 14 | | Intensity | Mild, strong, or desperate, judged from the wording | Strong | | Angle | The ad idea it produces | Hook: "Scalp still itching by 2pm?" |

Copy-paste header row:

Verbatim | Source | Theme | Frequency | Intensity | Angle

Three rules that keep the template honest:

1. ✓Verbatims stay verbatim. The moment you paraphrase, you launder out the phrasing that made the quote valuable. Typos and slang stay.
2. ✓Frequency is counted, not felt. One brilliant quote is an anecdote. Fourteen people describing the same pain is an angle. Count separate people, not repeated sightings of one comment.
3. ✓One theme per row. A quote that contains a pain and an objection becomes two rows. Rows must be sortable or the template is a diary.

How to fill it, step by step

1. Pick your surfaces. Two or three places your buyers actually talk: a subreddit in your niche, your own and competitors' Amazon reviews, the TikTok comment sections under viral videos in your category, YouTube reviews, app stores. Competitor ad comments are the most underused surface on this list.

2. Collect in bulk, then read. Scrape first, judge later. A few hundred comments per surface is enough for a first pass. Skim for sentences where someone describes a problem, a wish, a doubt, or the moment they decided to buy. Those go in as rows.

3. Merge and count. Sort by theme, merge rows that say the same thing differently, and add up frequency. This is the step everyone skips and the step that makes the output defensible.

4. Rank and write. Sort by frequency, break ties with intensity. The top three pains become your first hooks. The top objection becomes the line your next ad answers in its first five seconds. Fill the Angle column last, and keep the customer's wording in it.

A filled template with 30 ranked rows beats a 40-page persona deck, because every row is evidence with a count attached, not a guess with a stock photo.

If you still want survey questions

Surveys have one real job in this workflow: reaching customers whose language you cannot find in public. If you run one, use open questions that produce verbatims, not scales that produce averages:

1. ✓What was going on in your life that sent you looking for something like this?
2. ✓What else did you try before this, and what was wrong with it?
3. ✓What almost stopped you from buying?
4. ✓Describe the moment you knew it was working, what happened?
5. ✓If you told a friend about this, what exactly would you say?

Every answer feeds the same six columns. The template doesn't care whether a quote came from a survey or a scrape; it only cares that the words are the customer's.

The shortcut

Steps 1 through 3 are the grind: collecting thousands of comments and clustering them by theme and frequency. That is the part Adlicio automates, it scrapes the comment and review surfaces, clusters the recurring language, and returns the ranked angles with verbatims attached, which is this template, filled. The voice of customer guide shows the full method either way, manual or automated.