Voice of Customer only works if the questions don’t telegraph the answer. The EU Connected Dispenser project ran 57 stakeholder interviews across 33 hours specifically to avoid designing a solution around what the internal team assumed the pain point was.
Open-ended VOC sessions ask what someone’s day looks like and where it breaks down, not whether they’d like a specific feature. The Sway personas are a compact version of this: each one captures what the person says, thinks, does, feels, wants, and needs - a says/thinks/does/feels frame that keeps the interviewer from putting words in someone’s mouth.
Leading question
"Would you use a feature that tracks maintenance history automatically?" - invites a polite yes.
Open-ended version
"Walk me through the last time you needed to check a repair history. What did you actually do?" - surfaces the real workaround, and whether it’s even a problem worth solving.
A few habits keep VOC sessions honest:
- Ask about the last specific instance, not general habits - memory for "the last time" is more reliable than "usually."
- Let silence sit; the second answer after a pause is often more honest than the first.
- Capture verbatim quotes, not paraphrases - paraphrasing is where a researcher’s bias sneaks in.