Voice Of Customer

---
name: voice-of-customer
description: Ground claims about customer pain in real discussion instead of invention. Use whenever you are about to assert what customers want, struggle with, complain about, object to, or the words they use — in ad copy, landing pages, cold outreach, positioning, personas, feature justification, or market research. Also use to sanity-check a claim someone else made about a market ("do people actually care about X?"), to find objections and competitor gripes before writing rebuttals, or to pick which community a niche offer should target. Triggers on "what do people actually say about", "is this a real pain", "mine reddit for", "voice of customer", "find objections", "what do customers complain about", and on any moment where pain-language is about to be written from imagination.
---

# Voice of customer

Marketing written from imagination sounds like marketing. Marketing written from the words people actually typed sounds like recognition. This skill exists to make the second one the default.

The `voc` MCP server does the fetching (`find_pain`, `mine_subreddits`, `find_objections`). This skill is about **when to reach for it and how to read what comes back**.

**If those tools aren't available in this environment**, don't fake it and don't quietly skip the research. Say plainly that Reddit can't be reached here, then get what you can from the sources built-in tools *can* reach — WebSearch and WebFetch handle niche forums, review sites, Trustpilot-style pages and aggregate-stat articles perfectly well. Everything below about querying, weighting recurrence and evidence scope still applies to those sources. Only Reddit is genuinely blocked without the server, because built-in crawlers can't reach reddit.com at all.

## What this is, and is not, evidence for

This matters more than the mechanics. Getting it wrong turns anecdote into false authority.

**It IS good evidence for:**
- The *words* people use for a problem — the phrasing, the metaphors, the swearing
- Whether a pain **recurs** — the same complaint from many people, independently
- What people tried first, what it cost them, what finally made them act
- Objections, and the rebuttals real customers make to each other

**It is NOT evidence for:**
- Whether anything is **true**. It surfaces what people *say*, not what's so.
- Market size, pricing norms, industry statistics, efficacy of anything. Never cite a Reddit thread as a number.
- What a *population* thinks. Reddit and HN are self-selected, skewed English-speaking, online, and tech/hobbyist-heavy. Absence of complaint is not absence of pain — often it means that audience isn't there.

If a claim needs to be *factually* true, verify it with WebSearch/WebFetch against a real source. Use this for language and recurrence only.

## When to reach for it

Reach for it *before* writing, not after. The point is to write as a response to a real complaint.

- About to write a headline, hook, hero, subject line, or DM opener about a problem → mine first, write second
- About to name an objection or write a rebuttal → `find_objections`, so you answer the objection people actually raise rather than the one that's convenient
- About to claim "customers want X" or "the pain here is Y" → check it recurs
- Choosing which niche or community to target → `mine_subreddits` across candidates and compare hit counts

Skip it for pure brand/awareness work with no problem claim, and for anything where you already have first-party customer transcripts — real interviews beat forum posts every time.

## Querying well

- **Write the query the way a sufferer would type it.** `boiler keeps losing pressure`, not `central heating depressurisation`. Colloquial, misspelled, and emotional beats correct.
- **Sort defaults to `relevance` — leave it there.** `top` surfaces viral noise; relevance surfaces the actual pain.
- **Reddit is the main seam.** Built-in WebSearch/WebFetch are blocked on reddit.com, which is why this server exists.
- **Hacker News is thin for consumer and trades niches.** Zero hits for plumbers or salons is expected, not a broken query. It's strong for B2B/dev/founder pain. Keep HN queries to 2–3 words — the API AND-matches every term, so long phrases return nothing.
- **Always pass `subreddits` to `find_objections`.** Its angles are long phrases; searched site-wide they match loosely and huge off-topic threads win. One live run for software objections returned Nintendo Switch and r/antiwork megathreads. Constraining to 4-8 buyer subs turned the same query into usable gripes.
- **Run several narrow queries, not one broad one.** Three phrasings of the same pain surface three different vocabularies.
- **Use `questionsOnly: true` in broad subs.** r/Entrepreneur, r/marketing, r/startups and similar are dominated by people *broadcasting* expertise — "How I made $150k", "SEO is Not Hard", step-by-step guides — which bury the people *asking*. In one test it cut 173 hits to 58 and removed every guru post. Narrow problem-shaped subs (r/PPC, r/copywriting) often don't need it.
- **It fixes posture, not topic.** `questionsOnly` keeps genuine questions, but a vague query still returns genuine questions *about the wrong thing*. If the survivors are real questions on unrelated subjects, tighten the query — don't blame the filter.

## Follow the good threads into their replies

Search returns *posts*. The post is often the question; the replies are the answer. Once a thread looks relevant, call `read_thread` on its URL — that is where the workarounds, the prices, the tool names and the objections live.

This matters most on posts written by **someone validating a product idea** ("would you pay for this?", "is this something that would actually be useful?", "I'm not a plumber but I'm building…"). Those posts are worthless as pain evidence — the founder is asserting the pain, not feeling it. But the replies are the market's verdict, already given, for free. In one run, a founder asking whether missed calls cost plumbers money got the reply *"Texts and voicemail solve the problem."* That single comment was worth more than the entire post it was attached to.

Watch for two things while reading replies:

- **Subreddit rules.** Several subs, r/smallbusiness among them, explicitly ban market-research posts — "we are not your focus group". If the mod bot has commented, treat that as a hard boundary for your own posting, not just theirs.
- **Consensus vs. one loud voice.** Five replies saying "not worth it" is a finding. One is an anecdote.

## Reading the results

Weight by **recurrence, not score**. One 2000-upvote post is a story; nine people saying the same thing in different words is a market.

For each recurring pain, pull out and keep verbatim:
1. **The phrase they use for the problem** — this is your headline, unedited
2. **The trigger event** — what made it urgent enough to post about
3. **What it cost them** — money, time, an argument, a ruined weekend
4. **What they tried first** — that's your competitor, whether it's a company or a YouTube tutorial

Quote, don't paraphrase. Paraphrasing is where the customer's voice gets replaced by yours. Log quotes with their links so a claim can always be traced back.

## Honest failure modes

- **Cherry-picking.** If you go looking for a pain you already decided on, you will find three posts and call it validated. Note how many hits actually supported it out of how many you read.
- **Sample skew.** A subreddit is a subculture, not an industry. r/DIYUK homeowners are not the same buyers as the tradespeople in r/PlumbingRepair — and neither is the person who'd hire you.
- **Staleness.** A complaint from 2019 may already be solved. Check dates before building an angle on it.
- **No hits ≠ no pain.** It usually means that audience doesn't discuss it publicly, in English, on these two sites.