--- name: voc-evidence-log description: "A running log of customer quotes and observations, each tagged with a theme — drafted for you, yours to edit — so you can see at a glance which few things customers are actually telling you, not just a pile of unsorted notes. Use when: You have real customer quotes or observations — from interviews, support tickets, surveys, gemba sessions, or win-loss calls — and want to know what they add up to, not just where they're filed. You want a defensible, evidence-backed answer to 'what are customers actually saying' rather than the loudest anecdote in the room. Not for: You only have secondhand impressions of what customers think, not actual quotes or logged observations — go gather real evidence first; a log built from memory inherits every gap in that memory. You already know the theme you're looking for and just want to confirm it — an evidence log works best as genuine discovery, not confirmation of a conclusion you've already reached." --- # Voice of the customer (VOC) evidence log A running log of customer quotes and observations, each tagged with a theme — drafted for you, yours to edit — so you can see at a glance which few things customers are actually telling you, not just a pile of unsorted notes. Family: Voice of the customer · Format: .xlsx · Domain: core ## What it is A VOC evidence log is the foundational Voice of the Customer artifact — everything downstream in this family (affinity diagrams, CTQ trees, segmentation work) starts from evidence captured here. Each entry is one quote or observation, with its source and how it was gathered. The log doesn't just collect quotes, it tags each one with a theme and tallies which themes come up most — turning a pile of individually true but disconnected notes into a small, ranked list of what customers are actually telling you, with the receipts still attached to every claim. ## When to use it Use it when: - You have real customer quotes or observations — from interviews, support tickets, surveys, gemba sessions, or win-loss calls — and want to know what they add up to, not just where they're filed. - You want a defensible, evidence-backed answer to 'what are customers actually saying' rather than the loudest anecdote in the room. - You're about to make a product, messaging, or process decision and want the voice-of-customer evidence behind it in one place before you decide. Not when: - You only have secondhand impressions of what customers think, not actual quotes or logged observations — go gather real evidence first; a log built from memory inherits every gap in that memory. - You already know the theme you're looking for and just want to confirm it — an evidence log works best as genuine discovery, not confirmation of a conclusion you've already reached. - You need to design a new research study, not tally evidence you already have — that's the VOC collection plan. ## How to fill it in - **scope** — Which customer population does this evidence cover, and over what period? A log with no stated boundary blends customers who don't belong in the same analysis into a set of themes that describes neither group well. - **entries** — Enter each quote or observation with its source, source type, and date. Use the customer's own words or a close paraphrase — a generalized summary defeats the point of evidence. No theme yet; that's drafted for you next. - **themeSummary** — Drafted from your entries, then genuinely yours to edit — reassign any entry's theme and the tally updates immediately. Unlike every other artifact in this catalogue, this stays editable after generation, because theme assignment is the real judgement call here. - **narrative** — Drafted from the top themes — what the evidence, taken together, actually suggests. - **nextSteps** — What will you do with this evidence, ranked by impact and effort, owned and dated? A next step not tied to a named theme is a coaching failure mode, not a real action. ## What good looks like The example below is a B2B SaaS team's onboarding feedback: nine real quotes across four themes, a tally showing onboarding friction as the dominant cluster, and next steps that trace directly to specific themes rather than a generic 'listen to customers more' resolution. Full worked example, on-screen and as a downloadable .xlsx: https://www.katafacts.com/katas/voc-evidence-log ## Common mistakes - **Summarizing or paraphrasing away the customer's actual words before logging the entry.** — The point of an evidence log is that every theme traces back to something a real customer actually said — a summarized entry can't be checked against the source anymore, which is exactly what makes evidence more trustworthy than an impression. - **Treating every theme with any entries as worth acting on.** — Same vital-few discipline as every other artifact in this catalogue — the top few themes with real weight beat a flat list of everything anyone ever said once. - **Splitting near-duplicate themes ("onboarding is slow" and "setup takes too long") instead of merging them.** — Inconsistent theme labels understate how big a real cluster actually is — two 3-entry themes that are really the same issue look like two minor patterns instead of one major one. ## What it connects to Upstream: - **Gemba walk observation form** (not in the catalogue yet) — Observations captured on a gemba walk are exactly the kind of raw material this log tallies — feed them in as entries rather than letting them sit in a separate notebook. Downstream: - **Ideal customer profile (ICP) canvas** (`icp-canvas`) — A named theme pattern — which customers say what, and why — is direct input to who an ICP should target or exclude. ## Where AI helps Judgement — stays with you: - Deciding whether a drafted theme label is actually right, or reassigning it to something that fits better - Deciding which theme is worth acting on first Analysis — AI helps: - Drafting a theme label per entry from the quote's actual content - Drafting the narrative from the top themes - Drafting next steps that trace to a specific theme Drudgery — automated: - Tallying entries per theme and computing each theme's share of the total, with the arithmetic shown - Identifying the vital-few top themes - Exporting to xlsx in the house format --- Voice of the customer (VOC) evidence log is licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Attribution: Katafacts (katafacts.com). ## Using this skill Apply this method as part of whatever broader task, instructions, or deliverable you're already working on -- it's a method to use, not a standalone conversation to start. There is no generation tool for this catalogue yet, so draft the artifact's actual content yourself, following the fields above, the same way a person filling this out by hand would. The canonical guide page and a downloadable worked example (.xlsx) are at https://www.katafacts.com/katas/voc-evidence-log.