McKinsey found that employees spend 1.8 hours every day searching for information. 9.3 hours per week. Their summary: “Businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work. The fifth is off searching for answers.”
For copywriters the problem is specific. You spent 4 hours mining Reddit and review sites. You collected 80 quotes. You put them... somewhere. A Google Doc. A Notion page. A random text file. Three weeks later you need that one quote about pricing anxiety. And you cannot find it.
A copywriter on Reddit described this exactly:
“For me the headache is not finding VOC sources. It is organizing them. I have Google Docs. Notion pages. Random PDFs. Zoom recordings. Loom links. Email threads... and then I am supposed to magically remember where that one killer quote came from.”
The research is not the hard part. You already know where to find customer language and what words to look for. The hard part is making sure you can FIND those words again when you need them.
Here are 3 voice of the customer templates used by professional copywriters. Pick one. Use it on your next project.
Template 1: The Wiebe method (simplest)
Joanna Wiebe from Copyhackers uses three columns. That is it. Three columns in a Google Sheet:
Column 1: What they LOVE. Positive sentiments. Desired outcomes. “Game changer.” “Finally found something that works.” “Made my job so much easier.”
Column 2: What they HATE. Pain points. Frustrations. Complaints. “Exhausting.” “Nightmare.” “I wasted 6 months on this.”
Column 3: What they WORRY about. Fears. Hesitations. Objections. “Is it worth the price?” “Will it actually work for my niche?” “I do not trust AI.”
Wiebe's rule: paste the actual words. “With as few summaries or abstractions as possible.” Verbatim quotes only. The messiness IS the data.
This is the voice of the customer template for someone who wants to start TODAY. Three columns. One sheet. Done.
Best for: Quick projects. One-off landing pages. When you have 30-50 quotes and need to organize them in 15 minutes.
Template 2: The Havice method (six categories)
Jen Havice wrote the book on this. Literally. It is called Finding the Right Message. Her voice of the customer template uses six categories:
1. Struggle. The pain they experience. What keeps them up at night. The problem in their own words.
2. The Fix. What they want the solution to do. Described in THEIR terms. Not feature language. Their language.
3. Hesitations. What stops them from buying. Friction points. Concerns. “Too expensive.” “Not sure it will work for me.”
4. Awareness Level. How much they already know about the problem and available solutions. From “I do not even know I have a problem” to “I am comparing 3 tools right now.”
5. Differentiators. What makes a solution stand out. The features and benefits they actually MENTION. Not the ones you think matter. The ones THEY talk about.
6. Success. The outcome they want. What their life or business looks like AFTER the problem is solved.
After sorting quotes into these six buckets Havice creates two outputs: a Priority Messages List (frequency-ranked quotes per category) and a Top 10 Compelling Quotes list — the snippets that are “insightful and well summarized and when customers are excited about something.”
Best for: Full website rewrites. Product launches. When you have 60-100+ quotes and need to turn them into a complete messaging strategy.
Template 3: The Price method (three buckets)
Momoko Price teaches this in her CXL course on product messaging. Three master categories. Each with sub-categories:
Motivation Messages: Desired outcomes. Pain points. Purchase prompts (the trigger that made them start looking).
Value Proposition Messages: Unique benefits. Delightful features. Dealbreaker requirements (must-haves without which they will not buy).
Anxiety Messages: Uncertainties. Objections. Perceived risks. (This bucket feeds directly into an objection playbook.)
Price's method: “Tally up the severity and frequency scores and use those to come up with the best unique value proposition.” That is the Frequency x Intensity framework applied to the organized data.
Best for: SaaS and product copy. When you need to map customer language directly to a value proposition.
The 4 fields every quote needs (regardless of template)
No matter which voice of the customer template you use every single quote needs these 4 fields:
1. The exact quote. Verbatim. Typos included. Do not clean it up.
2. The source. Reddit. G2. Trustpilot. Amazon. YouTube. Name the platform AND the specific page. “Reddit r/copywriting” not just “Reddit.”
3. The URL. So you can go back. Reddit threads get deleted. Reviews get removed. Archive the link NOW.
4. A category tag. Pain point. Desired outcome. Objection. Competitor mention. Buying signal. Emotional language. One tag per quote. This is what makes the data SEARCHABLE later.
Without these 4 fields you will end up like the copywriter with Google Docs and Notion pages and random PDFs wondering where that killer quote went.
Most copywriters think disorganization is a personality problem
It is not. It is a SYSTEM problem.
IDC found that knowledge workers spend 2.5 hours per day — 30% of their working time — just searching for information. Not doing the work. LOOKING for the information they need to do the work.
For a copywriter billing at $100/hr that is $250/day in lost time. $1,250/week. $5,000/month. On searching. Not writing. Not researching. Searching for research you already DID.
A Google Sheet with 4 fields and 7 category tags fixes this. The ROI of a voice of the customer template is not “being organized.” It is $5,000/month in recovered time.
Which template to pick
Start with Wiebe's 3-column method if you have never organized VoC data before. Love. Hate. Worry. 15 minutes to set up.
Move to Havice's 6-category method when you are working on full website rewrites or have 60+ quotes per project. The six categories map directly to page sections.
Use Price's 3-bucket method when you need a value proposition. The Motivation / Value Prop / Anxiety structure maps directly to headline → body → FAQ.
All three methods start with the same raw material: the 40+ quotes from the 30-minute voice vault method. The template is how you make those quotes usable. Findable. And ready to become copy. Because once they are organized your audience's own words become your best copy.
For the complete 7-step process from sourcing to brief — that is the companion article. Organizing is Step 3.
P.S. Brevvi does the collecting AND organizing for you. 100+ sources. 23 sections. Every quote tagged and ranked. Run your first one free at brevvi.ai