Voice of customer

Most feedback programs collect diligently and change nothing. The collection is the easy half; the loop is the whole value.

Sources, weighted honestly

• Support contacts, the highest-volume and least prompted source, and the most under-used. People contacting you have a real problem nobody asked them about. But the sample is strongly self-selected: it excludes everyone who silently churned, worked around the problem, or would never contact you. Treat it as operational evidence to be normalized per active account and triangulated against churn and behavioral data, never as representative of the customer base.
• Churn and loss reasons, the most valuable and most under-sampled. People leaving have no reason to be polite.
• Interviews, depth, small n, best for understanding why something in the data is happening.
• Surveys, breadth, and only meaningful once you know what to ask.
• Public reviews and forums, biased toward extremes, useful for what people say when you are not in the room.

Anything a customer built a workaround for outranks anything they merely said in a survey.

On CSAT and NPS

Both are useful as trends and misleading as targets. The moment a team is measured on a score, the score improves faster than the experience does, asking at the favorable moment, coaching for the rating, excluding difficult segments.

Treat the score as a prompt for the free-text answer, which is where the information is. Segment before concluding: an overall score is an average of experiences that have nothing in common.

Never target a number without also watching the behavior it is supposed to predict.

Turning feedback into change

The failure is not collection, it is triage. Feedback needs: