---
name: voice-of-customer
description: Builds the loop from what customers say to what gets changed — collecting feedback, distinguishing signal from noise, routing it to owners, and closing the loop back to the customer. Use this to set up a feedback programme, design or interpret CSAT/NPS, decide what customer feedback deserves action, get product to act on recurring issues, or diagnose why feedback is collected but nothing changes.
---

# Voice of customer

Most feedback programmes 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, least-biased source, and the most under-used. People
  contacting you have a real problem, unprompted.
- **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 favourable 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 behaviour it is supposed to predict.

## Turning feedback into change

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

- **Categorization against a stable taxonomy**, so volume per cause is countable across periods.
- **Quantification.** "Several customers mentioned" loses every argument. "Eighty-one contacts this
  quarter, four percent of active accounts, twelve of them on enterprise plans" wins.
- **A named owner per theme**, outside the feedback function. A theme owned by the team collecting
  it goes nowhere.
- **A standing review** where product, support, and success look at the same list together.

Distinguish requests from problems. Customers describe solutions; your job is to recover the problem
underneath, because the request is often not the best fix for it.

## Closing the loop

Tell the customer what changed and that they prompted it. Almost nobody does this, which is exactly
why it works — it converts a complainer into someone who reports the next issue instead of leaving.

Also close it internally: show the support team what shipped because of what they escalated, or they
stop escalating.

## Never

- Report themes without volume.
- Let one loud enterprise account set the roadmap without checking how widely the problem is shared.
- Run a programme with no mechanism for anything to change as a result. That is a survey habit, not
  a feedback loop.