Bringing the Voice of the Customer Together with a Pursuit of Excellence
LAST UPDATED: November 19, 2025 at 9:37AM
by Braden Kelley
One treat at Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Nashville recently was having the opportunity to see and hear basketball legend Dick Vitale. I can’t all share all of the stories here, but one thing that stuck with me from his musings were that the keys to a successful life are passion, preparation and perseverance.
Whether you are successful at anything you attempt is going to come down to your desire, dedication, determination and discipline. AND, guiding your life by eternally asking yourself the following question:
“Was I better today than I was yesterday?”
After Dick Vitale’s talk I attended a few other sessions throughout the day, including one of the Voice of the Customer (VOC) with Tisha Cole of Kenvue. Key session insights include:
The core theme emerging from the session centers on the strategic interpretation and deployment of Voice of the Customer (VOC) data to drive tangible business value. A critical finding is the frequent decoupling of customer sentiment metrics, like Net Promoter Score (NPS), and actual purchase behavior or revenue. This suggests a scenario where customers may express dissatisfaction yet remain “trapped” due to high switching costs or lack of viable alternatives, highlighting the need to look beyond simple scores. To move from raw data to action, organizations must focus on actionable data — tying survey results and other VOC sources to operational metrics to identify specific levers. Analyzing trending topics in sentiment and breaking down verbatims against people, process, and technology provides the necessary granularity to pinpoint the root cause of issues and determine which business function (HR, Finance, etc.) is responsible for influencing the relevant outputs and value drivers.
Effectively leveraging VOC insights also requires robust governance and communication strategies. A significant challenge is defining ownership of insights when multiple groups within an organization are collecting customer feedback, which can lead to fragmented or inconsistent action. To ensure that the data creates value, a Cascade Calendar approach is vital for sharing VOC insights with all relevant teams, facilitating meetings where the information can be discussed and acted upon. Furthermore, as organizations increasingly use AI to process vast amounts of unstructured data like customer recordings, the quality of the analysis depends on the input; utilizing prompts that stress “make no assumptions” can help ensure the AI extracts genuine, unbiased themes from advisory boards and other feedback sources.
🏀 Applying the Fundamentals to Customer Strategy
Ultimately, the challenge of leveraging Voice of the Customer (VOC) data — whether it’s overcoming the disconnect between NPS and revenue, ensuring ownership of insights, or setting up a Cascade Calendar for sharing — comes down to applying the fundamentals of passion, preparation, and perseverance.
The pursuit of truly actionable data requires the passion to look beyond easy vanity metrics and deeply analyze the roots of customer sentiment across people, process, and technology. It demands the preparation to integrate disparate VOC sources with operational metrics, ensuring you aren’t just collecting data but building genuine intelligence. And finally, it requires the perseverance to navigate organizational complexity, break down departmental silos, and consistently act on the insights, even when the required changes are difficult.
Just as Dick Vitale suggests we ask, “Was I better today than I was yesterday?”, organizations must ask themselves: “Was our customer experience better today than it was yesterday?” By dedicating your organization to the determination and discipline of VOC management, you move past simply tracking customer complaints and begin the continuous, dedicated process of making the customer experience undeniably “Diaper Dandy.”
Image credits: Customer Contact Week (CCW)
Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, insights captured from the Customer Contact Week session, panelists to mention, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Google Gemini to clean up the article.
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