[PRACTICE NOTE] Operationalizing Voice of the Customer for Commercial Success

Synopsis. Operationalizing the voice of the customer (VoC) into marketing, sales and commercial ways of working is a core attribute and key differentiator for Customer Excellence Enterprises (CXEs). For those unique companies who are predisposed to consistently deliver exceptional experiences, this means integrating VoC (in all of its shapes and sizes) into every aspect of the commercial engine from product development, go-to-market, campaign execution to pre-call planning for sales reps. The dynamic workflow of listening across channels, making sense of, and acting on customer feedback and signals in near real-time offers CMOs, marketers, and sales reps the opportunity to: 1) align messaging, propositions, and engagement with customer preferences; 2) elevate revenue performance through improved relevance and resonance; and 3) de-risk the revenue leakage that comes from customer churn. To learn more order “The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life” at all major booksellers.

What’s the situation?

Voice of the customer (VoC) is the key to uncovering preferences, intent and demand signals, providing a clear understanding of the gaps between what customers want and what they are currently being offered. For marketers, it helps refine messaging, target the right audiences, and create campaigns that resonate emotionally and functionally. For sales teams, it uncovers invaluable insights into purchasing triggers, objections, and unmet needs, allowing for more tailored and effective conversations. In the broader commercial context, VoC serves as a guiding force to ensure that products, services, and experiences deliver measurable value to customers. Unfortunately, treating and scaling VoC in this elevated commercial interpretation doesn’t always happen, and it certainly doesn’t happen by accident. The culprits, blockers and barriers are some of the usual suspects: culture and status quo biases built around an inside-out perspective:

• Persistent Inside-Out Thinking. When marketers default to an internally driven point of view that devalues or outright ignores external forces, the resultant absence of the voice of the customer can lead to a strategically disorienting and debilitating environment for decision-making and commercial performance. This type of focus is an attribute of cultures where “inside baseball,” internecine competition, and “the loudest voices in the room” can dominate the discourse, often reinforcing biases and the subconscious desire to preserve the status quo. Operating in these corporate vacuums can lead CMOs, marketing and brand teams, as well as individual sales reps to prioritize what they independently believe is the best message or proposition for customers based on their legacy mental models, groupthink, personal preferences, or departmental agendas rather than actual customer needs and feedback. 

• Survey Fatigue is Real. As a further indicator of internally driven cultures, VoC is often relegated or ignored when it relies solely on episodic surveys conducted with relatively small, representative samples of customers. While such surveys can provide useful snapshots of customer sentiment, they are inherently limited in scope and frequency. They often capture opinions in narrow channels at a single point in time, which may not reflect the full breadth of customer experiences, intent, or evolving behaviors. Additionally, by requiring effort and an investment of time by customers, surveys are susceptible to survey fatigue, response bias and may fail to account for the nuances of diverse customer segments or broader market context. As a result, decisions based on this narrow view, run the risk of being incomplete, misaligned, or outdated.

• Poor Organizational Activation. Many companies invest heavily in gathering customer feedback through surveys, social listening, and other channels, yet fail to effectively operationalize (i.e. embedding and scaling) the customer's voice within workflows and decision-making. This disconnect can be especially pronounced in the commercial model, where marketing and sales teams often prioritize operational data from CRM systems and tech stacks over customer-driven insights. As a result, critical demand signals and customer anecdotes that reveal intent, preferences, and purchasing triggers can be overlooked, leaving blind spots and guesswork in commercial strategies.

Key Question: Why do companies choose to rely on assumptions, internal biases and guesswork over direct customer voices?

What Customer Excellence Enterprises (CXEs) Do.

As an antidote to guesswork, CMOs, marketers, and sales leaders in CXEs treat VoC not only in its traditional sense of direct feedback (zero party data) but also as a component of a omnichannel “customer listening ecosystem” and “insight generation stack”, organically integrated into the marcom tech stack and purpose built to interpret structured, unstructured and the digital signals that customers leave across channels. CXEs also “listen" to customer behavior through first party data such as clicks, searches, purchases, and social media interactions, treating these as hyper-actionable insights into customer preferences, frustrations, and unmet needs.

• Build an Early Warning System. Through the art and science of analyzing data from the many touchpoints where customers show up—in-person pitches, in-store, web journeys, app usage, loyalty programs, etc.—CXEs build a holistic understanding of both customer sentiment and intent. This approach creates an “early warning system” that enables them to anticipate needs, personalize experiences, and drive messaging and propositions that resonate deeply with their audience, ensuring that every decision (and every dollar, euro, pound, dinar, peso, or yuan, etc.!) is aligned with creating resonance and value in the eyes of the customer…anything short of this can come across as mere guesswork.

• Integrate into the Commercial Tech Stack. To address the structural barriers to activating VoC and unlocking its power within the broader company, CXEs prioritize operationalizing VoC within their commercial ways of working, ensuring that customer insights are treated as essential inputs rather than ancillary data. This involves creating closed-loop feedback workflows that allow marketing and sales teams to access, analyze, and act on VoC insights in as close to real time as possible. Through the alignment of CRM and marcom tech stack data with VoC, CXEs gain a more holistic view of the customer, enabling more personalized interactions, improved messaging, and stronger alignment with purchasing triggers. Following the patterns of CXEs, the companies that successfully integrate VoC as organic elements of their commercial models can bridge the gap between operational efficiency and effectiveness and customer-centricity, unlocking new opportunities for growth and differentiation in increasingly competitive markets. Operationalizing VoC with intention ensures that customer preferences and needs are not just understood but embedded into workflows to catalyze a continuous cycle of commercial and experience improvement.

• Support Strategic and Tactical Ways of a Working. In crowded and noisy markets where customer expectations are constantly evolving, leveraging VoC enables CXEs to align their messaging and propositions to what truly matters to their audience. These insights allow to develop unique selling propositions and value wedges—distinctive benefits that address specific customer needs in ways competitors cannot easily replicate. When VoC is leveraged effectively in this way, it empowers marketers to build lasting competitive advantages by delivering highly tailored points of value and distinction that align with customer priorities and expectations. To truly harness this power, CXEs operationalize VoC by sourcing insights from a wide range of multi-party data inputs (zero-, first-, second-, and third-party data sources). This comprehensive approach enables more informed and precise decisions, both strategically and tactically. 

1. Strategically, it helps define "where to play" by identifying underserved segments, emerging needs, and market opportunities.
2. Tactically, it guides "how to win" by informing personalized marketing campaigns and sales conversations, optimized interactions, and preemptive service enhancements.

CXEs like Best Buy consistently integrate customer feedback into their strategic processes, enabling them to identify pain points, uncover unmet needs, and prioritize initiatives with the highest customer impact. They treat customer feedback as more significant than the instincts of leadership or past successes, recognizing that only by listening deeply and responding authentically can they stay ahead of the often-subtle changes in customer preferences and expectations that can spell the difference between success and failure.

Key Takeaways :

• For CXEs, VoC is not just another dataset; it is the compass guiding decisions, the most trusted way to inform and de-risk resource allocation, commercial strategies and operational priorities. 
• In elevating the voice of the customer, CXEs do more than just listen—they act with confidence and conviction on behalf of the customer and their stakeholders.
• CXEs embed and scale VoC into their culture and ways of working, empowering teams to treat customer feedback as the ultimate authority.
• Through alignment with real-world customer voice, CXEs reduce guesswork and wasted effort, and focus resources in areas that drive the most value for customers and themselves.
• This commitment not only turns data into insight but also insight into value and competitive edge, strengthening customer perceptions and setting the stage for long-term win-win relationships.

Questions to Consider:

• How effectively are we capturing and integrating customer feedback across all touchpoints, and do we have the tools and processes to turn these insights into actionable strategies?
• Are our teams empowered and equipped to respond to VoC insights in real-time, ensuring we address customer needs and expectations proactively and consistently?
• How do we measure the impact of VoC on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and commercial outcomes, and are these metrics driving continuous improvement and innovation?
• Do we have a systematic process for communicating, prioritizing and implementing customer-driven changes?  

To learn more, order “The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life” at all major booksellers.