Going beyond quantitative metrics to qualitative insights in Voice of the Customer programmes
In today’s business landscape, post-interaction customer calls and automated surveys have become standard practice following a purchase, service or support enquiry. While customer satisfaction surveys originated with good intent, things have gone awry with customers surveyed incessantly after every interaction to extract some simplistic measure or ranking of their experience.
But a critical question remains unanswered: What does a 4/5 customer satisfaction score actually tell us about the customer experience following the brand interaction, and their future behaviour?
Here’s a fundamental truth – humans don’t communicate their experiences in numbers. Our emotions are complex, driven by beliefs, values, and expectations. Sometimes even words fail us because we struggle to articulate what we feel. Numbers simply cannot capture the nuances of human emotion.
Yet, this is exactly what customer experience professionals do. We reduce rich, complex human emotions to a “score” and call it “insight.” We’ve become so obsessed with metrics that we’ve lost sight of those we serve – our customers! It’s time to challenge this simplistic approach because understanding customers’ REAL experiences, including their feelings and resulting actions, is essential for business success.
Why Metric-Based CX Measurement Falls Short
- Customers see through it: Business leaders have become disproportionately fixated on KPIs like Net Promoter Score (NPS). Customers recognise that these surveys aren’t designed to improve their experience – they’re designed to serve the company’s measurement obsession. Be honest – when you receive a poor score, do you contact the customer to understand why, or does it simply get lost in the metrics?
- Customers don’t express genuine emotions in surveys: They lack words to describe their feelings, have been conditioned by years of surveys that lead nowhere, have low personal investment in providing feedback, and assume no one cares. They resort to safe, generic terms or, if angry, lash out knowing nothing will change.
- Numbers are subjective: What constitutes “good” or “excellent” varies widely among individuals. Some never give full marks regardless of experience, while others consider 50% a passing grade. These inconsistent measurement bases render the metrics unscientific and unreliable.
- Numbers don’t reveal actual behaviour: Will your customer stay, buy more, leave, forgive you, tell others, or litigate? Words and actions don’t always align – consumers ultimately vote with their feet and wallets.
The concern lies in accepting these flawed, surface-level responses as “insight” simply because they provide an easy language for leaders to understand and a convenient basis for incentives and performance reviews. But a customer’s experience isn’t a number – it’s an emotion-laden story, and loyalty isn’t measured but earned through customer actions.
Moving Beyond the Score
The remedy begins with understanding that “measuring” and “understanding” are not synonymous. To understand the REAL customer experience, we must augment Voice of Customer (VOC) programs with actual narratives – giving customers opportunities to share their experiences in their own words.
This approach acknowledges that emotions drive decisions, and emotional intensity determines how experiences are articulated. Customer behaviour resulting from these experiences is the missing link in simplistic CX metrics.
Incorporating customer narratives into VOC frameworks helps businesses fix mistakes, improve experiences, and foster loyalty – encouraging customers to forgive missteps, purchase more, and even pay premium prices.
Our ultimate goal is turning customers into brand advocates. I once stopped an elderly man wearing sneakers I’d seen advertised to get his opinion. His response was a 30-minute passionate testimonial about how those shoes changed his life. That’s the power of true advocacy – free, user-driven, credible testimonials that no advertising budget can buy.
This is what businesses should aim for when asking about customer experiences – unlocking genuine insights that keep operations customer-focused. Not a numerical rating, which reveals nothing about the “how and why.” To access TRUE feelings and behavioural intentions, we must dig deeper than surface numbers to understand the WHY, the intensity, and the decisions.
Humanizing Customer Experience
In our AI-driven personalization era, we’ve forgotten something fundamental: Customers aren’t robots – they want to feel heard.
Rather than just personalizing marketing, we need to personalize how we inquire about their experiences. Instead of treating customers like data points, we must engage with them as humans. Beyond merely hearing words, we must decode the messages behind them.
If you truly want to differentiate your business, be the company that listens, acts, and genuinely earns customer loyalty rather than measuring it superficially. In the end, your most powerful competitive advantage isn’t what you sell – it’s how you make your customers feel.
