From Data Warehouse to Boardroom: Putting Voice of the Customer to Work

Lauren Gold, Chief Customer Officer at Kustomer, sits down with Victoria Weiss, Senior Director, CX at Smalls, to talk about voice of the customer — a topic that, as fast as the CX space is changing, everyone continues to come back to as the most important.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lauren Gold: So many organizations collect customer feedback, but fewer successfully operationalize it and actually do something with it. How do you think about ensuring the voice of the customer actually influences operational and strategic decisions across the business? This could be specific to Smalls or other organizations you've led previously.

Victoria Weiss: What's really interesting about voice of the customer is our CX teams know everything there is to know about customers. We're chatting with them every day. We know their pain points. We know where they're struggling or what's going really well. We're collecting that data, but it sits in a data warehouse somewhere and there's not much being done with it. I think part of the reason that happens is other teams don't necessarily know how to view that, and CX doesn't have the bandwidth sometimes to be sharing that information or telling the story.

So what has really worked for me is building relationships cross-functionally. In my time at Daily Harvest years ago, I was that annoying CX person saying, "Hey guys, there's this consistent issue that I see. I think we need to do something about this — it will help us retain customers." I forced my way into rooms and started to build out decks. I think the key piece there was learning how to speak the languages of other teams and other departments. When I say five customers were annoyed by this in the last week, that might not raise any alarm bells with other teams. You need to figure out what they're prioritizing on their teams, which metrics are going to really stand out to them, and how you can tell the story in a way where it's not just a handful of customers, but a big chunk of a customer base or a customer segment being impacted by a specific issue or trend.

We have this data. What CX leaders need to do is translate that data into something that makes sense to other teams, and then make it really easy to say yes to trying out new things, new experiences. I love making a mock-up. I love saying, "This digital experience is not great — here's how we can make it better. Here's an easy way to do that where we can change language, and here's a more complex way to do that where we can build out a brand new feature." Make it easy for other teams.

Lauren Gold: I like that. It sounds like making sure you're customizing your approach and talk track and narrative to the different personas cross-functionally. Obviously starting with having some foundational relationship there too, always helps — that's where we're best at, we're CX people. But then also making sure that you're already armed with some solutions: here's the problem I'm facing, this is why you should pay attention to it, and here's some ideas on how we can do better.

Can you think of a specific change you implemented with a cross-functional partner — or a specific change that you feel really proud of based on customer feedback — and how it benefited your team?

Victoria Weiss: At my last company, we noticed a consistent trend of items arriving damaged, and it was something customers were complaining about. The worst part was that customers were receiving back-to-back damaged orders. I've always worked in subscription companies, so we see recurring incidents, and we needed to raise the flag and make sure we were improving every single order. We noticed it was leading to a high return rate when customers had back-to-back order incidents.

What I did was put together a package for the exec team where I said we're losing a number of customers because of damages, and the brand is degrading because of this. I came to the table with several solutions. The obvious solution was to create better packaging that's more sustainable. The other proposal I brought was: what if we just get pieces of cardboard and put them between layers of the packages in the box, and see how that goes? So we had this in-between solution — we were able to see how it performed and save money. We weren't investing a ton, and it gave us room to build out the right solution down the line. That actually worked, and it led to a 50% decrease in damage. It was really, really exciting.

I think the other thing that's really special about this is there's nothing worse than telling a customer, "We're working on this, we hear your feedback," and then nothing happening behind the scenes. But if you can say we're working on this and we're actually working on it, and we have the proof, and we're able to tell customers what we're doing actively — that is huge, and it's really good for team retention and team morale.

Lauren Gold: I love it. I also just love the scrappiness around it too — so cool that you and the Smalls team are just open to saying, "This is something we can try starting tomorrow to get better." Think big and move fast. I love that.

Victoria Weiss: I think that's huge. You have to be okay with being scrappy. You have to be creative. I think a lot of CX people are very creative, and we think big, think small, think in all different ways and find a solution that works for customers.

Lauren Gold: Okay, this is a juicy one — voice of the customer for a new CX leader can sometimes feel daunting. Either there's no program, so where do you begin, or on the flip side, you're getting data from so many sources and thinking, how do I create a feedback loop and actually do something meaningful with it? What is one of the first steps you'd recommend a CX leader take when starting a VOC program from scratch?

Victoria Weiss: I have a playbook that I run when I join a new company, and voice of the customer is always one of the first things I look at. The very first thing I think you should do is interview your team — your CX agents — interview stakeholders, so leaders across the business, and then talk to customers. What you're getting from that is an understanding of what the biggest pain points are, what the biggest trends are, and you're building a foundation of what your customers need. When it comes to stakeholders and other teams, it's really great to understand what their goals are in the immediate term, but also the long term — what are they trying to accomplish? Then you tell them, CX can help you with this. We can be here to support you when it comes to understanding trends, and if you have a gut feeling, use the CX team to either validate that or say maybe that's not the right path forward. You need to start with that as a foundation.

From there, really understand how you, on the CX side, are collecting data and tagging conversations, and how you might be leveraging AI to pull out insights and trends. When I joined Smalls, one of the first things I did was rebuild the taxonomy structure and make sure there's consistency in how we tag our conversations. The team feels supported and understands how to tag conversations, and that's feeding directly into our data warehouse so we can start to track trends over time.

From there, understand the roadmap, because you're going to find things immediately that you want to fix — whether it's the ordering process or the cancellation process. Understand where the company sits and their perspective on all of those areas, so you can fit your feedback in at the right moments and be pulled into conversations at the right moments.

So it's really about structure, organization, and building relationships. It is so huge to put yourself out there, to meet leaders across the business, and to say, "I am here to support you. I am excited to work with you. Let's do this."

Lauren Gold: Gosh, you're going to get so much feedback as soon as you open up those gates — so it's important to be thoughtful about how you're packaging that up. As you mentioned earlier, coming to the table with some solutions: this is actually great, we have this feedback, and now we can actually act on it and do something.

Victoria Weiss: The last thing is you need to get into a rhythm where you're consistently giving feedback and sharing customer insights, because this is hard — you need to maintain that and be reliable. That way the team starts to know, "Okay, this is when I'm going to get trends, this is when I'm going to get insights," and they can start to lean on that and pull it into their workstream. It's about building a sustainable structure for sharing insights proactively, and also closing feedback loops. If you're launching a new product, what's your game plan? How are you going to make sure you're collecting information so you can share it with the right teams? Think about that as well.

Lauren Gold: What are some of the most important things customers don't explicitly tell you in reviews or surveys? How do you uncover those insights — how do you dig out those themes that are really important but not blatantly exposed?

Victoria Weiss: Customers are really good at telling you how they feel, but they aren't necessarily good at telling you why they feel that way or what went wrong in a way that you can actually take and diagnose and fix. A good example: "Your website sucks and I want you to cancel me." Okay, cool — thank you for telling me our website sucks. I'm not expecting you to tell me why; that's not your job. But as a CX leader, it is your job to figure out what went wrong, where did we lose that customer, and how can we improve the experience so that other customers don't hit that same friction point.

A lot of it is the tools that you have available to you and what you can use. I've used FullStory in the past — a really creepy website that records all user sessions. If a customer reaches out and says this is really frustrating, I'll sit in FullStory and watch sessions to understand at what point that customer rage-clicked, or where they got frustrated, or where they dropped off. I'll also look into Segment and see what events occurred and where customers are specifically dropping off. Across the board, in every way, it's the CX leader's job to figure out why the customer is feeling this way and how we can make sure no other customers feel that way.

Lauren Gold: Have you ever followed up with a customer and asked for more specifics?

Victoria Weiss: Yeah, I have. There's actually one customer from my Daily Harvest days — her name is Jill, she's great, we're friends on Instagram — but she just had consistently really terrible experiences with deliveries. It was really bad luck, and where she was located, and a few things like that. I hopped on a few calls with her, asked her questions, and learned more about her experience, and was able to find a solution that worked for her. She remained a customer for years. I'm 100% on board with always reaching out to customers and asking for their feedback explicitly. I think it's a great way to learn.

Lauren Gold: Tell me this: how central is voice of the customer to the role of a CX leader today, and how should it influence day-to-day decision-making? Where do you draw the line as to, I love your feedback, but I need to keep moving forward with our strategy? Where is the balance that blends there?

Victoria Weiss: I think voice of the customer is everything right now. I think it's incredibly exciting. I've been in this industry for a decade, and when I started, it was straight up: we are answering questions, we are solving problems, we are a cost center — that is all we are. Now we're finally getting this attention where it's like, wait, hold on — there's an entire team of people who are literally talking to our customers, and why aren't we using that as a resource? All CX people are like, yeah, why aren't you using us as a resource?

So I think in order to continue that momentum, it is crucial for CX leaders to leverage our data, tell the stories, and paint the pictures of the ways we need to improve the experience in order to be the best in the space. CX is a differentiator in the ways we can show up for customers — by building relationships, by anticipating needs — but we're also a differentiator in the way we know our customers better than anybody. We can help you build roadmaps, we can help you build the customer journey, we can tell you where people are falling off or where we're winning customers. Voice of the customer is fundamental to that.

Lauren Gold: What is an underrated piece of feedback — one maybe people tend to overlook, either the actual criticality of the feedback or an input source that isn't as apparent to others? Why is it so underutilized, and what are some of those gotchas we can look out for?

Victoria Weiss: What's really interesting is I've been elevating CSAT as a business metric instead of just a CX metric — which I know everybody talks about CSAT, but I think the feedback we're getting in CSAT, in a lot of ways, is feedback for the business and for other teams. What I've been doing is circulating quotes and using that as data points that we need to improve experiences. The customer rates us negatively in CSAT because we can't deliver an order sooner than we actually can — they want the order expedited. That is a data point we should be using to prioritize expedited shipments, and we should be sharing that in company-wide meetings with the exec team. CSAT is not just an indicator of how the CX team is performing, it's an indicator of how the business is performing. So that's one that I've been really excited about, and I know it's probably a cliché — everyone's like, duh, CSAT — but I'm pumped about that one.

Lauren Gold: And I imagine your team feels really empowered, or really supported, that you're sharing that metric more broadly and that it feels like a team goal — because I know that for an agent to receive a negative CSAT for something that they perceive is out of their control just takes the wind right out of your sails. So it drives that whole company accountability, and I'm sure the team feels like you have their backs too in sharing it more broadly.

Victoria Weiss: Yeah, and that's the other area where voice of the customer is great too — like I mentioned before, taking care of team members. I think being an agent is the hardest job. You're doing the same thing every day, you're taking care of customers, you're expected to be on your game for every conversation. You need to know that you have leaders who have your back, that your feedback is being listened to and shared, and that you're making a difference.

Lauren Gold: Let's shift to AI a little bit. How do you see the voice of the customer evolving as companies gain access to more data and more insights? You're really limited only by your creativity as to the different insights you can pull, or the themes you can associate with one another that we've never been able to do before. How do you think about that?

Victoria Weiss: It's so cool. I remember I used to spend hours and hours looking through conversations, trying to find trends — I would read so many conversations and come away with nothing. Now being able to prompt AI and say, "What were the top five trends from last week across all conversations?" — it's the coolest thing, it's amazing. It's been really helpful in starting conversations with other teams, and it frees up my bandwidth so instead of going through every conversation, I'm looking through a report and making my decisions or judgment calls based on that report. I do some spot-checking to make sure the data is correct, but it's unlocking so many doors for me to be able to creatively solve problems and come up with solutions that other teams can really use.

The thing I'm a little worried about, and I think most people are probably worried about, is that everyone prompts differently. If I prompt a certain way and ask a question, and a leader on the operations team prompts a different way, our numbers might look different, our data might look different. So it's something I'm looking into and working with other teams on — how do we make sure we're talking to AI the same way and getting the same results, or leveraging it the same way.

Lauren Gold: That's a really good call. Okay, our last question — this is super insightful and energizing too. It feels like there are just so many possibilities in taking that feedback and driving great outcomes for our companies and our customers. If you could give one piece of advice, only one, what would you recommend for CX leaders who want to improve their VOC programs today?

Victoria Weiss: Okay, my advice is: be persistent. It's really hard to get this off the ground. It's really hard to get support and to make your way into these conversations, but don't be afraid to feel like you're annoying — because nobody sees you as annoying, because you are an amazing CX leader and you're really showing up for customers. So continue to be persistent, be scrappy, ask questions. I used to be quiet and timid in meetings, but I started to get this feeling in my gut where I'd think, no, I know what to say and I know this is a problem. Listen to your gut and speak up in meetings. I think that's my biggest piece of advice. You might get pushed to the side sometimes, but just keep going back, being persistent, and advocating for your team and your customers.

Lauren Gold: I love it. Be persistent, be scrappy, be curious, and represent your team and your customers. I'll leave it right there, Victoria. Those are such words to live by for us CX leaders. Thank you so much — it was so great to spend time with you today.