November 3, 2026 • 11 min read
Voice of the Customer Trends, Strategies, and Best Practices for 2027
Director of Content & Market Research
November 3, 2026
Many customer experience teams are stuck in survey-on mode. They run surveys on a set cadence, report on them, and repeat.
It's a familiar loop, yet it rarely changes what the business does.
Others have decided there has to be a better way, and their organizations are giving them room to experiment.
With the freedom to experiment, they combine multiple sources of customer information to understand the broader journey, connect insights, and drive action across product, service, marketing, IT, and beyond.
Then there is a smaller, more radical group that is embracing the latest AI innovations, building new solutions, and trialing more unique Voice of the Customer (VoC) strategies.
Against this backdrop, here’s a closer look at where the VoC space is heading, the strategies separating leaders from laggards, and the best practices that turn customer listening into measurable results.
What Is the Voice of the Customer?
Voice of the Customer is the process of collecting customer signals, distilling them into insights, and activating those insights to improve experiences and business outcomes.
Conventionally, brands collect those signals through customer surveys. However, they increasingly analyze customer conversations, social media engagement, and digital insights to gather additional intelligence.
As they do so, some are tapping into operational data, connecting what customers say to what they do next, spotting trends, and predicting actions based on that analysis. The organization can then take pre-emptive steps to positively influence those actions.
Increasingly, this involves piping insights across the organization to the right people or building workflow automation. Yet, AI agents may soon do much of this work.
That’s a teaser for the following five trends reshaping the VoC market.
Voice of the Customer Trends
1. The Focus Shifts from Insights to Outcomes
Every click, purchase, and abandoned cart is feedback. Organizations are combining these solicited and unsolicited signals at scale to gather richer insight.
The crucial next step is turning that insight into actions that influence key outcomes, from churn to revenue growth.
Currently, businesses do so by routing insights across the business for human intervention, designing automated workflows, and, in rare cases, implementing AI agents.
However, businesses mustn’t forget the crucial next step: monitoring the impact of actions.
“You can prove over time, with real hard data, whether the customer bought more, or churned or not, and whether that specific intervention worked as planned. That builds confidence.”
2. Businesses Use Synthetic Data to Plug VoC Gaps
Customer survey rates have declined 30% since 2021. That statistic alone underscores how customers have become increasingly averse to filling in forms and sharing data.
Given this, brands are analyzing customer conversations with service and sales reps before asking: how would the customer likely have completed this post-interaction survey?
In doing so, they are adding synthetic data to their traditional survey data pool.
From that data, many brands are also building synthetic customer personas or “digital twins”. These digital twins allow brands to anticipate how customers might respond to new service and product concepts (more on this later!).
3. Omnichannel VoC (Slowly) Gains Momentum
For many, omnichannel VoC doesn’t extend much further than surveys and a little contact center analytics. Some may also tap into social media channels. Yet, typically, that’s as far as their efforts extend.
The next step is connecting new sources of insight. That’s true omnichannel VoC.
Think of customer support interactions, behavioral data, and operational data. When organizations start pulling this in, they not only see what the customer said, but also what they did next. That’s a critical next step many still miss.
4. A Buy vs. Build Conversation Takes Hold of VoC Space
Engineering-heavy companies are often tempted to build their own VoC tooling. Why? Because many VoC platforms have expanded beyond their core offering. As a result, brands pay for capabilities they don’t use, adding unnecessary cost.
The catch is that if engineers build their own software, they must maintain it indefinitely, as models drift, data changes, and people leave the business.
As a result, two clever engineers soon become two engineers, a project manager, a data architect, and a front-end developer, all pulled off work that directly serves customers.
Given this trade-off, Staikos spots a third option: “compose.”
“IT organizations are looking at all the tech they have around the company and saying, 'I've got a little piece of Medallia here and a little piece of Qualtrics there. What if I just brought them together, plus a different provider for surveys, as an example?’ They can then right-size their tech around one coherent VoC strategy.”
5. AI Agents Enter the Fray
AI agents are emerging as the future of interpreting customer signals and dynamically adapting experiences. This returns to the first trend of turning insights into action.
Some vendors are already preparing for this future, with Medallia, Sprinklr, and SmartCX by SmartSurvey adding MCP wrappers to their platforms, opening the door for agents to access their insights.
The challenge is that, even with MCP, connecting AI agents across platforms remains complex, both to configure and govern.
In 2027, this will remain a blocker, but more VoC providers will offer hands-on support and position themselves as partners rather than just technology providers.
Voice of the Customer Strategies
1. Address the VoC Fundamentals First
Before chasing sophistication, fix what's broken. Sometimes the most valuable thing a brand can do for its customers is simply make the journey work.
"You can throw fancy confetti at them that glitters in the dark, but if they can't even get through the checkout with their card, the confetti doesn't matter."
As Zuber highlights, everyday friction can erode trust faster than moments of delight can build it.
Her advice? Take a step back, start from scratch if necessary, and get the fundamentals right before investing in anything ambitious.
After all, a frictionless checkout will always beat a clever campaign.
2. Model the Relationship Between Customer Experience and Business Outcomes
Feedback becomes far more persuasive when it's tied to money.
Nick Travers, COO at SmartSurvey (the company behind the VoC platform SmartCX), recommends unlocking business data such as average order value and revenue, then modeling how customer experience moves those numbers.
Ultimately, this lets brands size the impact of specific issues and prioritize accordingly.
But don't stop at solving problems. Consider: "How do I add more value?"
“Once you can identify the drivers of outcomes like revenue growth, you can make targeted changes that amplify it, so CX becomes a growth lever rather than only a defensive function.”
3. Leverage Digital Twins to Give Feedback on Products & Services
Digital twins have been a market research capability for approximately 20 years. Now a small but influential group of CX teams is putting them to work.
Staikos describes recreating customers as digital personas that product teams can interact with through natural language prompts.
“Show them a concept: if the digital twin hates it, shelve it. If they love it, build a prototype and test it with real customers.”
Staikos says this is "a really small sliver of CX functions, but it's the one really driving organizational change." After all, this innovation helps compress the product development cycle by filtering ideas before they consume real resources.
4. Replace Traditional Surveys with Generative Surveys
The classic survey follows the same old, familiar script for every customer. Generative surveys change the format entirely.
Instead of a simple form, the customer has a conversation with an AI interface that can probe, follow up, and dig into what actually matters.
Staikos highlights this as one of the most meaningful VoC technology shifts in recent years.
The payoff is richer, more contextual responses that are easier to understand and act on, turning a score into an explanation teams can use.
5. Connect VoC Insight and Market Research
VoC exercises like customer panels, synthetic or human, are widely utilized before a product or service launches to anticipate customer reactions.
However, more brands are establishing a continuous feedback loop from the moment a new offering goes live, which then informs ongoing improvements.
As customers raise concerns about a new offering - whether related to pricing, quality, terms and conditions, or other aspects - organizations capture this feedback, create tickets, and route them to the market research team, typically through channels such as Microsoft Teams or Slack.
From there, they can investigate and address emerging issues.
Voice of the Customer Best Practices
1. Assign a Voice of the Customer Owner and Give Them Authority
Legacy VoC was constrained by what it could monitor, who ran it, and how the organization leveraged findings.
These findings may sit inside marketing or a standalone insights team, disconnected from service and delivery.
As new data sources multiply, someone must take charge.
"It takes someone with a sense of clarity and vision about what these programs can accomplish to make them work in practice."
Without an empowered owner, even the best data stays theoretical.
2. Build an Operating Model Around the Voice of the Customer
Too many customer experience teams are never brought together cross-functionally to act on feedback, solicited or not.
Staikos's fix is to "start small, but with your biggest leaky bucket."
For instance, this could mean finding the product bleeding the most money, identifying the biggest cause, and fixing that one thing.
The result is measurable. Returning significant sums of money to the business earns credibility, and the VoC leader can use that story to inspire further change and begin building an operating model around VoC insights that departments buy into.
After all, success in one area builds the case for scaling the model across the enterprise.
3. Challenge Organizational Silos
Real VoC-driven transformation demands sacrifice. Staikos observes that many leaders resist giving up their end of the silo, getting out of their bubble, and changing how they work.
Zuber's antidote is relentless, creative communication.
She shares customer insight through podcasts, short video clips, lunch-and-learns, and a monthly newsletter, so every team sees how its work affects the whole journey.
"It's repeating yourself over and over, and coming up with solutions to push back," she says.
Zuber also notes that the goal is for teams to spot shared problems on their own, solve them together, and keep collaborating thereafter.
4. Define the Future State and Intentional Predictors
When aligning functions behind VoC transformation projects, brands should think about intentional predictors, i.e., milestones that show they’re making progress.
Robbins offers a fitness analogy. Stepping on the scale only reveals what happened in the days before. What matters is what the brand does during those days.
In VoC, the scale is the insight, and the real work is designing moments that influence those insights before building a report.
The teams that define their leading indicators can course-correct in time rather than explain results afterward.
5. Connect What Customers Say with What They Actually Do
Robbins's long-standing concern is that VoC hinges on what customers say. The missing piece is connecting words to behavior: Where do they spend? Do they return? Do they recommend the business?
“A lot of those things can be invisible or difficult to connect, but that's always the missing piece.”
To this point, when brands receive recurring feedback, the ability to anticipate the next course of action, based on past precedent and the individual customer’s context, is key to determining how they act on that insight.
What's Next for Voice of the Customer Platforms?
On the VoC platforms supporting these strategies and best practices, expect innovation to center on turning insight into outcomes.
As previously noted, many have added MCP wrappers so AI agents can access insights from their platforms. The next step for vendors is likely to preconfigure AI agents that help organizations act on what they learn, not just collect data.
The twist in the tail? Every organization's VoC process is different. As a result, tech providers are becoming more consultative. SmartCX, for example, starts with a customer's existing insight program as the baseline, then innovates alongside them.
Additionally, platforms are expanding into synthetic data use cases such as predictive metrics, pre-configuring integrations to combine VoC and operational data, and also pulling in the Voice of the Employee (VoE).
Learn more about how VoC platforms are developing here: 11 VoC Solutions & What Differentiates Them in 2026