By Megan Keup, Product Marketing Manager, CallMiner

Recently, I joined a Women in CX panel on the future of customer experience, alongside industry leaders, Kat Robinson, Georgina Nelson, and Alejandra Arguelles, and host, Clare Muscutt. The conversation led me to reflect on a critical question facing organizations today:

Are we truly listening to our customers?

As a Product Marketing Manager at CallMiner, where our product centers on uncovering insights from customer conversations to drive smarter decisions, this question is so simple yet complex. In many organizations, it’s easy to default to metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and assume positive metrics equates to genuine customer understanding. But as we said during the panel discussion, metrics without context rarely inspire organizational change.

Customer feedback without context

During the panel, several discussion points were raised about the limitations of relying on a single metric to represent the entire customer experience. It’s clear we need to rethink how we capture and act upon feedback. In just one hour, many topics came up – here are the three points that stood out to me from our conversation.

1. Combining metrics, conversations, and context

Structured feedback like surveys and NPS surveys will always have a role. They offer standardized insight that helps benchmark performance. But relying solely on these inputs misses the nuances of CX. To fully understand customers, organizations must pair these metrics with unstructured data like contact center conversations, social media posts, and online reviews. This comprehensive approach paints a richer, more actionable picture of customer sentiment and pain points.

2. The power of personalization

One thing that stood out to me during the discussion is how vital it is to maintain a level of personalization in our feedback collection processes. At CallMiner, we believe the ability to ask targeted questions in real-time enables organizations to detect emerging trends while delivering a level of personalization that enhances experiences and even loyalty . This type of feedback mechanism enables data-driven decisions across the organization that can evolve alongside customer needs.

3. Keeping humans in the loop

While AI and automation are changing the way we collect and analyze customer feedback, human effort remains essential. Technology can process vast amounts of unstructured data, surfacing trends and patterns at scale. However, human judgment is essential to making informed decisions. By combining AI with human input, organizations can ensure feedback doesn’t just translate into data points, but into meaningful actions that have real impact.

Key takeaways from the panel and audience interaction

The panel and audience chat surfaced several memorable takeaways that resonate with my work at CallMiner:

• Holistic feedback integration: Combining solicited and unsolicited feedback data with an emphasis on personalization builds customer confidence and loyalty that is critical to growth in a competitive market.
• AI-driven insight: By harnessing AI-powered analytics, organizations can gain real-time insights that make feedback systems more responsive to evolving customer needs.
• Trust is a critical part of listening: Collecting feedback means little if customers don’t feel valued in sharing their experiences honestly. Trust is foundational, particularly as AI plays a growing role in feedback analysis.
• Every voice matters: True listening means amplifying diverse and underrepresented voices, especially those we might not hear in traditional feedback channels.

Share your thoughts

If you are responsible for customer insights, VoC, CX, or strategy, I encourage you to reflect on your feedback processes. Are you capturing diverse customer voices from a variety of channels? Are you able to spot new trends quickly? Are you creating personalized experiences? And most importantly, how are customer insights driving decision-making capabilities across the organization?

I’m grateful to have participated in this panel with such forward-thinking leaders and an engaged audience. It’s clear from our discussion that CX is ongoing and rapidly changing, not simply a metric to track.

I’m looking forward to continuing this conversation and working together to build smarter, better customer experiences. Watch the entire conversation here, and please feel free to connect with me.