Voice of Customer has been part of the Lean and Six Sigma vocabulary for so long that the phrase mostly goes unexamined. We gather customer requirements, translate them into measures, and feed them into improvement work. The discipline is sound.

But on our next webinar, Annette Behrensmeyer and Volker Probst want to draw attention to a word inside the phrase that quietly shapes how most organizations practice it: voice.

The word "voice" carries a hidden assumption

Annette's point is that the word itself implies the customer has to do something before you learn anything. Speak to you. Write an email. Take a survey. Voice of Customer, practiced literally, is a system that waits for the customer to act.

A signal is broader. As Annette frames it, your customers can send a signal without lifting a finger -- without responding to a survey, without being annoyed or upset enough to send an email. The work she and Volker are interested in is looking at those unsolicited signals: the behaviors and operational indicators that reveal how an experience actually went, and using today's technology to read them without bugging the customer or waiting for them to reach a breaking point.

That last part matters. By the time a customer is frustrated enough to fill out a survey or write a complaint, you've already lost something. The unsolicited signal often shows up earlier.

The gap between what customers say and what they do

Mark put the question directly in the preview: is it fair to say there's sometimes a gap between what customers say and what customers do?

Volker's answer was a story. When his wife was in the hospital, pregnant with their twins, a nurse came in every day and asked her to fill out a survey -- and to give it 10 points, because that score was how the nurse was measured. The incentive built a bias straight into the data. The number that rolled up looked fine. It told the organization very little about what the experience was really like.

His broader point: there are other behaviors that indicate how an experience genuinely went, and those behaviors should shape what an organization decides to focus on and invest in to improve. The survey score is one signal, and a compromised one. The behavior around it often says more.

That say-do gap is the heart of the session. If your improvement work is prioritized off solicited feedback alone, you're acting on a partial and sometimes distorted picture -- fixing what the vocal few reported while missing the friction the rest are quietly working around.

Why this is a continuous improvement conversation

Volker spent most of his career in continuous improvement, transforming healthcare organizations toward CI frameworks, before spending the last decade studying how customer experience and continuous improvement interact. Annette has spent more than a decade building and shaping enterprise CX programs, both inside a SaaS platform and as a consultant helping companies listen to their customers better.

What they've built together is a framework connecting signals to action on one side and engagement on the other -- aimed at making decisions easier to implement. That framing should be familiar to anyone who does improvement work. The challenge was never a shortage of information about customers. It's turning that information into prioritized action that actually changes the experience.

For healthcare leaders, this is the voice-of-the-patient question, which Mark flagged as important for the audience. For manufacturers and service businesses, the same logic applies to whatever behaviors and operational data sit in your systems already. The methodology isn't industry-specific.

There's a practical question worth sitting with before the session: where would a customer signal go in your organization today, and who would be accountable for acting on it? Reading richer signals only helps if there's a system to route them to an owner, track them to a countermeasure, and measure whether the experience improved. 

Listen to the preview

Join us live

Beyond the Voice of Customer: How Richer Customer Signals Can Improve Continuous Improvement airs live Thursday, June 18 at 1:00 pm ET, hosted by Mark Graban with Annette Behrensmeyer and Volker Probst of Resonance Growth Partners.

Annette's parting request in the preview was simple: come with many, many questions. The Q&A is where these sessions earn their keep. If you can't attend live, register anyway and you'll get the recording in the podcast feed and on YouTube.

Register for the webinar