It’s time to re-think voice of the customer programs
Traditional customer surveys, endless feedback requests, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are failing both consumers and brands. What should modern companies do instead.
By Mike Pastore,
Head of Content & Media
Published on 2026-10-21
Are customer surveys officially dead?
In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down with Mark Trussel, general manager, voice of customer, at Quantum Metric and co-founder of OpinionLab.
We’re going to dive deep into why traditional long-form surveys, endless feedback requests, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are failing both consumers and brands — and what companies must do instead to truly understand customer behavior.
Episode highlights
The death of traditional surveys: Why more than 50% of consumers stop responding to direct surveys and silently walk away from brands that ignore them.
Behavior vs. sentiment: How pairing session-based user behavior with attitudinal data creates predictive feedback, rather than retrospective scores.
The “NPS lie”: Why treating Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a business strategy or compensation plan leads companies to manage numbers instead of helping customers.
Unlocking the “silent majority”: Leveraging AI and lookalike modeling to quantify the silent middle curve of customers who never fill out a survey.
The thermometer vs. thermostat Analogy: Moving from programs that merely report the news to real-time systems that trigger actions while the customer is still engaged.
Closing the CX loop: Shifting focus from collecting a higher volume of feedback to capturing targeted, higher-quality insights to improve retention and lifetime value.