---
title: "It’s time to re-think voice of the customer programs"
url: https://adtech.lol/articles/e4fb36f6-e6a7-4e0c-95ba-f6a2c1bae5fc
source_url: https://martech.org/its-time-to-re-think-voice-of-the-customer-programs/
source_site: martech
author: "Mike Pastore"
published: 2026-10-21T00:00:00+00:00
tags: ["customer experience", "voice of the customer", "Net Promoter Score", "feedback", "customer behavior"]
publisher: AdTech Radar
---

# 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.

## 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](https://martech.org/author/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.

Source: [https://martech.org/its-time-to-re-think-voice-of-the-customer-programs/](https://martech.org/its-time-to-re-think-voice-of-the-customer-programs/)