Customer Feedback – Useful Roadmap or Harmful Distraction?
- Jun 11, 2025
- 4 min read
Customer ratings. NPS. Customer feedback. I’ve heard wildly different opinions from senior leaders on the value of these types of voice of the customer tools. While B2C companies seem to embrace them more than B2B and B2B2C businesses, behind the scenes there is still not a lot of alignment.
Everyone knows at some level a great experience is important. Just think of picking out a new car or vacation destination – almost everyone looks at customer ratings and feedback before deciding. So why the doubt when running a business? I think it stems from three main items:
1. It’s hard to quantify. While there has been study after study showing the benefits of a great experience and using customer feedback, it is still hard to quantify the ROI and prioritize experience items for a business dealing with competing initiatives.
2. A great experience won’t provide quick wins. This is mostly true. It does take a little time for the seeds of a great experience to bear fruit.
3. Customer feedback is misleading. Leaders tend to reference Steve Jobs saying, “customers don’t know what they want.” Or even the famous quote from Henry Ford when he was starting to mass produce cars, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Some pretty smart people – but does “misleading” mean “useless?”
The first two items above are less about customer feedback and more about how a business builds out their goals and then prioritizes their strategies and roadmaps to get there. If an organization just prioritizes quick wins, experiences (and long-term growth) will eventually suffer. Or, if they are in decline and “grasping for salvation” (a term used by Jim Collins) to turn things around fast, initiatives to improve the experience will likely be sidelined as well. As these first two items are tied to broader leadership issues, they are not my focus in this article.
So, what about #3 – is customer feedback really misleading or even useless?
The reality is that customer feedback can be both quite useful and misleading. You just need to know when and how to leverage it. Let’s break it down into two categories:
1. Existing product or service optimization
2. New product or service design
Existing product or service optimization
This is customer feedback on existing products or services. It is much more straightforward and has less of a chance to get misinterpreted.
This feedback drives continuous improvements and helps to remove the rough edges of an existing product or service. It’s the critical “eat your own cooking” information that quickly surfaces performance gaps that can typically be addressed without too much conceptional interpretation.
New product or service design
This is customer input used in the design of new products or services. This is where I most often see customer feedback going from being good “medicine” to destructive “poison.”
But does this mean it should not be used in new designs? Not at all, you just need to be mindful.
Let’s go back to Steve Jobs, as I’ve hear him being brought up a lot on this topic. He did indeed say that “customers often don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” and “it’s not the customers’ job to know what they want.” But this has been very misinterpreted.
To be clear, Jobs deeply understood his customers. When it came to product design, he believed that “you need to start with the customer experience and then work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”
Jobs didn’t ignore customer feedback, he reframed it. He didn’t just ask “what do you want?” Rather, he tried to understand what would delight and empower them, even if they didn’t know it yet. And he deeply observed how they used products, their behavior, versus just taking direct input. He understood that their stated “needs” could actually just be perceived needs, and to think it through at a deeper level. Jobs said, “our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do.” This requires knowing your customers deeply, but then having the immense creativity to think outside the box and give them what they really want versus what they said they need.
Summary
Customer feedback is critically important to scaling a business, but it’s vitally important to understand when and how to use it. The benefits of feedback are not binary. It’s not either 100% good or 100% bad, but it is almost always valuable if you use it in the right way.
Throw it all out with the bathwater, arguing it’s just useless “soft stuff,” and you will suffer immensely. Leverage it in the right way and you will not only build a sustainable business that produces great products and services, but will also consistently reinvent itself to grow and fend off future competitive threats.
