Your VoC Program Might Be a Performance
When CX owns the data but not the decisions, friction never dies.
This week’s loudest CX pain point isn’t “we need more feedback.”
It’s this.
Insights exist. Decision rights live elsewhere.
We’ve got the receipts. The people who can fix it aren’t in the room.
So the same issues show up again, and again, and again.
You’re not crazy if it feels like you’re running a newsroom. You publish the truth. Nobody ships the fix. And after a while, you start editing yourself because you don’t want to sound like a broken record.
What’s really happening
Most orgs have built strong listening muscles.
VoC. Surveys. Text analytics. Call tagging. Dashboards that refresh every morning like clockwork.
But the changing muscles are weak.
We’re jacked on listening. We’re skipping change day.
So the loop looks like this:
CX captures recurring pain.
The root cause sits in product, policy, process, or billing logic.
The owner has different incentives. Roadmap. Revenue. Risk. SLAs.
The fix gets pushed.
CX patches symptoms. Scripts. Macros. Credits. “Helpful” FAQs.
Customers come back next quarter with the same issue, louder this time.
Does this sound familiar?
We flagged a billing confusion driver in Q1.
In Q2 we brought screenshots and verbatims.
In Q3 we brought volume + recontacts.
In Q4 someone asked for “one more cut of the data.”
Same issue. Better deck.
And then someone asks, “Why isn’t NPS moving?”
Because you don’t move scores with insight.
You move scores with decisions.
The three patterns that keep you stuck
1) You own measurement, not outcomes
You can prove what’s broken. You can’t move the budget. You can’t claim a roadmap slot. You can’t change the policy rule that created the mess.
You’re allowed to diagnose, not operate.
That’s not a CX maturity problem. That’s a governance problem.
Governance = who can change the policy, who can edit the UI string, who can allocate engineering time, who can accept the risk.
2) The root cause crosses teams
Recurring friction rarely lives in one place.
Billing confusion often ties back to UI labels, finance policy, and a comms gap.
Onboarding churn can trace to sales promises, product gaps, and enablement.
Support spikes can come from usability, documentation rot, and marketing claims.
When the journey has no clear owner, the fix has no clear owner.
And “shared ownership” turns into a group project where nobody turns in the homework. Everyone attends. Nobody commits.
3) Leadership keeps picking shiny work
Root-cause fixes get tagged as “maintenance” or “tech debt” and lose to whatever has a launch date and a revenue slide.
I’ve watched leaders nod at a top complaint, then spend the next 40 minutes debating a new feature name. I rolled my eyes so hard I felt it in my neck.
No bad guy here. Everyone’s optimizing for what they’re paid to care about.
Why it hurts more than the dashboard shows
When recurring issues don’t get solved at the root, you pay for it in four places.
Support costs creep up. Repeat contacts stack. Handle time drifts. Escalations rise.
Agent burnout goes up because it’s the same fires every day.
Customer trust drops because people feel like your company never learns.
CX credibility takes a hit because your program becomes “insights theater.”
And then the org starts doubting VoC, instead of doubting its decision model. That’s how good programs get labeled “noise.”
The shift that changes the game
You don’t need more listening.
You need a forcing function that turns recurring friction into owned work.
That means moving from VoC as reporting, to VoC as governance.
Not “CX owns everything.”
More like: recurring friction has to have an owner, a decision, and a deadline. Or it doesn’t count as work — it’s just commentary.
The DCX Decision Playbook
Build a Top 5 friction list, not a dashboard
If you bring 30 insights, you get 0 decisions.
Bring five. Make them sharp. Make them expensive. If it doesn’t hurt to read, it won’t get fixed.
For each friction driver, include:
What the customer experiences (one or two lines)
Where it shows up operationally (contacts, recontacts, escalations)
What it costs in capacity (even directional is fine)
What needs to change (system, process, policy, product)
Who holds the lever
If you can’t name the lever-owner, that’s the point. The list makes the gap visible.
Assign one accountable owner per driver
Not CX. Not “the business.” Not a committee.
One person who can say yes to the change, or can force the tradeoff discussion with the people who can.
Collaboration stays cross-functional. Accountability stays single-threaded.
If you’re thinking, “But none of the levers report to me,” good. Clarity is how you borrow authority you don’t have.
Put it on a weekly or bi-weekly exec rhythm
Quarterly readouts are where friction goes to die. Because by the time you’re back in the room, the roadmap moved, the sponsor moved, and urgency evaporated.
Recurring friction needs a regular loop with leadership where three questions get answered:
What moved since last time?
What’s stuck and why?
What decision is needed right now?
Ask for 30 minutes. Keep it tight. 1 slide each issue, if you can pull it off.
When leaders say “we’ll take it offline,” translate that in your head as “this is about to disappear.” Your job is to bring it back next session with one sentence: “Still stuck. Same impact. Decision still needed.”
And put the decision in the notes. If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.
Translate pain into money and risk
Exec attention goes where the dollars, deadlines, and risk are.
So stop leading with “customer frustration” as the headline. Lead with what it does to the business.
Try these translations:
“This issue is creating repeat contacts and consuming X agent hours a week.”
“This driver shows up in cancellations and downgrades. We’re bleeding here.”
“This policy is saving pennies and costing trust.”
“This is a known defect. We’re choosing to carry it.”
That last line lands. It forces ownership. It makes the tradeoff explicit.
Quick diagnostic: Are you trapped in insight without authority?
Answer yes or no. Don’t overthink it.
You publish VoC insights, but systemic fixes rarely ship.
The same drivers stay on top quarter after quarter.
You’re asked to “prove it again” every cycle.
Roadmap prioritization rarely weights service pain.
You spend more time treating symptoms than fixing the system.
No exec forum exists where friction drivers are owned and tracked.
If you hit three yes answers, you’re not failing. You’re operating inside a system designed to keep decisions elsewhere.
Now you have something you can fix. Not by yelling louder — by changing the rules of the game.
One small action this week: write a Friction Brief
Pick one recurring driver. One.
Write a one-page brief that can’t hide behind “we’ll look into it.”
Friction Brief (1 page):
What customers experience (1–2 lines)
How it shows up operationally (volume, time, escalations)
Suspected root cause (system, process, policy, product)
Decision needed (and who can make it)
Cost of doing nothing for 90 days (capacity, churn risk, trust)
If we do nothing, what will Support do instead? (scripts/credits/escalations) — make the shadow cost visible
Then send it to the person who owns the lever.
Here’s a script you can steal
Subject: Decision needed on recurring friction driver
Body:
“Hey [Name]. This issue is showing up again and it’s expensive.
Customer experience: [1–2 lines]
Operational impact: [contacts / recontacts / escalations]
Root cause: [best current read]
Decision needed: [specific choice, not a vague ask]
Cost of doing nothing for 90 days: [one clear sentence]
If we choose not to fix it this quarter, that’s a valid call. I just want the tradeoff made explicitly.”
That last line is the move. You’re not begging for prioritization. You’re asking for a clear decision.
And if the answer is “no,” don’t argue. Capture it and set a condition:
“Got it — what would need to change for this to be a yes in 30 days?”
Now it’s not dead. It’s queued behind something real.
A Free Tool for You
If building a brief from scratch, or staring at a blank page, wondering how to make the pain feel “expensive enough” to compete with roadmap work, makes you sweat, I built a tool for you.
It’s a customGPT called the DCX Friction Brief Builder
Instead of wrestling with wording, you plug in the reality on the ground: what customers are feeling, what Ops is absorbing, and what decision you actually need. It does the heavy lifting of turning that into a sharp, one-page brief that leaders can’t hand-wave away.
Try it out. Check back and let me know how it goes!
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