The Voice of the Customer: The Missing Link to Success

Transcript

[00:00:02] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives Podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a super important conversation and a very exceptional guest. We have on Karen Lam.

[00:00:12] Steve MacDonald: Now, Karen, you’ve got a big career in customer support, customer experience. Right now you’re the Director of Customer Support at Top Hat, and what we’re going to be talking about today is the voice of the customer and what does that mean to the business and how it’s really a missing link to a ton of learning, a ton of direct connection actually to growth and revenue, and how do we capitalize on all of that.

[00:00:39] Steve MacDonald: But what I’d love to do is, it’s interesting, your background, you’re actually a published author. You’re award-winning, and you love storytelling, and in the business environment, we have to be good storytellers. I mean, it’s how we advocate for ourselves. It’s how we take data, and we turn it into something actionable. But you love it for a lot of different reasons, including sparking conversations like why do you have a minion on the shelf behind you? So, I’d love to have you talk a little bit about your background before we dig in and get started here.

[00:01:15] Karen Lam: Perfect. Thanks, Steve, and I really, really appreciate that introduction. Definitely, the reason I keep my background without any blurring or without any filters is because I want to invite the individual who I’m having a conversation with into my home, and this is a big part of it.

[00:01:32] Karen Lam: That minion, I acquired it quite a few years ago. It was one of the first things that my husband and I bought together when we moved into our brick, our first abode, first living situation. So, I really appreciate that and it’s one of the things that do often come up in conversations when I have them.

[00:01:49] Karen Lam: In terms of my experience overall, definitely growing up within a support environment has been extremely meaningful to me and with the background in storytelling. Ultimately, I’m also what I would call a context-driven leader. So, that really means, again, providing a story behind the intention and the meaning of what we do day to day.

[00:02:07] Karen Lam: I started off in support like many other individuals, like working in retail. You know, that type of first early job is really the first foray into support. But ultimately, how I got into Top Hat, into EdTech specifically, has been quite a journey.

[00:02:24] Karen Lam: I started off at a smaller company that was really focused on education databases, and then from there, acquired a few different roles, trying out where I wanted to take my career, and came full circle really managing a support team, really directing the future of how we speak and work with our customers and really having that career progression at Top Hat today.

[00:02:46] Steve MacDonald: Well, we’re going to take all of that and you’ve got a very defined point of view, like say, you and I talked before this and you said there’s two really critical challenges that are blocking really growth today, and I’d love to just dive right into the nitty gritty here and ask you, from your point of view, what do you think those two blockers are to creating what long-term sustainable growth in our business?

[00:03:09] Karen Lam: Yeah. So, the two blockers really are one piece being career progression, especially when we think of support roles or ultimately any roles within an organization. With the prevalence and the usage of AI, there’s this fear about where do I take my career from here? So, what may be blocking progressive growth and strategic growth within a company is really how are we offering and offsetting that career progression as an employee grows within a company.

[00:03:37] Karen Lam: The second item, which I’m incredibly passionate about as well, is really the voice of the customer program. Every single company should have a voice of the customer program because it’s the one way you’re going to get a good pulse on not only your customers and your product, but also the pulse of the people who are behind the scenes and working for you and bringing that brand message and reputation forward.

[00:03:59] Steve MacDonald: So, high performance teams are what drives growth in companies, and secondly, the voice of the customer is the highest voice of authority in the business, which nobody’s going to say, “We’re not a customer-obsessed company. We’re not customer-first.” But it’s how we act on it.

[00:04:15] Steve MacDonald: So, I would love to hear you explore both of these, but I’ll start with the voice of the customer. What does that mean inside of your organization and how you run customer support?

[00:04:25] Karen Lam: Yeah, for sure. So, the voice of the customer program, one thing that I do want to mention is the program itself, it existed at Top Hat, like prior to me joining. But the area where it really needed a huge improvement was that the individuals or advocates that were part of that voice of the customer program, we weren’t necessarily getting the value out of the data, and what I mean by that is when we were meeting about the data, we were really only focused on business strategic metrics. So, being like NPS and really focusing on what CSAT looks like.

[00:04:56] Karen Lam: Those are wonderful on a dashboard, but they also don’t tell the story behind how we got that information, what that information looks like in real terms. So, when I started taking the voice of the customer program over, what I wanted to do was to marry it with what I mentioned before, like that context-driven piece, allowing other departments that are not necessarily customer facing also have a voice in how we shape the relationship that we have with customers and the relationship we have with their own product, as on a personal level as well. So, when it comes to really having a very powerful voice of the customer program, or what I mean when I say voice of the customer program, it’s really listening to both your employees, but also to the customer as well, and then building strategy behind it.

[00:05:42] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, there’s really the internal customer and the external customer. So, you also talked about how the voice of the customer is more important than ever, especially in the day and age of AI. If you could kind of connect those two dots, like AI and voice of the customer, what’s the additional opportunity that we have?

[00:06:01] Karen Lam: Yeah, for sure. So, one of the areas that I did find challenging when I did take over the voice of the customer program is there’s not a lot of information out there about voice of the customer. There’s a lot of information on what metrics you might want to focus on and what to look at, but not necessarily what to do or how to really run a successful voice of the customer program, especially now more than ever, because AI has become the big buzzword over the last few years.

[00:06:28] Karen Lam: AI specifically, large language models, have an amazing ability to synthesize information. A lot of the inputs and the survey data or reviews that we see out in the ether, all of it is based off of language that is available and easily digestible for an LLM to consolidate and unify that information. So, with the age of AI, how we’re connecting the dots here is really leveraging that power of technology to make it a whole lot easier to synthesize that data and to provide the appropriate picture of what your ideal customer profile is, what it looks like, and what customers are really saying.

[00:07:04] Steve MacDonald: So, if I’m running it through the care and filter here, it’s allowing you to tell stories you weren’t able to tell before. Give me an example if you could, like some of the stories we’re able to tell today, that you don’t think that we had a good opportunity to tell before or at the granularity we weren’t able to tell before.

[00:07:23] Karen Lam: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So, definitely, one of the areas and one of the things I’ve been recently really having a great kick on is using AI to figure out how does AI perceive a company’s brand and reputation and their credibility.

[00:07:39] Karen Lam: It’s a very simple prompt like, “What do you think of this company?” or “What do you think of Top Hat?” or “What do you think of whatever our competitor is?” So, for the first time ever with AI, because it’s been trained on all the information out there on the internet, it’s pulling from historical data. Historical data that we’ve not necessarily thought about that could potentially impact brand reputation and brand messaging.

[00:08:01] Karen Lam: So, you can imagine how interesting and also slightly scary it is when you see some of the data that LLMs are trained on or from maybe a blog post that was from 2019 but like we’re now in 2025. So, it’s interesting how information that exists in the universe, regardless of how old it is, is still potentially making an impact on how individuals might perceive your company or how individuals perceive your company. So, ultimately, anything that’s out there on the internet has an impact on how an individual, your customer, your potential prospect, is perceiving the brand of your product.

[00:08:40] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s interesting. I love your idea that there are internal audiences and there are external audiences, and the voice of the customer internally is equally as important. Very, very different reasons, but there’s almost a third audience internally, and that’s the one that we’re always constantly trying to involve and influence and say that we have some really great information that we need to share with the C-suite, the leadership of the company.

[00:09:10] Steve MacDonald: They tend to be very KPI-driven, very focused, and they tend to look at us as a cost center. It’s a generalization, but it’s still true in so many companies today. So, we’re looked upon not as a value center that has representation of the voice of the customer and everything it can do, but more as a cost to be contained.

[00:09:31] Steve MacDonald: How do you use AI these days to translate it? Because you can say, “build me the story for a C-suite audience,” and it’s going to know the language and the KPIs and the mentality of the C-suite. When you say telling stories, I think I tell stories very differently to my children than I do to my buddies, and we have to understand those audiences, and is AI really helping us do that these days?

[00:09:57] Karen Lam: Yeah, for sure, Steve, because definitely if you use or view AI as a tool, it’s a wonderful way for you to have a conversation with it, bounce ideas, see what comes back, and certainly, it’s important not to take everything that the AI is giving back to you as an output at face value. Massage it and make some adjustments to the information that’s received. But definitely with all the data it’s trained on, it knows exactly what would be most impactful to your C-suite, and there’s definitely that element where data is important, but it’s also what’s driving that data and is it marrying or matching to a North Star metric.

[00:10:34] Karen Lam: So, the important part is being strategic with the way you communicate the information, and a lot of that has to be wrapped around money and dollars. But on top of that, it’s also what are we doing today? What are we doing later, and what is the outcome we are expecting?

[00:10:50] Steve MacDonald: Now, we’re making an assumption that the data that we have, the information we have, if we tell it in the right story to the right audience, it’s going to make a huge difference, which is all true statements. But there are negative perceptions that linger about customer feedback, and you called it the perception trap, and I just wanted to ask you to clarify that for us and then how do we get past the perception trap?

[00:11:16] Karen Lam: Yeah, no, that’s a fantastic question, Steve, and I’m glad we had that conversation about it earlier because it’s one of the things that really, honestly drives me bonkers because ultimately, when we think of feedback, usually it has a negative connotation attached to it.

[00:11:30] Karen Lam: We think of a customer providing a CSAT survey, an NPS comment. It’s not always the case, but it’s usually very focused on where can you do better? What is the important thing that you can do to turn this around for me? And that, by and large, has a very negative connotation to it. But we do also have to keep in mind that when we think of voice of the customer, it’s not only about the feedback that might be negative. It’s also areas where we might be on the right path and doing things that are in the right way.

[00:11:59] Karen Lam: So, clearly, if a customer leaves us an NPS comment, but like, “Everything’s great, you don’t have to change anything. It’s wonderful,” and that really brings our NPS score to a very solid, positive place. But it’s not exactly feedback that is very useful or anything that we can act upon.

[00:12:15] Karen Lam: So, where I would argue where it becomes really important to view voice of the customer in a much more positive lens is to really fine-tune, and you can even use AI to do this, to really fine-tune those comments that are related to what direction we’re heading and where we can go from there, and some of that can be inferred clearly.

[00:12:33] Karen Lam: So, if somebody’s really, really loving a specific feature that was recently released, then that particular customer could be an advocate or potentially maybe a user research opportunity where you could reach out to them and have a conversation and figure out, like, what exactly are they really loving about this new feature that’s being released and where we could potentially take it to the next level, because ultimately, if one customer really loves something that you have put out there, it’s not only proven its value, but it also means that there might be other customers who may not be using that feature effectively.

[00:13:05] Karen Lam: And this is a great opportunity to have a conversation to figure out, are there more onboarding materials that need to be created? Do we have to create a new marketing strategy? Are we not marketing it effectively? So many options that are available simply from looking at the data but figuring out where you want to focus your attention.

[00:13:23] Steve MacDonald: Now, what’s interesting is we’ve probably all heard the term applied in a lot of ways, but with AI too, “Garbage in, Garbage out.” You can have the best AI tools, but if you’re not giving it the right data, the right information, it’s not going to be any good for you. So, you’re talking about impacting all these other different departments.

[00:13:40] Steve MacDonald: You also talked about, in our previous conversation, how it’s not just customer support ticket information, like voice of the customer, and important data that we feed to the AI comes from a lot of different places.

[00:13:53] Steve MacDonald: So, I just wanted to know kind of like your philosophy on that because segmented or fragmented data is a massive problem. I mean, I had a conversation with somebody who said, “I was in the 90s in some of the big Fortune 500 tech companies, and we were all talking about fragmented data,” and it’s interesting because we’re still talking about it today. How do you think about the data and bringing it together so that we can use things like AI, in a number of different ways to tell that story.

[00:14:21] Karen Lam: Yeah, for sure. So, data does come from a variety of different places for sure, because certainly there’s survey data that we send out, whether it’s CSAT or NPS, and then ultimately, maybe a marketing team might have additional surveys that are sent out, or if you’re a brand new customer, there might be more surveys that are being sent out as well.

[00:14:38] Karen Lam: But then when we think of data, it’s also a matter of what’s available in the public domain. So, again, user reviews, like if you have an iOS or Android app, certainly those reviews are part of what impacts voice of the customer, what individuals are saying on social media, and that’s where AI becomes incredibly helpful here because it has the ability to, for lack of a better term, essentially listen, like be that behind-the-scenes look on what is being said, whether it’s on Reddit or any other public forum, and to distill that information so it’s a lot easier for you to intake. But because there’s so many data sources, one of the big challenges, as you had mentioned, is that there’s so much data, and that data might be very, very difficult to manage.

[00:15:20] Karen Lam: What I would often encourage is anyone who has a voice of the customer program or is thinking of starting one, is to really focus on which data inputs you want to focus directly on. There are so many inputs that are available, but not all of them might be reasonable.

[00:15:36] Karen Lam: The second item as well is to also look at it from a context-driven piece. There are a multitude of different departments that power an organization. All of those departments also feed into what voice of the customer could be about. So, this is a great opportunity to build empathy across different departments, to understand what finance is doing to improve the customer experience, what customer success is doing to improve the customer experience, and of course, what customer support is doing, and ultimately, even product and engineering. Those might not be the only departments at your company, but ultimately getting the story, building that empathy, and I really find that having employee empathy to understand what their peers and coworkers are doing, and marrying that with what customers are seeing and experiencing, actually builds a much stronger unified view of what the ideal customer experience should look like, and having that empathy, building it, once you get that level of understanding, once you invite users into your home, you’re going to have a much better conversation and you’re going to actually be able to impact some change because you have that shared understanding.

[00:16:45] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. It’s interesting because we’ll all nod and say every department has a role in customer experience, right? You could be in finance, and it could be subscription management, it could be invoicing. Legal certainly has an impact on how we interact with our customers.

[00:17:00] Steve MacDonald: So, who’s the bridge, internally? If you were to go and look up, do, like, a ChatGPT or something, deep research, and talk about the prevalence of voice of the customer programs, you’ll find studies by, like, McKinsey talking about how most companies falter at their voice of the customer programs.

[00:17:19] Steve MacDonald: So, who’s in charge? Who’s bringing all this together, because I know for one, I didn’t come in thinking I’m going to be a data analyst, I’m going to be like the guy in charge of data. Yet it’s so important. We can’t have fragmented silos of data. So, how do we wrangle this beast called data?

[00:17:42] Karen Lam: Yeah. So, “wrangling the beast” is a great way of putting it. But yes, it’s not only, like, one individual, it’s really getting together a group, an internal program within your company, to get all the customer advocates together in one room.

[00:17:55] Karen Lam: So, here at Top Hat we meet twice a week. Anybody in the company can join, and certainly you can still participate by listening and not necessarily contributing anything other than listening, because I think ultimately, even if you are just listening, you are building that empathy muscle that is incredibly important.

[00:18:12] Karen Lam: The individual stakeholders who do present or offer their suggestions and opinions, those individuals all are part of that customer advocacy group. So, what that looks like is for us, because I mentioned context building earlier on in the conversation, when we meet twice a week, we usually have one person who leads the conversation by presenting on something like either a project they’re working on or anything that would impact the customer experience or anything that might be a great cross-functional collaborative effort, that again, has an impact on the customer experience.

[00:18:46] Karen Lam: Now, it may not always be an improvement. It could sometimes be a learning of what had happened. But it’s an open forum, no judgment, and it’s more like sharing those wins and learnings, and then again, that builds the empathy across the entire group to make sure that we’re focused again, bringing full circle on the customer.

[00:19:06] Karen Lam: If I recall the question correctly, it’s not only a single person responsibility, it’s definitely a large cross-functional effort, and when we look at data, and we look at all the data inputs, again, it’s really about looking at what is going to make the most impact and focusing on that first. The rest will follow.

[00:19:25] Karen Lam: Where many companies tend to fail around voice of the customer, not only because of information that is so difficult to find and source, is that there’s a lot of time spent, or companies that might mention they have a voice of the customer program, but the time is spent purely on looking at what the numbers are, and because of the sheer amount of data that is there, they might only either meet or report on the voice of the customer data or those inputs really, like, annually or semi-annually or perhaps even quarterly, which in my mind is not often enough because ultimately, you have interactions with a customer all throughout, every month, all year within the business. So, it’s important to carry that conversation throughout the year as often as possible.

[00:20:12] Karen Lam: Now, you may not want to meet every two weeks like we do at Top Hat. Maybe once a month makes more sense, but definitely you need to set the cadence where you’re reviewing the data and actually closing the feedback loop when it comes to communicating some of those items, whether it’s finally implementing that feature that’s been highly requested or really maybe putting a plan around a large frustrator that has come out with a recent release or something like that. So, again, really looking at that data, focusing in on what’s important, but also having that cadence in communication.

[00:20:48] Steve MacDonald: So, I think this is pretty amazing. You tell me if I’m capturing what you said right here. It almost feels cultural from what you’re saying inside of Top Hat, that the different departments are meeting specifically around customer experience and sharing.

[00:21:06] Steve MacDonald: There is a cultural collaboration and partnership to identify how do we improve our customer experience, how do we listen to the voice of the customer, because if you do the research, customer voice and customer experience, they’re intertwined. You can’t take them apart from each other. Is that a good takeaway that you’ve kind of made it internally, a cultural thing that you do?

[00:21:28] Karen Lam: Yeah, no, I think, Steve, you hit the nail on the head there, and it really, ultimately, in my mind, a voice of the customer program is how you’re learning and how you’re learning at scale. What sort of insights are you inferring from the information that is already readily available, whether you’re using AI to source from the internet or whether you’re just looking at, internally, your survey responses and content. Regardless of how you’re receiving that information, it’s unifying all that together, telling that story, but also being able to learn from it, and being able to learn from that is going to not only improve your relationships with your customers, it’s also going to improve your relationships with your peers, and then, ultimately, improve product quality, which also impacts support volume, and hopefully, that means something a bit more manageable.

[00:22:15] Karen Lam: But that also means that you have the opportunity, again, to then prove the value of the support team, and that’s why I feel like voice of the customer programs ultimately do need to be grounded within an individual who is within customer success or customer support.

[00:22:29] Steve MacDonald: You just said something, again, really important. You said it gives an opportunity to prove the value of the customer support team. There are too many of us in the industry that are feeling like the support department is not a strategic asset.

[00:22:44] Steve MacDonald: In these regular meetings that you have, have you ever felt like a support department, or is it the time where you feel like, “No, this is my opportunity to educate, to help, to support the rest of the company and bring insights that they just didn’t understand or know, whether this is marketing, sales, finance, whatever.” Has it given you a platform to go from the ticket-taker, cost center to the value center that impacts the rest of the company? Is that like an important way that you’ve transitioned inside of Top Hat?

[00:23:19] Karen Lam: Yeah. I’d say, like, Steve, that’s exactly what it is. It gives not only my team, but an opportunity to bring that voice to the table to make sure every support member has that seat at the table, even though I’m a representative of my team. But it’s also an ability to make sure that we’re showing that the support team is strategic.

[00:23:41] Karen Lam: I think I’ve been very fortunate here at Top Hat where we have a lot of support from our CEO, and there’s a lot of concerted effort around making sure that customer-facing teams feel valued and are motivated, especially during our busy period or busy season.

[00:23:57] Karen Lam: But ultimately, when we’re talking about strategy, when we’re talking about ensuring the value of support is being recognized, the voice of the customer program is, hands down, an amazing way to do that. It might not be the only way, but it’s certainly something that I find is incredibly valuable.

[00:24:14] Steve MacDonald: So, I’m going to give you an opportunity to showcase your storytelling capabilities. If you could, and I don’t want you to divulge anything that’s proprietary, but give us a story, an example of one of those meetings where you came in and you shared incredibly valuable voice of the customer information, that everybody started nodding their heads. They’re like, “Oh, absolutely.” Like, is there a story that you could tell us that kind of just brings this to life?

[00:24:42] Karen Lam: Yeah, for sure. I think I’ll just pick, like, a recent example. So, last month, because one of our focuses within the company is to look at different ways that we can leverage AI, and clearly, every single company is looking at ways that they can leverage AI to improve their business, improve their operations, and really get some value out of individual LLMs or anything that’s out there in the universe.

[00:25:06] Karen Lam: So, one thing I presented on was really my findings and my research, because I’m curious, that’s part of being a support member, wanting to help and being curious in what the individual item looks like, having that investigative spark. I was looking at brand perception specifically, and using AI to figure out how does an individual, somebody who doesn’t know anything about Top Hat specifically, how do they perceive Top Hat as a brand? And that particular presentation was something incredibly different from what we normally do at voice of the customer.

[00:25:39] Karen Lam: So, what I mean by that is, in our conversations, typically, it’s very department-focused. Again, building that context on what is one department doing today, and that would be the presentation we would have for that bimonthly meeting.

[00:25:52] Karen Lam: But this time around it was something about, like, how does AI perceive Top Hat? What is the reputation that Top Hat has? What does that look like? And then, provide that information to me. And, of course, I played around with it, tried different LLMs to see what sort of responses were out there. But where it became really interesting was the findings that surfaced from it, and a lot of that ended up being that there was old information that happened to be out there in terms of our mission statement and also our strategy. Those have been updated within the last year or so, and, clearly, with a large language model, any model, it’s only trained on past data. It has trouble with newer information out there, unless it gets retrained.

[00:26:30] Karen Lam: So, that became an opportunity, at that point in that presentation, for our marketing team to really review and look at some quick wins on how we can improve that messaging and improve the credibility of what we were putting out there with marketing messaging, and we’ve already made some improvements now in terms of having that translate over to improving the responses that we get from, whether it’s ChatGPT or Gemini.

[00:26:52] Karen Lam: That still is a work in progress because it will take some time for the new information to hold, but we now have a strategy. We now know that there are certain elements that we can really focus on and, yeah, like, that was my wow moment when that happened.

[00:27:06] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. So, here’s my takeaway, is that if you are having a hard time representing the value as a customer service center, customer support center, you’re not working hard on us at it, right? We got more voice of the customer, more tools to bring that to life, to tell stories, more ways to impact the different departments inside of the organization than we have ever had, and I would find it hard to believe that if we put these stories together and we said, “I want to pull together a cross-departmental meeting and I want to share some information that could really help everyone,” that people are going to say, “No, I don’t want to do that.” We just got to take the first step and do it and make it cultural.

[00:27:56] Steve MacDonald: That’s my big takeaway. But I want to know, because we’ve talked about so much, if there was one takeaway that you wanted the folks that are tuning into this podcast to have afterwards, the one thing I want them to remember, what would that be?

[00:28:13] Karen Lam: Yeah. That’s the reason it’s difficult for me is because we’ve talked about so much, Steve. So much information. But I think the one takeaway I would think of is really look at your people, and the reason I say that is because individuals who are motivated and focused and want, really, the best for our customers are going to be your customer advocates, and those are the individuals who are going to be a perfect stakeholder for a voice of the customer program.

[00:28:40] Karen Lam: So, ultimately, really what I’m saying is have a voice of the customer program if you don’t have one already, and invest in it, and that investment could be, like, small steps, figuring out what sort of data you want to focus on as a metric, as your benchmark. But also looking at, like, how you can marry or map that to anything strategic that’s in the pipeline, because if you want that value to be noticed and recognized, you need to not only start speaking the language of the executive team, but also make it so that it’s accessible to everyone else, so they can also support your vision as well.

[00:29:14] Steve MacDonald: I love it. I wish we had another couple of hours because there’s just so much to go into here. We might have to have you come back online. But here’s what I do know is going to happen. People are going to have questions, and is it appropriate if I gave out a link to your LinkedIn profile that people could reach out and ask questions?

[00:29:31] Karen Lam: Yeah, for sure. I mean, especially when it comes to the voice of the customer program, I know I struggled to find information on it, so I’d be happy to help anyone else who’s looking to get their feet wet and start their journey.

[00:29:42] Steve MacDonald: Well, fantastic. You know, the goal of what we’re trying to do on this podcast is to bring executives like yourself together, where we can share our unique insights, our unique points of view from our backgrounds, and if we can share and bring all that together, then it’s like the rising tide that lifts all boats, and I just think you were a really important part of that rising tide today. So, I just wanted to say thank you for coming on.

[00:30:05] Karen Lam: No, thank you, Steve.