Leadership teams can use customer feedback to improve strategic planning by testing internal assumptions, identifying what customers value most, and turning those insights into priorities with clear ownership and follow-through. Collecting feedback is the starting point. The real work is deciding what you will do differently because of it.
This time of year, leadership teams are deep in planning for the year ahead. They’re debating new markets, new products, and new hires. Before we get into any of that, I always ask one question:
“What are your customers telling you?”
Most teams answer quickly. They know their customers; they talk to them consistently, but when I ask, “When was the last time you heard a customer tell you, in their own words, why they choose you?” the room usually gets quiet.
Recently, Rhythm Consultant Paul Pirkle and I spent two days with a leadership team working on its growth strategy for 2027. Paul opened with a simple exercise: he asked each leader to describe an elephant.
Every answer was different. One described a big gray elephant. Another described a female with no tusks. Others pictured an elephant with a broken tusk or a mother with her babies. Same animal, completely different pictures.
Then Paul said something I haven’t stopped thinking about:
“Knowing it or not, you are defending your elephant.”
That’s exactly what happens with our customers. Every leader has a picture of the customer in their head, and every one of them is defending it. Listening to customers together gives the team a chance to test those different pictures against the same evidence.
So that’s what we did. We put an empty chair in the room to represent the customer. Before we talked about a single Winning Move, we listened to what their customers had to say.
One of my favorite ways to start a Voice of Customer conversation is to ask the team to guess before showing the findings. Voice of Customer, or VoC, is the practice of gathering and interpreting customers’ feedback about their needs, experiences, and expectations.
Before reviewing the study, we asked the team three questions:
These were the team’s hypotheses, not findings from interviews with all three groups. In fact, the absence of lost customers from the study became an important gap to address.
We also asked the team to estimate how two major customers had scored their trust in the company. Only then did we reveal the results.
The team correctly identified which relationship was stronger, but underestimated the trust in both. The point wasn’t whether they could guess the numbers. It was seeing where their assumptions matched the customer’s experience and where they didn’t.
Then the CFO said something that stuck with everyone:
“The stuff that’s most important to them is not the stuff that we’re doing.”
The company was doing well on relationships. Customers felt cared for. But what customers valued most was service and delivery, and that was where the company was weakest. As one leader put it, customers were saying, “I just want you to deliver.”
He followed that with an honest confession: “We talk about growth more than we talk about servicing our customers.”
That’s where customer feedback becomes useful for strategic planning. It helps you distinguish between what your team is proud of and what customers need you to improve. Strong relationships were not a substitute for reliable service and delivery.
This company had commissioned an independent Voice of Customer study two years in a row. That gave us an opportunity to examine how customer feedback had changed, while also checking who had participated in each study.
One of its largest customers gave the company a 7 out of 10 on likelihood to recommend. Both years. On a dashboard, that looks stable.
But when we read the customer’s words, the story was different. The previous year, the comment was that they were “not seeing the same proactive service.” This year, the same person said they felt “taken for granted.” They talked about broken trust and hinted that they might start spreading their business around.
Same score. A very different relationship.
This is why I’m such a believer in Red-Yellow-Green and Early Warning Systems. You want to recognize a relationship is in trouble before the customer calls to say they’re leaving.
A score can help you track a relationship, but it may not explain what is changing underneath it. Read the comments, ask follow-up questions, and compare the customer’s experience over time before concluding that a stable score means a stable relationship.
The feedback challenged negative assumptions, too. Customers praised how well the company launched new sites, even though the team experienced those launches as stressful and disorganized. Paul summed up the contrast: “You’re not that good, and you’re not that bad.”
Customer feedback can reveal problems you have underestimated and strengths you haven’t recognized. Both matter when deciding where to focus.
To turn Voice of Customer insights into strategic priorities, identify recurring customer needs, decide which ones require a leadership-level response, and commit ownership, resources, and a way to measure progress. A finding becomes a priority when it changes what the team will do.
As we worked through the feedback, one theme kept showing up. When customers were thrilled, they pointed to great on-site leadership. When they were close to leaving, they described inconsistent site leadership. The team also connected bad site leadership with past customer losses, although lost customers themselves had not been interviewed in this study.
The CEO told us that one customer had said to him, completely unprompted, “You’re only as good as your site manager.”
Think about that. The customer had named what mattered most in their day-to-day experience.
This wasn’t a new idea for the team. Two years earlier, it had chosen improving site leadership as its number one Winning Move. Every quarter since, that priority had lost out to something more urgent.
Their Voice of Customer findings didn’t hand them a completely new strategy. They reinforced a decision the team had already made but never fully funded. As I told them, “This will cause you to get really serious about the decision you guys already made.”
Sometimes customers tell you something you already know but haven’t acted on. That may be the most valuable thing they can tell you.
Identifying a priority is not the same as committing to it. When customer feedback points to an important issue, bring these questions into your planning discussion:
Otherwise, the next study may tell you exactly the same thing.
Customer feedback should also shape how you explain what you do. Use it to connect your services to the problems customers need solved and the outcomes they care about.
Here’s one that stung a little, and not just for the client.
When Paul reviewed the company’s sales deck, he pointed out that 39 of its 40 pages were about the company.
Meanwhile, customers in the study said they didn’t understand the full range of services available to them. One leader shared that some important customers thought the company did very little in a service area where it actually did millions of dollars of work for them.
As Paul put it:
“The worst thing a salesperson should ever hear is, ‘We didn’t know you did that.’”
I have to be honest: in the same session, I looked at one of my own slides and realized it was all about us, too. I’ve been guilty of this myself.
Look at your proposals, website pages, and sales decks through your customer’s eyes. What problem are they trying to solve? What outcome matters to them? How does your service help?
If customers don’t understand what you can do for them, adding more pages about your company may not solve the problem. Connect your capabilities to their needs, using language they recognize.
Customer feedback can also challenge your assumptions about where to automate. In this study, customers placed greater importance on face-to-face meetings than they had the previous year. Because the interview participants changed between studies, we couldn’t assume that every difference reflected changing preferences among the same people. But the finding was worth exploring.
I’m not telling you to slow down on AI. I’m a big believer in it, and we use it every day at Rhythm Systems. AI can help organize interview transcripts and spot patterns across conversations. Those patterns can guide better follow-up questions.
Before deciding what to automate, ask customers where it would make their experience better and where access to a person matters most. Don’t make that decision entirely from inside your own company.
A Voice of Customer study is a useful start, but customer listening can’t be a one-time project. Bring what you learn into annual planning, quarterly priority reviews, and the meetings where your team makes decisions.
Here are the practices I would take into the next round:
Your customers know why they choose you, where you’re falling short, and what would make their experience better. Sometimes they also see strengths that your own team doesn’t recognize.
Before your next annual planning session, ask your leadership team four questions:
Write down the answers. Then ask customers the same questions and compare what you hear.
Don’t just celebrate the good feedback. Pay attention to the uncomfortable answers, too. Decide which finding should change a strategic priority, who will own the response, and when you will review progress.
Don’t build your 2027 strategy only around what your team believes customers need. Test those beliefs against what customers actually say, then make room in the plan to act on what matters.
The goal isn’t to defend your elephant. It’s to make sure everyone is looking at the same one.