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The 2026 State of CX Outsourcing
Customer feedback — how it’s collected and addressed — has an outsized impact on a company’s bottom line and how customers feel about a brand.
Companies collect more customer feedback than at any point in history, but most struggle to act on it. Consider that more than 99% of customers read reviews before buying a product, while 56% say a company’s response to a review has changed their perspective on the business.
Yet traditional systems struggle with fragmented data and lack of unified context. Being able to act on feedback requires a culture of curiosity and continuous improvement. With customers living in a multitude of different channels, it’s vital for organizations to be customer-centric and adaptive around how they ask for and act upon customer feedback.
To dive deeper into customer feedback management, CMSWire interviewed Karthik Suri, Chief Product & Corporate Strategy Officer at Sprinklr. They discussed the importance of customer feedback management (CFM) and its evolving practices. Suri feels strongly that legacy CFM shifted from human‑centered to transactional and over‑analytical — rich in data, but increasingly abstracted from the customer’s original intent and voice.
Highlights from the discussion are below, where Suri outlines where companies traditionally struggle with customer feedback and listed actionable steps for organizations both just starting and those looking to optimize their customer feedback practices.
Table of Contents
- Challenges in Customer Feedback Management
- Struggles, Solutions & Actionable Steps
- How an AI-Native Platform Elevates Modern Customer Feedback Management
- Don’t Let Valuable Customer Feedback Get Lost
Challenges in Customer Feedback Management
Customer feedback used to be straightforward and analog — customers would fill out physical comment cards and drop them into a slot, as simple and analog as a process could be, but also constrained by utility. As transactions moved online, the humble comment card gave way to digital surveys and other online feedback methods.
Even now, organizations are largely adapting physical processes to the digital world. “Legacy CFM vendors ended up simply digitizing a physical process,” Suri said. As a result, companies often struggle to interpret unstructured data. He continued, “Feedback is as much – if not more – what people say about you than what they say to you.”
With legacy companies still largely replicating analog feedback in a digital world, they often constrain feedback to old operational models, which ignores valuable signals. “Today’s problem isn’t data scarcity,” said Suri. “It’s that feedback has drifted into a transactional, over‑analytical exercise. We capture volumes of signals, yet too often lose the human intent and voice we need to act with confidence and speed. Many companies still rely on the old world of checkboxes and phone‑tree surveys — processes that reduce genuine customer voices to mechanical inputs. So, even as customers are talking more and generally being more forthcoming about what they want, enterprises struggle to capture this feedback, extract sentiment, translate it into signals and take meaningful action.”
When customer feedback isn’t acted on, it can create a disconnect between customer feedback processes and the actual customer experience. This can lead to fragmented feedback, dissatisfaction or even customer churn.
Suri explained the customer’s point of view when their feedback isn’t acted upon. “If a company asks me for feedback and does nothing about it or asks me for feedback and it doesn't impact me, It's a rear-view mirror of my experience – something that doesn’t motivate me to engage again and may even de-motivate me,” Suri said.
Struggles, Solutions & Actionable Steps
Suri identified three main challenges when it comes to traditional CFM solutions: impersonal and interruptive feedback collection instead of continuous listening, a lack of unified context across channels and experiences and finally fragmented data processed with a weak insight‑to‑action loop.
Feedback is typically treated as a discrete, transactional activity (post‑event surveys) rather than something that happens naturally “in the flow” of the experience. When feedback is treated this way, it stops being listening and becomes theater – performed for the company, not experienced by the customer. Further, because feedback is point‑in‑time and fragmented across channels and tools, companies miss signals before, during and after the experience. They don’t “meet customers in the moments that matter,” so the full context of the journey is lost.
Finally, structured and unstructured data live in silos; most of the rich, unstructured signals are ignored. Even when data is collected, companies struggle to interpret it, turn it into insights and then into timely action. This means customers don’t see anything change, often invalidating their own experiences.
Suri identified several steps for companies who might be just starting out with their CFM journey, along with those looking to optimize their current processes.
First, companies should start with a culture of curiosity and continuous improvement. “Fundamentally wanting to change and wanting to be customer centric is step number one,” Suri said.
Shift from discrete feedback events to continuous listening and learning. Then, select a vendor that supports continuous listening across channels and modalities. “Structure your customer feedback as a continuous listening system, anytime, anywhere and not as a discrete corporate activity,” Suri said. “This means you have structured and unstructured listening along with solicited and unsolicited feedback through any channel and as far as possible in the flow of experience of your customers.”
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Finally, understand the importance of insights to action with low latency and foresight to resolution. “Think about it. You're listening continuously to your customers. How does that translate into making your product or service better or resolving any transactional issues in real-time when they happen?” Suri asked.
How an AI-Native Platform Elevates Modern Customer Feedback Management
AI‑native CFM directly addresses the core reasons customer feedback so often falls flat: fragmented signals, slow analysis and disconnected follow‑through. Instead of leaving teams to manually sift through surveys, social posts, call transcripts, reviews and support interactions, AI unifies these massive, messy, multichannel inputs and interprets unstructured feedback at scale — giving companies a complete, real‑time view of what customers are experiencing.
Just as importantly, AI accelerates the insight‑to‑action loop by surfacing emerging issues early, identifying root causes behind friction and triggering automated workflows that help teams resolve problems before they compound. By dramatically reducing the latency between listening and acting, AI‑native CFM transforms feedback from something that feels reactive and performative into a continuous, proactive advantage that customers can feel.
Don’t Let Valuable Customer Feedback Get Lost
Improving CFM takes continuous listening across channels, integrating structured and unstructured data, and leveraging AI for insights to action.
The rise of multi-generational audiences and their buying patterns, customers' presence in multiple channels and the role of AI in enhancing customer experience all mean that companies can no longer afford to collect data in purely traditional ways and worse yet without the intention of doing anything with it. Effective voice of the customer programs require organizations to close the loop between feedback and action.
If your company is still simply adapting analog feedback collection to a world moving at the pace of AI, now is the time to examine how you can transform your CFM and turn insights into action.
To see how brands can bring the humanity back with unified CFM — including continuous listening and AI-powered insight-to-action workflows — visit sprinklr.com.