Where does the Voice of Customer really play out in the buying journey?

While Artificial Intelligence is revolutionising plenty of things, some elements remain unchanged. The traditional stages of the customer journey are one of them. You know them well: discovery, consideration, purchase, loyalty and, finally, recommendation.

What’s changing now is how your customers’ satisfaction shows up throughout this journey, as well as the opportunities that arise to capture what they’re saying about you.

In this article, we’ll help you understand where the Voice of Customer plays out at each stage of the customer journey, the key moments you can’t afford to miss, and the friction points that could cost you customers!

From the first signal to the recommendation: where does the Voice of Customer come in?

At every one of these stages, signals pass between the customer and the business, reflecting their level of satisfaction, whether expressed or simply perceived. That’s what we call the Voice of Customer — the full range of signals, explicit or not, through which a customer lets you know what they think of their experience.

This voice doesn’t travel in one direction only. Sometimes the customer receives it, when they read what others have said before them. Sometimes they express it themselves, becoming a source of information for someone else in turn.

Rather than a straight line that stops at recommendation, what actually takes shape is a genuine loop: the customer discovering you today is relying on the voice of a customer who came before them. And the customer who stays loyal to you today will become, tomorrow, the voice that brings in a new one.

Moments of truth

But not all touchpoints in the journey carry the same weight: some matter far more than others in shaping the customer’s final perception. These are the moments of truth.

In the 1980s, Jan Carlzon, then CEO of the airline Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), popularised the idea that every interaction between a customer and a business, however brief, is a decisive moment that shapes the customer’s perception of the brand.

Once that perception turns negative, it can be hard to win back: according to PwC’s Experience is Everything study, 32% of consumers say they’d abandon a brand they love after just one bad experience.

In 2011, nearly thirty years later, Google built on the concept and introduced ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth). This is the moment when the customer looks for information even before the first direct contact with the business — typically, reading reviews or searching online before visiting or calling. It covers both discovery and consideration, up until any direct contact takes place.

The concept spread quickly and gave rise to several variations:

• FMOT (First Moment of Truth) for the first direct contact (walking into the shop),
• SMOT (Second Moment of Truth) for actually using the product or service,
• TMOT (Third Moment of Truth) for sharing the experience afterwards: reviews, word of mouth.

CX leaders clearly understand what’s at stake in these moments of truth: 85% say a single unresolved issue is enough to lose a customer, even right from the very first contact, according to Zendesk’s CX Trends 2026 report.

The most common friction points and weak signals to watch for

At every stage of the customer journey, moments of truth are tipping points that can swing the experience in a positive or negative direction. When the tip is negative, it feeds into a review, a response to a satisfaction survey, or both at once.

These friction points aren’t vague, generic problems you have no control over. Quite the opposite: each one corresponds to a precise moment in the customer experience that went wrong, and one that can be identified.

Friction points can take many forms, and crop up at any stage of the journey:

• Information shown online (opening hours, product or service availability) no longer matches reality by the time the customer shows up in person.
• The customer waits at the till or the front desk longer than expected, with no member of staff available to help them.
• A customer starts a request on one channel (chat, online form) and then has to pick it back up on another (phone, branch), with the person they speak to having no idea what they’ve already explained.
• After a contract is signed, several weeks go by before the technical team actually takes over to kick off the rollout.
• A customer leaves a review or a message to flag a problem, and gets back a generic reply that doesn’t mention anything they actually described.

All of the friction points above share one thing in common: something happens, and it goes badly. An interaction does take place, but it turns into discomfort or disappointment — with the risk of it turning up in your reviews and surveys.

There’s another category of friction, of a different nature altogether: it’s not the interaction that fails, it’s the very opportunity to make contact with the customer that never happens at all. The customer doesn’t come forward, the business has no idea, and no signal — no review, no complaint — ever reveals it. These missed opportunities are all the harder to spot because, by definition, they leave no trace:

• When a customer asks a conversational AI to recommend a business for what they need, the one just a few minutes from their home never even comes up.
• The customer is torn between several similar businesses, and, lacking recent reviews for one of them, goes with the one that shows the most — regardless of the actual quality of service.
• A customer, happy with their experience, leaves the business without ever being offered a simple way to say so.

How to spot weak signals… before the customer walks away

Spotting a friction point once it’s already driven a customer away is too late. Yet, your customer feedback contains several indicators that let you catch it beforehand, even if they can go unnoticed when looked at individually:

A gradual decline in the share of positive reviews: you can spot this by comparing the share of 4-5 star reviews on a rolling basis (month by month), rather than focusing on your listings’ average rating. This is an indicator that’s easy to miss if you focus solely on the average rating, which is built on several hundred reviews and only shifts very slowly…

A gradual increase in the time it takes to respond to reviews or customer messages. This is a signal that’s often invisible internally because it worsens little by little, but it reveals a double problem: a slower response time isn’t just an issue of service quality as perceived by the customer, it’s also often a sign that an internal organisation is starting to fall behind.

The same keyword or negative theme coming up again and again across different reviews. It’s not a single negative opinion that should catch your attention, but the repetition of the same word or the same idea. How do you spot this across a whole network? Through thematic analysis or automatic tagging of reviews, rather than reading every single review by hand — something that’s simply not sustainable once you’re past a dozen outlets.

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A growing gap between the average review rating and the score from internal satisfaction surveys (NPS/CSAT) over the same period. If the two move in different directions, or increasingly diverge, it’s a sign that one of the two channels is picking up on something the other isn’t. A more granular comparison of performance, along with semantic analysis of customer feedback, can then help identify what’s driving that gap.

Negative reviews piling up at one specific outlet, while the network average stays stable. This is a particularly important signal for any multi-outlet network. A network-wide average can easily mask a problem that’s heavily concentrated in two or three outlets, invisible unless you drill down to the level of each individual outlet.

“Close the Loop”: how do you turn insight into action?

Once you’ve identified the friction points and analysed the signals, one question remains: where do you start? Not every area for improvement deserves the same level of oversight, and not all of them can be kicked off by the head office alone.

Some friction points are one-off, specific to a single outlet, and are best handled locally: it’s the local team — the one that knows its customers and deals with them every day — that’s best placed to fix it quickly.

Others, however, are systemic: they crop up again and again across different outlets and point to an underlying problem in a process shared across the whole network. The Voice of Customer tools give the head office the right visibility to identify and address these network-wide issues.

This is where real collaboration between the two levels needs to happen:

• head office is responsible for spotting what keeps recurring, for prioritising the initiatives worth pursuing, and for giving local teams the means to act;
• local teams are responsible for putting things into practice, in direct contact with the customer, with a level of detailed knowledge the head office will never get from a dashboard.

That said, these efforts need to be sustained over time if you genuinely want to improve perception — and therefore satisfaction — among your customers.

For a network, there’s a real risk in failing to sustain this improvement loop that the Voice of Customer makes possible. The more outlets you have, the more easily local realities can slip past you. A static read of the customer journey leaves you to lose touch on what your customers are really saying and the difficulties your teams are facing.

So don’t treat this as a one-off audit, done once a year. The Voice of Customer — reviews and feedback combined — is precisely the mechanism that keeps that picture continuously up to date, at both central and local level.