Why Your Customer Feedback Isn't Working
Wonder Insights
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Last week, we sat down with Ajay Ochani from Versuni (the company behind Philips, Senseo, and nine other global home appliance brands) to understand how they transformed scattered customer feedback into a system that drives real product innovation. What we learned wasn't just inspiring—it was practical. And if you're struggling to turn your customer feedback into meaningful action, this might be exactly what you need to hear.
Watch the full conversation with Ajay here →
Here's what Ajay told us about Versuni's situation before their transformation: "We sell [to] over 100 retailers in more than 50 countries. We have a gold mine of consumer touchpoint data—ratings, reviews, call center transcripts, NPS surveys, and more. But it's not just scattered. Different teams are using this data through different tools, in different languages, with different structures and processes."
Sound familiar? The issue isn't lack of data. Most consumer brands have plenty of first-party feedback. The problem is that it's:
Marketing owns the reviews. Customer service has the call transcripts. Product teams run their own surveys. But nobody has the complete picture and without the complete picture, you can't make confident decisions.
Versuni's journey started like most voice of customer programs do—with a centralized team. "We had a global VoC team," Ajay explained. "A couple of people sat together, created use cases, and started sharing reports with the organization. We hoped we were adding more consumer centricity to every decision."
At first, it worked. People saw value. They got excited. Then they hit a wall.
"After some time, we hit a hard road because the global VoC team was very limited. We were open to help everyone, but we were limited by our capacity and bandwidth."
This is the classic bottleneck. A small, centralized insights team becomes the gatekeeper. Every question, every analysis request goes through them. Insights take weeks. By the time they arrive, the decision has already been made. Versuni realized they needed a different approach. Instead of pushing insights to stakeholders through reports, they needed to pull model—where teams could access what they needed, when they needed it.
Before we go further, we need to address something critical: not all customer feedback is created equal. There's a difference between what we call "smart data" and "soft data."
Soft data is everywhere:
It exists, but it's fragmented, inconsistent, and often unusable at scale.
Smart data is different. It's:
The first step in Versuni's transformation was bringing all their scattered feedback together and turning soft data into smart data. "We started consolidating all this data, bringing it together, connecting the dots, trying to see how it makes sense," Ajay shared. "And in this case, AI is very helpful."
Let's talk about AI for a moment—because there's a lot of hype, and it's important to separate reality from marketing. Yes, AI is powerful. It can speed up analysis from weeks to minutes. It can process millions of data points and surface patterns humans would never spot manually.
But here's what most vendors won't tell you: AI is only as good as your data foundation. "Generative AI is a big buzz right now," Ajay noted. "People are utilizing it and it's really helping us make faster decisions. But many people don't know that AI always works on a sample of data. It takes big data and tries to find relevant data to help us spot trends very easily. But can we rely on this sample when we have to make big decisions—which innovation to drive, where to invest, what key quality decisions we need to make?"
The answer Versuni landed on: you need both.
AI brings speed, scale, and pattern recognition across massive datasets. Humans bring context, judgment, creativity, and understanding of business application. "The future isn't AI replacing people," Ajay emphasized. "It's AI augmenting human intelligence."
At Versuni, they use natural language processing to tag every review and identify strengths and weaknesses. But when it comes to major investment decisions or quality-sensitive actions, they bring in human validation and expertise. It's not about choosing between automation and human judgment. It's about knowing when to use each.
Theory is nice. But let's look at two real examples where Versuni's feedback system caught issues that could have spiraled.
Versuni recently launched a new air fryer series. As part of their sustainability efforts, they decided to eliminate physical user manuals and replace them with QR codes that linked to digital versions. Good intention, right? Less paper waste, better for the environment.
But then their NPS scores started dropping. One and two-star reviews started appearing. "We thought we were doing our bit for the environment," Ajay recalled. "But unfortunately, we learned our ratings were showing one or two-star reviews. When we deep-dived into the sentiment analysis to find the 'why' behind it, we learned that our sustainability campaign—which we felt would be adding value—was not perceived by the consumer as we thought. They were frustrated. They were not able to use our air fryer, especially for first-time setup."
The fix? They printed leaflets with first-time setup instructions while still providing QR codes for the full manual. Balance restored. Crisis averted.
But here's the key: If Versuni had waited for quarterly market research reports, this issue would have snowballed. Active monitoring plus rapid action = problem contained.
In India, Versuni developed a special jar for their blenders designed for dry grinding of spices, perfect for making masalas (spice blends). It was innovative, different from standard blenders with rubber seals.
The innovation team was excited. They were adding authentic homemade masala-making to their consumers' lives. But when they launched, complaints started flooding in. "Because these jars were a bit different, they didn't have the normal rubber seal," Ajay explained. "Consumers thought the product was defective. They started calling our call centers and putting bad ratings, misinterpreting that this is a bad product."
The marketing team jumped into "hyper care" mode. They improved product page content, actively communicated the innovation, and helped consumers understand the feature.
Reviews turned around. The innovation was recognized. "These examples portray that brands need to keep an open ear to the voice of the consumer," Ajay said. "To make sure the message is going across correctly."
Watch Ajay share these stories in detail →
So what does all this effort actually deliver? Over the past decade, Versuni increased their average product rating from 4.4 to 4.6 across more than 5,000 products on over 100 touchpoints.
That might not sound dramatic, but consider:
"This is not an ad hoc kind of thing," Ajay emphasized. "We have to be consumer obsessed. We always have to listen to them to understand what they're looking for."
But Versuni doesn't just track star ratings. They measure three key metrics that are monitored by C-level executives:
These aren't vanity metrics. They're tied directly to business outcomes—conversion rates, product development priorities, and competitive positioning.
So how do you actually build this in your organization?
Based on Versuni's journey and what we've seen work across dozens of global brands, here's the practical roadmap:
You need two types of metrics:
This isn't about "number of reviews collected" or "sentiment score." It's about metrics that leadership cares about—product ratings, NPS correlation to retention, support ticket reduction, innovation success rates. When executives care about VoC metrics, the whole organization pays attention.
This is non-negotiable. VoC touches every part of the organization—Product, Marketing, CX, Operations, E-commerce. If it's owned by one team with no executive mandate, it will never scale.
What executive sponsorship looks like:
The common failure mode is a VoC program owned by one team, with no executive visibility, where other departments say "nice work, but we're busy." The program never achieves ROI because adoption is limited.
You need clear roles:
Getting this mix right ensures alignment, accountability, and momentum throughout the rollout.
At this stage, you have the foundation—the right people, roles, and processes. Now comes technology. A customer insights platform that helps you aggregate all that scattered feedback, analyze it at scale, and deliver insights to the right people at the right time. But here's the critical part: technology doesn't replace human judgment. Teams still need to validate insights, add context, make decisions, and ensure AI outputs translate into real impact.
The balance between AI-powered technology and human expertise is what turns data into growth, innovation, and customer loyalty.
One final piece of advice from Versuni's journey: don't over-engineer from day one.
"Start with a pilot where you prove results and win early champions," Ajay recommended. "Once you show results, scaling becomes so much easier."
Think of this as a cycle, not a one-time project. Keep iterating through:
And remember: even the smartest strategy fails without the right structure. Centralizing data creates consistency, but real power comes when it's shared widely—when teams don't have to rely on others to find answers. As Ajay put it: "Technology gives you the muscles. People give it meaning. Adoption happens when teams see AI as a partner, not a replacement. Automation for speed, humans for judgment. That's the right balance that turns a platform into performance."
The playbook is simple:
That's how you go from feedback chaos to product innovation. That's how you turn consumer voices into ROI. Want to see how Versuni built their consumer intelligence system? Watch the full webinar with Ajay Ochani, or if you're ready to explore how this could work in your organization, book a conversation with our team.
About the Speakers:
Ajay Ochani leads consumer intelligence initiatives at Versuni, the global home appliance company behind Philips, Senseo, Saeco, and other iconic brands across 50+ countries.
Lamia Marouani helps enterprise brands at Wonderflow transform scattered customer feedback into product-level intelligence that drives innovation and growth.
