About this episode

The episode discusses the importance of understanding customer signals beyond traditional surveys in continuous improvement efforts.

Voice of Customer has been a fixture in Lean and Six Sigma for decades, but the word "voice" carries a hidden assumption: that the customer has to do something -- answer a survey, write an email, lift a finger -- before you learn anything. Most of the time they don't, and you're left improving in the dark. In this preview of our next Continuous Improvement Webinar, host Mark Graban talks with Annette Behrensmeyer and Volker Probst, managing partners at Resonance Growth Partners, about a broader idea: customer signals. These include the unsolicited, behavior-based indicators customers send all the time without being asked -- and the operational data that often reveals more than a survey ever could. The conversation gets at a problem every CI leader knows: the gap between what customers say and what they do. Volker shares a story from when his wife was hospitalized while pregnant with twins, and a nurse asked her daily to fill out a survey and award a perfect score -- a built-in bias that tells you almost nothing about the actual experience. The better question is what behaviors and operational indicators reveal about how an experience really went, and what an…

People in this episode

Host: Mark Graban

Guests: Annette Behrensmeyer, Volker Probst

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Resonance Growth Partners

More episodes of KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

• Preview: Why Great CI Programs Don't Get Funded (and What to Do About It) · July 17, 2026 · 9 min
• [Webinar] Beyond the Voice of the Customer: Richer Signals for Continuous Improvement · June 18, 2026 · 55 min

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