The Listening Investment
The Listening Investment: Why Acting on What Customers Tell You Always Costs Something First
In the companies I worked for, I saw times when customer feedback was either tossed aside or used as inputs for new products and services. When success happened, it was in response to solving a customer problem or complaint. Sounds elementary. Putting that into practice isn’t easy or elementary. I’ve seen leaders stand on their own knowledge and understanding of the market ahead of what customers and employees say. During these times, product innovation falters and it costs more in the long run to fix the problems. Common solutions are to throw “marketing” at the problem, or reduce prices so the product eventually sells or it’s written off the books.
When customers spend the time to give you feedback, it’s either because they love the people who give them great service, or they have something to complain about. It’s human nature. Most companies stop there: they collect it, put a number on a slide, and call that CX. What actually separates the good CX companies from the rest is what I call the Listening Investment — the real cost a company has to absorb the moment feedback stops being a report and starts being a decision. It’s real money: inventory, headcount, a strategy the company built itself on that it now has to walk back in public. It’s daunting to think about this long term and the implications for investment. Companies that ignore it, keep this quarter’s numbers intact. Companies that invest are betting the trade is worth more than what it costs them today.
Two companies made that investment recently, at very different points in the bet.
Warby Parker built its whole identity on being online-only, providing eyeglasses without a store, without an optometrist’s office and without the friction of retail. Customers didn’t agree, and Warby Parker listened. Through early pop-ups and a mobile showroom, they found out people wanted to try glasses on before they bought them, and opened their first store in SoHo in 2013. They’ve since expanded to over 300 stores nationwide. By the end of 2025, they discontinued Home Try-On — the very program that built their early reputation — because the thing that solved an early problem had become the wrong answer to a problem customers no longer had.
Source: EXCLUSIVE: Warby Parker retail and experience chief talks store expansion, Chain Store Age; Warby Parker’s Neil Blumenthal on what’s next for the brand, Retail Dive
The investment is paying off. Adjusted EBITDA grew 30.2 percent to $95.2 million in fiscal 2025, alongside revenue growth of 13 percent to $871.9 million. Independent foot traffic data backs it up too: store visits were up 23.5 percent year over year in a recent quarter, with customers spending more time in-store, not less.
Source: Warby Parker Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results, BusinessWire; Warby Parker’s Store-First Strategy is Paying Off, Placer.ai
Rent the Runway is another example. They used their deep knowledge of customers to redesign the customer’s experience and remove friction by providing more inventory, adding machine-learning discovery and recommendations, and a one-off order option for when a customer’s regular shipment wasn’t available. That’s what customers wanted, and it resulted in higher retention and a Subscription Net Promoter Score up 39 percent year over year, more than tripling since 2022.
Source: Rent the Runway’s NPS improvements boost financials, CX Dive
Here’s what that investment cost, in dollars: to earn that NPS gain, Rent the Runway increased spending on inventory specifically because leadership believed more item availability was “critical for improving customer satisfaction and retention.” Adjusted EBITDA fell from $46.9 million to $24.9 million that same year. That’s a company choosing, on purpose, to let profitability absorb the cost of a decision it made because of what customers were telling it, betting that retention converts into something more durable than this year’s EBITDA line.
Source: Rent the Runway Q1 2025 slides: revenue drops 7%, bets big on inventory, Investing.com
Neither company waited for certainty before it invested.
Here’s what I would ask your leadership team this week:
When you last changed something because of customer feedback, can you name the specific metric that moved and the specific decision that moved it?
Do you know, in dollars, what it would cost to act on the feedback you’re already collecting?
If margin has to dip before retention or NPS improves, does your team have the patience, and the story for your board, to hold the line long enough to find out if the bet pays off?
Are you funding the ability to listen — surveys, dashboards, a VOC platform — without ever funding the ability to act on what you hear?
Could you point to one specific business decision made in the last year because a customer told you something, not because a trend line confirmed something you already planned to do?
If the answer to these questions shows customer feedback isn’t part of how your company makes decisions, you’re not avoiding the Listening Investment — you’re just deferring it.
The result of not taking action is this: innovation stalls, marketing tries repositioning the product, sales decrease, and customers leave for the next best thing.
Let’s talk about what’s next. I’d map where the feedback you’re already collecting is going. For example, into a decision, or onto a dashboard nobody acts on and what it would take to close that gap before the competition closes it for you.
The first call is free — sixty minutes to find out if there’s a gap worth closing.