Outside the retail sphere, it is not easy to discover who is an actual customer. Furthermore, it is not always clear who should be the source of VoC, according to an article on the business2community.com website.
Sales
Sales people often only hear what they need to in order to hit the planned quotas. They may claim all customers want something which has not yet been added by the product team but will not mention many other things customers would also like to have. And if such an item is actually added, customers will suddenly lose all interest in it and the sales team will start talking about how it is now all a question of the price or something else.
Service
Maybe it is really all about what customer service is hearing? After all, service and support staff do talk to customers on a regular basis. However, they usually deal with problems and complaints: clients make themselves heard if something isn’t how it should be: billing is inaccurate, delivery is slow or your company website isn't working. And, of course, all of this may be true.
On the other hand, you still have clients who continue to purchase your services and products. Insights from customer service staff are indeed valuable and help you find out what is going wrong. However, the staff seldom hear about things which are going right or about minor hiccups which are not really worth complaining about. It is also possible something is so terribly wrong that the customer does not even bother talking to your staff and immediately seeks another supplier instead.
To sum up, sales and service feedback is selective. It is always about very small samples and specific transactions.
-jk-