If you work on a Voice of Customer (VoC) team, you already know the drill: feedback is everywhere. It’s coming in through surveys, support tickets, online reviews, call transcripts, social posts—you name it. There’s no shortage of voices. The hard part is a) actually making sense of it all, especially when every tool speaks a different language, and b) acting on all this feedback in a way that drives company growth.

Good thing there’s the Modern Data Stack—a smarter, more connected way to handle data. Instead of juggling a bunch of disconnected platforms, the Modern Data Stack helps you bring everything together. Now, you’re not just collecting feedback, but making it easy for all teams to  do something with it.

This article breaks down how that works, what the tradeoffs are, and what you need to know to get started.

So, let’s start.

How Do Companies Approach Unifying Data?

To make all of this possible—from storing structured data to analyzing unstructured feedback—companies are turning to the Modern Data Stack. This is a flexible, cloud-based ecosystem of tools that work together to collect, store, transform, and analyze data.

It typically includes a data warehouse like Snowflake or BigQuery, an ELT tool like Fivetran or Airbyte to move data, and a transformation layer like dbt. For analytics and visualization, tools like Looker, Tableau, or PowerBI are often used. And since the emergence of LLMs and tools for AI-powered analysis Voice of Customer can now unify unstructured data within this framework.

What makes the Modern Data Stack powerful is that it’s modular, scalable, and makes advanced use cases like closing customer feedback loops or personalized marketing campaigns much more accessible.

Traditional Approaches to Unified Data Analytics

Before the Modern Data Stack, unifying customer feedback was especially challenging. Companies often used tools like Qualtrics for research surveys, Medallia for NPS, and separate platforms for support tickets, reviews, and social media listening. These systems didn’t talk to each other, and bringing the data together meant manually exporting reports, cleaning spreadsheets, and trying to merge inconsistent formats.

It was hard to get a holistic view of the customer experience—feedback was scattered, delayed, and hard to analyze across channels. As a result, insights were often reactive, not real-time, and limited to just one feedback source at a time.

To solve this, one solution is to turn a survey platform into a unified data solution. Companies would add unstructured feedback from other sources into a platform like Medallia or Qualtrics. Some of these platforms can even be used as a mini-CRM and a ticket management solution. But companies often don’t like doing this for several reasons:

• Survey platforms are known for having weak analytics, it’s not their strength.
• Other tools, such as call center software, generate much more data than surveys, which they aren’t prepared to put into a survey management tool
• They prefer to use best-in-class solutions for CRM (Hubspot or Salesforce), triggering tickets (Salesforce Service Cloud, Service Now or Jira) and analytics (Thematic, Chattermill)
• They also don’t want to be locked into a single survey tool.  

A different solution would be to use a Feedback Analytics tool such as Thematic as a place for unifying customer feedback across channels. Such solutions are built specifically for analyzing customer feedback at large enterprises and are agnostic to how you gather your data.

In this approach, Thematic uses AI to automatically discover themes in unstructured feedback. Insights analysts and researchers review the analysis to make sure it matches the needs of the business.

In Thematic, users can then ask questions about feedback, create reports and set up dashboards.

Compared to using Medallia or Qualtrics for unifying data, companies get best-in-class analytics created specifically for the analysis of unstructured data. Not just scores, but reasons behind the scores, fast answers to adhoc questions, easy way to find customer quotes or compare segments.

Compared to the full Modern Data Stack approach (described below), this approach is the faster time to value. Voice of Customer, Research and Insights teams often don’t have direct access to data warehousing, handled by a different team. But, it’s a relatively easy lift to connect various sources of feedback into a tool like Thematic. The security review is faster than in the full Modern Data Stack model.

However, there are disadvantages too. The teams run into the risk of creating dashboards that nobody sees in just another tool. Feedback analysis and insights stop at reporting on it, rather than using the data to trigger actions that improve customer experience. While it is possible to trigger alerts and route feedback from Thematic into other tools, it can only be based on the data added to Thematic, which results in data duplication and less powerful triggers.

Using the Modern Data Stack for Feedback: Thematic as a Transformer

In a Modern Data Stack setup, feedback data is treated like any other valuable source of customer insight. Instead of isolating feedback in a standalone tool, companies integrate it into their central data warehouse alongside behavioral, transactional, and operational data. This enables deeper analysis, cross-functional visibility, and automated actions based on unified signals.

In this architecture, Thematic plays a critical role as the transformer step. It ingests raw, unstructured feedback from surveys, support tickets, and reviews, then uses AI to categorize, theme, and structure it into analytics-ready formats. This transformed feedback is then pushed back into the data warehouse—such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift—where it can be joined with other customer data and queried using familiar tools like Looker, Tableau, or PowerBI.

With this setup, data teams can build holistic dashboards that blend feedback with usage and revenue data, product managers can explore trends across NPS and churn, and CX teams can create alerts or workflows that are triggered by specific themes. It closes the loop from feedback to action, fully leveraging the power of the Modern Data Stack.

What Moving to MDS Means for Voice of Customer Teams

So, what does all this talk about the Modern Data Stack actually mean for you and your team? It’s not just a tech upgrade—it’s a shift in how VoC work fits into the bigger picture. Your role is evolving, and with that comes new opportunities (and a few challenges). Here’s what’s changing.

1. You’re No Longer Just the “Survey Team”

VoC teams have historically been typecast as survey experts. But with the MDS, your scope can grow to include everything from support tickets to call center transcriptions to social sentiment—all unified in one system. This gives your team more influence and a larger voice in shaping business strategy.

2. Your Insights Can Drive Action—Automatically

When feedback is integrated into the broader data stack, it becomes part of a larger decision-making engine. Imagine surfacing a theme like “billing confusion” and having that insight automatically route to the billing team’s Slack channel or JIRA board. With modern orchestration tools and real-time alerts, VoC insights become triggers—not just reports.

3. You’ll Need New Skills and New Friends

To thrive in this model, VoC professionals need to deepen their data fluency. That might mean getting comfortable with SQL, understanding data pipelines, or collaborating more closely with analytics and engineering teams. The good news? This opens up career growth paths and ensures your work has company-wide impact.

4. There’s Still a Role for Purpose-Built Tools

While the MDS offers power and flexibility, it doesn’t replace every specialized VoC tool. Platforms like Thematic or Chattermill still offer unbeatable features for feedback analysis. The difference is, you now need to think about how these tools fit into your larger data architecture, not stand apart from it.

Pros and Cons of Integrating Feedback into the Modern Data Stack

Pros:

1. Bigger Impact Across the Company: By integrating customer feedback into the Modern Data Stack, your team can have a bigger impact. Feedback isn’t just stuck in one tool—it can be combined with other business data to help everyone make smarter decisions.
   
2. Real-time Action: With feedback in the MDS, you can trigger actions based on customer sentiment. For example, negative feedback could automatically alert the right team to respond quickly, improving the customer experience in real-time.
   
3. Easier to Scale: As your team collects more feedback, the MDS makes it easier to add more data sources. You won’t have to manually bring in new tools; everything will work together smoothly.
   
4. Better Insights and Reports: Having all your data in one place means you can create more powerful reports. You’ll be able to connect customer feedback with sales, behavior, and product data, which leads to more meaningful insights.
   
5. Empower Your Team: By connecting feedback directly to the MDS, your team becomes a key driver of change. You’ll be able to provide insights that affect real business outcomes, giving you a bigger role in shaping company strategy.

Cons:

1. Takes More Effort to Set Up: Getting all this feedback into the MDS isn’t easy—it requires time, coordination, and technical setup. You’ll need support from other teams, like IT or data engineers, to make it work.
   
2. More Oversight Needed: With all the data flowing through the system, there’s more to keep track of. You’ll need to work closely with data security and compliance teams to ensure everything is handled safely.
   
3. Resource Intensive: The process can require more resources to manage—like extra time for data engineers to maintain the system and more technical tools to handle the integrations.
   
4. Managing Permissions Can Get Tricky: As more teams use the feedback data, making sure everyone has the right level of access is key. You’ll need to ensure sensitive information doesn’t get shared inappropriately.
   
5. Longer Setup Time: The initial setup can take time, meaning you might not see the full benefits of a unified system right away. But once everything’s in place, the long-term value will make it worthwhile.

Voice of Customer Made Easy:
The Professionals’ VoC Handbook

Written by a CX expert, this handbook simplifies VoC strategies and helps you get the most from customer feedback.

What's inside:

• Easy-to-follow VoC strategies
• Tips for analyzing feedback
• Plus: Bonus VoC checklist

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A Call to Action for Modern VoC Teams

The Modern Data Stack isn’t just for data engineers and analysts anymore. It’s a powerful enabler for Voice of Customer teams to amplify their impact—if they understand how to work within this ecosystem. By embracing this architecture, VoC professionals can move beyond isolated surveys and into the realm of predictive insights, real-time actions, and company-wide influence.

So what should you do next?

• Audit your current tools: Are they siloed? Can they connect to a broader stack?
• Talk to your data team: What would it take to integrate feedback data into your warehouse?
• Invest in skills: SQL, data modeling, analytics and dashboarding tools will be your new best friends.
• Structure your unstructured data: Use Thematic or similar solutions alongside the MDS to unify qualitative and quantitative insights.

In the end, VoC teams that embrace the Modern Data Stack won’t just be capturing the voice of the customer—they’ll be making it easy to act on it  across the entire organization.Ready to see how feedback analysis works on your data? Request a demo of Thematic now!