Most companies talk to their customers.

What’s less common is having a clear, shared understanding of what those customers are actually experiencing or hoping for.

As businesses grow, feedback starts coming in from everywhere. Sales conversations. Support issues. Renewal calls. Offhand comments someone remembers from a meeting months ago. Over time, those inputs become scattered, and leadership teams unintentionally fill in the gaps with assumptions or internal stories instead of real customer insight.

That’s where Voice of the Customer work becomes so powerful.

It brings clarity to the noise. It connects the dots across conversations and surfaces patterns you can trust, not just one-off opinions. When done well, it helps leaders see their business through their customers’ eyes and make decisions with more confidence and fewer surprises.

Mitigating risk is what customer due diligence is all about. In-depth customer due diligence is typically the best way for investors to understand customer risk. To accomplish this, Mayfield conducts customer surveys under the seller’s corporate name. We let customers know that the seller is attempting to better understand how to serve them going forward. Open-ended questions reveal in-depth customer analysis of the quality of the product, service or software, their price sensitivity and whether the customer(s) intend to leave – all hugely important.

Investors often entertain the idea of conducting customer due diligence themselves.  Some may even review a recent check-the-box style, seller-initiated survey, see high NPS scores, and be satisfied. There are many reasons, though, to have a 3^rd party conduct in-depth customer due diligence. Here are three, with real-life examples.