The journey toward genuine customer obsession requires more than just good intentions—it demands a robust, organisation-wide strategy for customer listening. In 2018 IKEA embarked on a VoC program aimed at building a single source of truth about its customers and the business.
IKEA’s need for its Voice of the Customer (VoC) program stemmed from its ambition to move beyond being merely customer-focused to becoming customer-obsessed, while managing the complexities of its unique global business model. The program was required to replace slow, inconsistent, and manually intensive data collection with a single, unified, and always-on system.
Speaking at Ashton Media’s CX Retreat in October, Tim Stierman, Digital Product Leader, Global CX Platform, explains the importance of the VoC program to IKEA’s success as a global enterprise: “So, why is listening to our customers a non-negotiable priority at IKEA? It’s simple: great experiences don’t happen by coincidence; they are intentionally designed. We manage every touchpoint to ensure we deliver something unique, thoughtful, and meaningful. Our ultimate goal is to connect emotionally with people and, of course, to see them leave IKEA with a smile.”
A unique element of IKEA’s corporate structure is its franchisor-franchisee dynamic. The Global Office, which is the franchisor, owns the brand, the concept, and the supply chain. However, all customer-facing retail stores are owned and operated by its 12 independent franchisees.
This structure poses a crucial problem: how does the franchisor effectively lead this diverse group and ensure a consistent global concept when they do not directly own the retail operations?
The experience should be globally recognisable, whether the customer is in Europe or Australia. The essential need, therefore, became a centralised, objective, and unified Voice of the Customer (VoC) platform to share data-backed best practices and enforce global quality standards.
A visionary history and unique model
Founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA began as a modest mail-order company. The company shifted its focus to affordable furniture in 1948. The major breakthrough came in 1953 when Kamprad introduced the idea of flat-packing furniture. This innovation, which required customers to transport and assemble the products themselves, drastically reduced shipping and storage costs.
Not only did it reduce internal costs, but customers loved the ability to take products home immediately and build them themselves. This early success underscored the power of aligning business decisions with customer convenience.
The first IKEA store opened in 1958, and international expansion began in the 1960s, establishing IKEA as the world’s largest furniture retailer.
Stierman explains the elements that have led to IKEA’s success and the importance of customer experience, “At IKEA we use the democratic design for our product development (price, function, form, design, sustainability). It’s not about which of these are more important, it’s about balancing all five. They all need to be in balance to achieve a great customer experience”.
The VoC transformation – From reactive to predictive
Prior to 2018, IKEA’s approach to customer insights was fragmented. Customer feedback and data collection was slow, inflexible, and manual, often relying on sporadic store surveys conducted only every six months.
“Metrics were inconsistent across markets’, says Stierman, “one franchisee might measure Net Promoter Score (NPS) while another tracked Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), making global comparison meaningless. Furthermore, reliance on the ‘gut feeling’ of long-time employees often superseded objective data in decision-making. The solution was the consolidation around a unified methodology and a single source of Truth. This involved embracing a consistent listening methodology”..
Listen, understand, predict, and lead
The first thing IKEA had to build was a platform to collect and collate all relevant, accurate and consistent data about its customers. The engine for this strategy was the development of an internal platform, Build CX. While the company used third-party technology providers, it maintained strategic ownership of the data domain to ensure global consistency, control, and long-term security.
The biggest challenge wasn’t in terms of technology but culture and stakeholder buy in from franchisees and operations across the globe. Stierman comments, “In large organisational transformations, change management is often the most critical factor. Our process involved systematically guiding all stakeholders—in our case, the franchisees across all markets—through the necessary considerations and benefits of the change”.
“As we work in an agile environment, we typically begin with a controlled pilot program before attempting to scale. The positive results and demonstrable success from these pilots are then used to effectively convince other markets of the proposed benefits”.
To ensure the success , the company’s VoC strategy integrated a key KPI around customer experience and loyalty throughout the organisation. Stierman says, “When we adopted a Voice of the Customer (VoC) approach, we established a key performance indicator (KPI) that was integrated across the entire organisation, even down to personal goals and bonus targets. While this successfully created intense focus and consistent reporting, it introduced a risk: the conversation frequently centered on the KPI itself rather than the actual customer. This balance required careful management”.
The platform is now live in 62 countries, utilised by roughly 20,000 IKEA co-workers, and collects an impressive 2.5 million filtered customer feedbacks per month. The benefits include enhanced customer loyalty, the development of more relevant products and services, and improved retail strategies.
Key activities within the program included:
- Personalising the customer experience by rewarding interactions.
- Utilising real-time sentiment analysis to gauge public opinion.
- Improving specific touchpoints, such as website usability and delivery, through targeted surveys.
Even though significant improvements were made there is still room to improve in identifying and removing pain points for customers. Stierman reflects, “I believe our most significant blind spot was, and continues to be, the gap between the visiting and purchasing stages—specifically, the exploring and choosing phases. These two stages are where we can generate the biggest business impact, but they are also the moments where we are most likely to disrupt the customer experience. Therefore, achieving the correct balance here is crucial”.
“One of our major takeaways relates to stock availability. This is a critical factor for our customers. The issue is often not solely whether the products are physically in stock, but rather how we communicate that availability to the customer in a transparent and timely manner”.
The power of merging data sets
IKEA recognised that simple satisfaction scores were insufficient. The key innovation lies in data enrichment, which merges customer feedback with internal Operational data to gain profound, actionable insights.
For instance, the system tracks customer satisfaction with customer support centres down to the individual agent level, not for accountability, but to define better, more targeted training material. Furthermore, it enriches data with third-party performance information for assembly, installation, and delivery services, even tracking satisfaction with performance down to the specific truck driver. This merging of data sets allows for truly granular optimisation of the value chain.
The AI democratisation challenge
The ambition to democratise these insights across the full value chain encountered a barrier: many co-workers in stores lacked the technical skills to analyse complex Business Intelligence tools.
The solution proposed was an AI Chatbot, designed to act as a ‘smart, experienced co-worker that removes technical barriers to insight creation through natural language querying of the data. The initial launch, however, faced crucial challenges. While easy to use, the speed was poor, and most importantly, the trust and quality of the data were questioned when the bot suggested features that did not exist.
This experience reinforced a crucial lesson – cutting edge technology still requires a build-measure-learn approach, and even AI makes mistakes that must be managed. Despite, the initial hiccups IKEA is using AI as a core component of its digital transformation to create a seamless, personalised, and efficient omnichannel customer journey—from initial design inspiration and product visualisation to purchase, delivery, and post-sale services.
Takeaways for CX Leaders
The transformation of the IKEA VoC strategy offers three fundamental lessons for any global organisation managing a complex value chain:
The first is to focus on the customer, Not the KPI. While strong metrics are necessary, the organisation must remain responsive to genuine customer needs and not allow internal targets to incentivise data manipulation or cloud objective reality.
The second is to build a sound data foundation. A well-labeled, governed, and unified data set, such as the one underpinning the Build CX platform, is not just helpful—it is crucial for long-term success and is the only path to future-proofing the business, especially with the accelerating integration of AI.
Finally, customer Experience is a Culture. It cannot live solely within one department or platform; it must be ingrained throughout the entire organisation and permeate every step of the full value chain, from design and supply to the moment the customer assembles a flat-pack at home.