VoC 2.0: How EA listens to players to elevate experiences

Enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), voice of the customer (VoC) has evolved beyond traditional research cycles to focus on constant and continuous understanding of customer behaviors. It means the organizations that take this crucial area of CX seriously can make sense of masses of data and act on it in real time, fixing pain points and improving experiences.

But to build outstanding experiences, the leading organizations are solving another piece in the puzzle, and it elevates VoC from firefighting issues to guiding customers down new paths of engagement. 

At Electronic Arts (EA), current work is centered around continuous understanding of customers and the gaming giant is aiming to put customer journeys at the heart of CX, connecting experiences across the entire player ecosystem. At All Access: Future of Customer Listening 2026, Andra Bond, EA’s director of CX discovery and experimentation and Olivia Lucas, senior service designer, will explain what it takes to build a listening practice inside a large and complex organization. 

Ahead of their session, Andra and Olivia told CX Network what attendees can expect to hear, and what they believe to be the most interesting thing happening in customer listening. 

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CX Network: Your session at All Access: The Future of Customer Listening is called Listening smarter: Bringing customer understanding in-house. What will it cover?

Olivia Lucas: We’ll share how we are working to embed the Voice of the Customer in our product and service design process from discovery through to measurement. Throughout, we stay anchored in customer needs, bringing together signals from gameplay, support, community, and social. 

Andra Bond: We’ll walk through core tools like our Experience Atlas, which are being created to help us turn that noise into clear, shared understanding and get to strong early hypotheses faster. We’ll also show how we carry customer needs all the way through implementation and future planning using evolution-focused frameworks that keep us human-centered and shift the emphasis from shipping features to shipping value.

Olivia Lucas: The talk will also explore how deeply understanding the culture and context you operate in can help you better serve your customers – by identifying their needs early and often, and by carrying those needs through from first discovery all the way to what actually gets delivered.

CX Network: What are the top skills you look to embed in your customer listening team?

Andra Bond: We’re a small team, but we’re built to cover a wide range of problems. Within the team we span research, strategy, design, and development, so we can stay close to the work end to end.

Because our work touches many parts of EA, it’s also critical that we can partner effectively across the organization, so we operate as strong collaborators and facilitators, not just specialists in our own lane.

CX Network: Extracting meaning from customer data is no easy job. How does EA make it both meaningful and actionable?

Olivia Lucas: We face a lot of challenges when it comes to making data useful and usable. EA has a half billion customers across regions, and platforms, so the challenge isn’t a lack of player signal – it’s making sense of it at scale. 

Andra Bond: We are developing ways to use advanced machine learning to bring fragmented research, player feedback, and behavioral data into a unified Voice of the Customer view, designed around how EA actually works – its structure, culture, and decision-making rhythms. 

That unified insight can give teams a clearer understanding of where friction occurs, why it’s happening, and who it affects, so we can act with confidence rather than relying on static reports.

CX Network: What do you consider to be the most interesting thing happening in customer listening at present?

Andra Bond: Advances in AI let us analyze large volumes of data almost instantly. We can spot patterns faster and identify friction in our customers’ journeys with far less manual effort. That said, there is still plenty of room for improvement. 

No AI system solves all our problems or can operate on its own, so we are focused on building custom solutions that use new AI capabilities to enhance our workflow and help us produce outcomes that remain as human centered as possible.

Olivia and Andra will speak at All Access: Future of Customer Listening 2026, on 24  February. Find out more and reserve your place, here.

Quick links 

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