Are these huge piles of feedback actually analyzed and acted upon? Is customer feedback some sort of corporate cargo cult? Or maybe clever marketing by vendors of feedback tools and services?
Probably all three depending on the organisation. In theory you want customers and if you can make them happier in an easy way you should do it to retain them and recruit more. In practice, a lot of managers seem to do cargo cult stuff copying other better managers.
I imagine if they have a lot of data they’re processing it further, finding trends, and then just pulling samples for a detailed look.