Spam. Survey fatigue. Junk mail. The widespread nature of each term perhaps highlights just how stale many customer feedback initiatives are.
Yet, capturing, sharing, and acting on the voice of the customer (VoC) is seemingly more critical than ever. Indeed, a Walker Study suggests that customer experience will soon overtake price and product as the number one brand differentiator.
Alongside this trend, CX management has become a mission-critical initiative. Yet, it’s an initiative that can only thrive with an abundance of customer insight.
As such, many customer feedback programs must evolve. Our panel of experts has worked with many brands, helping them do precisely that. This month, they include:
- Bruce Temkin, Head of Qualtrics XM Institute
- Bill Staikos, SVP, Evangelist & Head of Community Engagement at Medallia
- Rick Blair, VP of Product Strategy and Experience Management at Verint
- Anthony Gaskell, Managing Director, EMEA at Reputation
Below, they tackle many of the most frequently pondered questions relating to customer feedback, sharing how contact centers can transform VoC processes to drive better experiences.
How Can Companies Capture More Customer Feedback?
Temkin: In today’s environment, where customers are talking to and about companies across multiple channels and touchpoints, businesses must invest in a portfolio of listening mechanisms. But the goal isn’t just adding feedback; it’s about listening in ways that deliver more actionable insights faster.
The cost-of-living crisis has changed what people want from their customer experience with an emphasis on price. Indeed, recent Qualtrics research found that over half of UK consumers (56 percent) have switched to a cheaper brand for essential products in the past six months. All of this shifting requires companies to learn and respond faster.
Instead of relying on single, point-in-time surveys, companies that want to truly understand their customers must widen the aperture. It combines solicited feedback from channels like surveys and unsolicited feedback from other areas such as social media and contact center conversations. This often requires building skills for handling unstructured data like calls and chats with a customer service department.
Moreover, businesses can capture more feedback by tuning in to what customers say at every touchpoint in their journey - whether that’s in-person feedback, a phone call, or comments on social media or review sites.
Staikos: Many companies traditionally focus on quantitative surveys for direct feedback. However, with today’s capabilities, there are many more signals to capture.
Specifically, session recordings of a customer’s digital behavior – whether in-app or online – are an excellent way to identify friction in digital journeys.
Additional sources include the digitization of contact center calls and social commentary, mined for sentiment and thematics around customer pain points.
Moreover, qualitative surveys and usability labs are excellent ways to garner feedback from customers in a deeper way.
Finally, leveraging the workforce for feedback about what the company can do to improve the customer experience is another excellent source.
Whether frontline employees or back-office operations, customer service teams play an outsized role in understanding customers more effectively.
Blair: The pandemic demonstrated just how quickly disruption could impede customer journeys. It ushered in the paramount importance of gaining customer insights via VoC programs to listen, interpret, act on, and monitor customer journey experiences – in near real-time.
Surveys remain the foundation for capturing customer feedback as most brands today rely exclusively on surveys for customer feedback, much of which is initiated via email.
However, breaking out of the survey mentality can help organizations capture more valuable customer insights.
To get the most from VoC programs, organizations need a balanced approach to gathering customer input from direct, indirect, and inferred data sources. Such a holistic combination of sources and inputs can help organizations keep up with the rapidly evolving customer landscape.
Gaskell: It’s important to understand the full end-to-end customer journey.” While 81 percent of executives agree with this statement, only 28 percent are measuring this successfully, according to the Harvard Business Review.
The customer journey varies for each person. For example, one may go straight into the store, another may browse online and research against competitors, and some go into the store and then purchase online.
As such, it’s essential to have open and flexible communication channels that reach the customer where they are and provide accessible opportunities to capture all forms of feedback.
Ultimately, feedback is a form of currency. Setting up all possible beacons across the digital landscape is critical. They serve as customer experience (CX) listening posts, giving companies feedback they would not receive relying solely on review websites and surveys.
Ensuring the brand has established a presence on Google My Business listings is crucial to driving visibility. Regularly updated business profiles see a 500 percent increase in views across searches and maps.
Also, companies can unlock business insights from customer interaction data via public touchpoints – like social media and review sites – and private channels, which include CX metrics.
Finally, social listening data helps further understand sentiment outside of regular surveys and turns online conversations into actionable data that drives business strategies and improves CX.
How Can They Turn All That Feedback Into Actionable Insight?
Temkin: There is no value in gathering data if the business does nothing with it, so turning feedback into actionable insights is critical.
As such, Qualtrics talk about applying insights to drive four action loops:
- Immediate response
- Continuous improvement
- Process integration
- Strategic decision-making
Following such a strategy starts with a point of view on where and how the business makes insights actionable. Often, the most valuable insights come from a combination of customer feedback (experience data) and operational data, such as a customer’s purchase history or segment.
Software solutions that tap into NLP and speech analytics are ideal. They take all the structured, and unstructured data companies have and extract insights on customer sentiment, effort, and intent.
Furthermore, bringing together customer data across all touchpoints onto a single platform allows organizations to identify the actions that will have the most significant impact, empower employees to take action, and start to prove the ROI of CX strategies.
Staikos: VoC vendors have made significant advances in machine learning to analyze customer feedback, whether captured directly from a survey or indirectly from observed behavior. These advances are helping teams identify opportunities more efficiently, aggregating customer signals.
Nevertheless, disseminating insights into the business is an approach fewer companies employ. Instead, companies leverage role-based insights, with delivery rules embedded in their customer experience tech stack, to personalize insights at scale.
As such, department leaders can see insights relevant to the business. These insights travel in real-time so that frontline staff can act in the moment and in a context suitable for the customer.
Blair: VoC programs are only as good as the data companies capture. Yet, the key is to present that data in a meaningful way, instantly providing teams with the insights they need to make improvements, measure efficiency, develop forecasts, and more.
Several technologies can help achieve this goal, including:
- Engagement data management solutions capture volumes of dissimilar data from many sources. They enable a uniform and cohesive view of interaction data across data silos.
- APIs to move data seamlessly around and join various data sources in the CX environment.
- Automation that allows the hybrid human and bot workforce to get more done.
- Text analytics solutions to uncover themes, recurring topics, and emotion and sentiment from open-ended written customer input.
- Speech analytics to organize and uncover insights through call recordings from contact center interactions.
- Predictive outcome technology that identifies potential trends and challenges.
- Machine learning technologies that learn quickly from more extensive data sets. As digital expands, data grows ‒ sometimes exponentially ‒ and the teams managing the data either stay static or shrink.
Gaskell: For many businesses, particularly those with siloed data, analysis can be a time-consuming, logistical nightmare. Fortunately, today’s digital management tools are adept at aggregating data from multiple channels and converting it into targetable insights.
With a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) also helping to unify private and public data - plus CRM, employee engagement, commercial data, and so on – businesses can drive business decisions based on what is best for the customer.
Again, market-leading CX platforms can help, analyzing the entire wealth of feedback data and extracting actionable insights - using AI - to tailor for specific industries, taxonomies, or user profiles.
What Mistakes Must They Avoid When Reinventing Their Customer Feedback Strategy?
Temkin: Accelerating digital transformation has remained a mission-critical goal for many CX leaders. And while that may have had a positive impact, the rush to adopt new software solutions means many companies have left the human element of CX behind.
Now, they’re paying the price as customers demand more profound and empathetic connections with the businesses they engage with.
Qualtrics data shows human connection trumps operational metrics for driving satisfaction, which can lead to increased spending and loyalty.
In the contact center, empathetic agents are around twice as likely to make customers happy than short wait times. This suggests that the individuals dealing with customers on the frontline have an opportunity to foster a human connection that they shouldn’t waste.
But it’s not just about throwing out the tech and going back to doing everything in person. Instead, companies must respond to customers individually, demonstrating that they understand each customer’s history, intent, channel preference, and needs.
At the same time, amidst economic uncertainty, customer needs are constantly changing, and companies need to keep their fingers on the pulse to adapt their strategies to keep up.
Bruce Temkin[/caption]
Bill Staikos[/caption]
Rick Blair[/caption]
Anthony Gaskell[/caption]