Every time a customer has an exceptional personalised experience with a brand, the bar resets for everyone. For all organisations, this means continuous investment to deliver on changing experience expectations must be the norm.
According to the KPMG 2020 Global Customer Experience Report, demonstrating your understanding of your customer’s specific needs and circumstances, and that you’ll adapt the experience accordingly, is now the expected norm.
One way to gain this understanding is through a customer feedback program. Customer feedback is one of the most critical aspects of any experience improvement program. Most organisations understand the value of customer feedback, and many have developed programs to collect and understand customer feedback. However, there is significant variation in the success of these programs.
Let’s explore the six most common mistakes of customer feedback programs, their associated impacts and how a fit-for-purpose Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) platform such as CentraCX VOC can help you avoid them.
1. A siloed approach to collection
Collecting and understanding customer feedback with every interaction is an essential part of customer service. Yet, many organisations still adopt a siloed approach to collecting that feedback. This means they’re not getting the full picture of the customer experience.
Today’s customers expect organisations to be responsive and to provide feedback across multiple interactions, including:
- Voice & IVR: after a call with your agent.
- SMS & Messaging: surveys commonly result in the second-highest participation rates after voice surveys.
- Email: branded emails inviting your customers to participate in a short survey.
- Web: adding web-based surveys to your public or authenticated web pages.
- Mobile Apps: surveys embedded within custom applications.
- Webchat & Chatbots: concluding human or bot chat sessions with a simple survey.
Creating surveys with CentraCX VOC provides the opportunity to collect CX metrics such as NPS, Customer Satisfaction, First Call Resolution, Customer Effort and Team Member Quality on every channel your business uses to interact with customers.
Business users can create complex surveys with dynamically branching and conditional flows without IT involvement. Once built, you select the channels on which the survey will be rendered. Maintaining the same metrics across channels makes comparison easy, as customers use multiple channels to communicate with your business.
2. Low customer participation
Once you’ve created your survey and delivered it to customers on the appropriate channel, the biggest hurdle is getting people to participate. Many businesses struggle to get their survey participation rate over 10%, but 30% participation is entirely achievable. Here are three tips to help you:
- Immediacy – Don’t wait too long to send a feedback request. Requests using Voice or SMS/Messaging (received in real-time) are shown to provide the best response rates.
- Appreciation – Let your customers know that you value their feedback and that it will help you improve the service you deliver. Make it personal. Close the loop, and thank them.
- Length – A survey less than 2 minutes in length is optimal for higher survey participation rates. Research shows that people are more likely to respond to a survey if they know upfront how long it will take them, so keep your survey short and to the point.
The CentraCX VOC platform supports a comprehensive methodology for providing relevant and timely survey requests using the best feedback channel. As a result, many customers achieve survey participation rates on more than 30% of their interactions.
3. Limited feedback context
Creating a seamless customer journey goes beyond providing customers with opportunities to communicate on their channel of choice. The journey also needs to be designed in the context of each customer’s personal circumstances.
Each survey should incorporate the context surrounding every interaction. Without the context of the survey, it’s not possible to understand the factors that have led to the opinion. Understanding this context is a prerequisite to meaningful insights, action and outcomes.
CentraCX VOC uses Machine Learning to analyse all customer and employee feedback and incorporates contextual information relating to each survey. The context is passed with the survey trigger and can include as much information about the specific customer, interaction, products, processes and services available. All information relating to context is retained with the survey through the analysis and action stages. This allows for deep analytics and insights to occur both within CentraCX and within your CRM or data warehouse system.
4. Limited data analysis & visualisation
Meaningful insights arise from a deep understanding of customer feedback. It requires analysis of rich data through a process of contextualisation, aggregation, visualisation and Machine Learning. You need a solution that can visualise your feedback through rich interactive dashboards that include individual and aggregate metrics across the organisation.
To develop deep insights, your business should be enabled to:
- Associate feedback with frontline staff in an n-tier organisational hierarchy that models resource, team, geography, business unit and division.
- Attach unlimited context-rich meta-data to feedback such as customer ID, segment or product.
- Use natural language processing to transcribe voice feedback and combine this into a single set with text-based feedback.
- Use machine learning / AI to identify sentiment, reason and key terms.
- Integrate with CRM, contact centre and data warehouse systems to bring customer feedback into enterprise-wide business intelligence.
- Leverage employee feedback to contextualise customer feedback and deliver an additional layer of insight.
CentraCX VOC can help your business collect customer feedback and gain deep insights into your customers, products, processes, and traditional customer service. Dashboards can be developed specifically for each frontline team member, manager, and stakeholder, displaying the metrics most relevant to them. You can also compare performance across the organisations, including between individuals, teams, business units and divisions.
As surveys are completed and analysed, data is sent to your CRM or data warehouse system. With the full set of feedback data, including metrics, qualitative feedback, contextual information and machine learning data, inserted into your customer record systems, there is a single source of truth.
5. Lack of employee engagement
Many companies overlook a key resource that can be used to engage and empower staff. That resource is customer feedback.
A good manager consistently provides feedback to their teams. When done correctly, it helps individual development and builds high-performance teams. Yet when it comes to customer feedback of frontline staff, particularly when directed at an individual, many organisations won’t allow employees to hear it.
Their concern is that the feedback will negatively impact the employee; they will hear something they perceive as criticism or a personal attack, and their performance will suffer as a result. However, most customer feedback about employees is positive, which provides critical context to the small amount of actual criticism. When employees can engage with feedback, it can be empowering.
The CentraCX VoC platform uniquely incorporates processes to build employee engagement as part of everyday work. It gives team members a voice that is far louder than conventional employee feedback surveys. We call this “Tribal Analytics” and together with a single customer data repository, it creates the opportunity to understand customer and employee opinion in the context of your enterprise data.
CentraCX VOC captures employee feedback on every customer interaction giving the frontline a voice and providing the opportunity to design for business improvement. The agent has an opportunity to share their perspective on specific customer feedback. The two feedback pieces are then linked, creating richer opportunities for teams to understand, collaborate, and improve the customer and employee experience.
6. No tangible actions or outcomes
So you’ve collected feedback and understood the insights it provides. Now what?
Turning insight into action requires tools and capabilities that can identify solutions to specific problems and engage employees to continually drive change. Many organisations don’t invest in the processes to turn feedback into actionable insights. And while it might be enabled by technology, delivering a differentiated customer experience requires leadership to connect technology, people and processes.
CentraCX VOC utilises customer feedback to drive action at three distinct levels:
- Complaint Management: turning customers at risk of leaving or entering the complaints management process into promoters by rectifying their specific service issues.
- Employee Improvement: using customer feedback to support change and improvement by the frontline team members that support your customers.
- Organisational Improvement: identifying specific process and product issues that drive negative customer sentiment. Using customer feedback to assess the degree of impact and supporting resolution prioritisation.
Want to improve your customer feedback program?
By addressing these six common mistakes, you’ll be better able to reap the benefits of a customer feedback program. You can start creating exceptional customer experiences that drive loyalty and spend at each touchpoint with help from GSN. With CentraCX VoC, we work with your business to:
- Collect customer feedback across multiple channels;
- Create rich dashboards of feedback and actionable insights
- Engage your teams by giving them a voice in the feedback in the process.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help, or click the button below to explore the CentraCX solution.