Does Your Customer Feedback Data Show You The Big Picture?
Mundane customer surveys are things of the past. Half-wit insights and hidden bias, will only take your brands so far. Modern marketers need to whip up innovative strategies to glean valid feedback.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook begins his day at 5:00 AM by reviewing customer feedback, according to a recent news report. While passion helps the tech giant improve customer experience, innovation is a better strategy. Is direct VoC from reviews and surveys enough for brands across industries to drive better decisions?
For several reasons, customer feedback cannot be restricted to surveys at one common touchpoint anymore. Most importantly, due to inefficiency. Customers have a dynamic experience across several touchpoints and channels throughout the buyer journey. Some quit while browsing, some abandon carts, and others leave the purchase hanging at the payment gate. Do we know the sentiments behind these unsuccessful acquisitions? This is survivorship bias – the error of focusing only on successful customer journeys while overlooking those who did not cross the finish line.
When your database is convoluted with undetectable bias, not even the most intelligent AI-driven analytics tool can give you valuable insights to create effective marketing efforts. So how do we find the loopholes and fix them?
Getting customer feedback across multiple touchpoints is imperative and marketers need to look at modern approaches to customer feedback. “We need to weave customer feedback requests into existing front-line daily routines and the tools and processes they already use, so they can be connected to customers and know what they need to do to improve the experience,” says Donata Peksa, Head of Brand Experience at HSBC.
For instance, Corporate Visions, a sales coaching and improvement solutions provider, recently launched TruVoice, a fitness tracker for sales. This automated customer feedback system will show areas for improvement based on what their buyers are saying to the sales representatives at the time.
As a result, it helps brands on various fronts:
- Personalised recommendations
- Uncovers gaps in sales skills
- Optimises business results
Meanwhile, measuring feedback with behavioural and social media sentiment data is crucial to cross-validate insights. Using NLP and ML-driven tools to identify and measure the emotions and opinions expressed by online users is a great way. Although they would not give accurate and contextual insights by themselves, it would certainly help support the other quantitative customer feedback strategies.
According to Matteo Pomoni, Global Head of Retail Daily Banking at ING, you need to be able to link data sources as they complement each other. “All insights are critical because they help us not only to understand how we are doing but also to benchmark our performance against our main competitors.”
“Brands can glean feedback during live chat sessions, monitor social media channels, create an online community of fast adopters, and reward frequent reviewers with access to prototype products or services, are all convenient ways of gathering voice of the customer,” adds Peska.
It’s time to go beyond surveys and re-imagine your customer feedback strategies. Andrew Clayton. Group Head of CX, Close Brothers, reiterates the ‘you said, we did’ culture to be embedded in every organisation. It shows tangible improvement in customer service, user experience and product development. What better way to keep both customers and stakeholders happy?
