It’s no surprise that management teams are looking at how to use customer experience as a key differentiator. But how exactly do you harness customer feedback to help your organisation provide excellent CX that helps you stand out from the crowd?
The starting point is gaining a clear understanding of the role and value of the VoC (voice of the customer) as part of an organisation’s commitment to driving excellence and innovation. It’s not about individually addressing every customer complaint at board level via email.
It means identifying the most profitable customers, listening to and understanding their experiences, and encouraging their role as active promoters of the business. It’s about using the VoC to streamline processes that reduce the costs associated with managing dissatisfaction and extended service (multiple calls to solve a problem, discounted products to replace a faulty good, free returns, etc.) for other customers. It’s about minimising attrition and recognising that the cost of acquiring new customers is high and is an increasingly complex process.
There is no value in gathering feedback in isolation or keeping it in a silo. In order to improve customer experience, you must prove the direct link between customer feedback, CRM and loyalty metrics, integrating financial and operational data with customer and loyalty data to provide context for decision-making.
You also have to remember that customers rarely provide feedback stating “If you improve your returns policy, I’ll spend 15% more with you next year and recommend you to 3 friends.”
So, where do you start? Encourage customers to provide their feedback by focusing on three key essentials:
1. Robust planning
As part of the internal planning process, you need to identify who you want to ask in order to deliver the robust data that the business needs. But you need to look at it from your customers’ point of view.
What is the best channel to reach them? You’ll almost certainly need to provide multiple channels to meet the needs of different customer groups and to align with your various touchpoints.
When will your customers be completing the survey? Does the timing make sense to them?
Is your survey really focused? Is it clear to customers why you are asking these questions and can they answer them easily?
Fundamentally, this is all about the methodology of your surveys. Taken individually, they should be short, simple and straightforward. The deep insights come as you bring together the data from multiple sources: however, for the customer, each survey is an interaction that must stand alone.
2. Relevance
This is about making sure your survey is really focused. Make sure that customers understand why you are specifically asking these questions and why you’re asking now.
Remember that for customers, this also means that you must:
- Make it easy – Use the ‘cracks in the day’ – the five-minute spaces when people are on a train or waiting for the kids to come out of school. That means ensuring your surveys work perfectly on a mobile device or can be completed within your existing app. It also means creating short, focused surveys, as they needs to gain and keep attention now and for the next invitation.
- Make it engaging – This doesn’t necessarily mean the much talked about ‘gamification’ – though if that fits your brand, go for it. This is really about making sure that your survey is a clear reflection of your business, properly aligned with the brand. It shouldn’t feel like an add-on, because that won’t engender confidence that responses are going back to the people who can take action.
3. Prioritisation
It’s critical that you ask the right questions and then act on the feedback you receive.
As the business will want to prioritise actions based on the feedback it receives, it’s essential you don’t ask 100 questions that you’re not going to do anything about. In order to make a real impact, prioritise the feedback you’re seeking from your customers by helping them to prioritise their needs. Make it clear you’re asking about specific areas where feedback will really make a difference to CX in the future.
You must tell your customers that you’ve taken action based on their feedback. By proving that you’re really listening, and making customers a priority, you will greatly increase the likelihood that they’ll complete another survey when they interact with you at another touchpoint.
Above all, remember that customers are increasingly demanding of the companies that they do business with. While they often now expect to be asked for their feedback on the experience, they’re inundated with survey requests, so by focusing on asking relevant questions, at the right time, you’re far more likely to gather the robust data you require in order to make decisions confidently and to improve customer experience across your organisation.
