Feedback is all over the place today. When your customers have opinions regarding your service or your product, they are never shy about letting the world know. Customer feedback software is creating ripples all along in the digital landscape today. It could be using online reviews, through social media mentions, through word of mouth, or even more. Have you ever wondered what your business is doing out of the feedback? Are you utilizing the feedback to improve your customer experience?
In case you are not, you need to be. Unsolicited customer feedback is a superb, efficient tool to improve customer experience. You should know the huge power of receiving information straight from the horse’s mouth – your customers.
There are regular studies and seminars getting organized by businesses around the globe regarding using customer feedback to grow a powerful and impactful business. What the comments by these businesses provide about feedback give strong insights about how to use customer opinions within real-time so that customer expectations and experiences can be improved.
Before you get into understanding customer experience metrics, you need to understand how the present-day customer feedback applications work. The present-day system of collecting feedback depends on certain CX metrics, yet understanding that they are only as good as the kind of insights they would provide along with the actions they would allow you to take. These days the metrics are made organization-specific by focusing on results like higher customer retention, loyalty, and acquisition. The results that you are hoping to achieve would determine which of the metrics are essential for improving your customer experience.
Observing the right kind of metrics and seeing the way that data got applied was studied by some of the big and upcoming brands under their customer program. These brands acquired data from customer feedback apps like customer satisfaction surveys through the Likert Scale and Net Promoter Score so that these brands could identify in which areas the customer experience worked, where it failed, also if any silos were there.
Silos come with the potential to harm your business in an event a different portion of the organization would merely measure customer experience using their own lens. The KPIs and metrics that give a definition of success may be different by every department. But, in cases where silos all try towards achieving their own created version of success, it usually fails to achieve the personal version that success brings; it does not create for one streamlined customer journey. While all the metrics need to be business-centered, you would also require a huge understanding of what success could mean for the entire company.
A good narrative of ROI must be holistic, as ROI cannot be contained in just one department or within a single line of business. The narrative must connect CX metrics to the operational metrics that matter to the entire organization. Customer feedback would affect the bottom line, which should give you the incentive to improve the kind of customer experience you need.
When someone posts feedback about your business on the digital platform, it becomes a part of another customer’s experience to come on board. That is the reason why it is important to become a part of those conversations to help you guide your newer customers.
Online feedback is mostly the first thing any new customer gets to see while interacting with your business. What are your existing customers saying regarding your business over a certain time period, and how well are you responding to promote your customer loyalty?
There is a great risk of not managing the CX with deftness. Research suggests that one in six customers resort to other businesses if they read even one single negative feedback. Almost three out of four are more likely to recommend you to colleagues or friends when they have received positive customer service. If we are not addressing feedback, our customers will dictate all our conversations for us.
Using the tools so that you could connect metrics of customer experience that are organization-specific with the key indicators of success would help in giving a deeper understanding of the impact of your strategies in CX. Having the ability to demonstrate the ROI that CX needs good data along with dashboards that would clearly communicate how effective your initiatives have been. Utilizing a consolidated tool of CX means you require fewer tools in navigating and highly consistent reporting. This would ensure that the insights can be easily understood and the required tools are utilized.
Your technology tools must also go beyond mere surveys and consider both types of unstructured and structured feedback. In today’s scenario, surveys merely make up 6 to 7 percent of the total feedback that is available to any brand. The remaining live in other areas and are mostly unsolicited.
From Google business listings to social media and all that is in between, customers today are using the internet to create a voice that can be heard. For all current and prospective customers, the focus should be on improving their experiences.
Organizations that can’t figure where they should begin need to examine which of the customer experience metrics are essential towards achieving the business goals they had. From there, technology can certainly help in identifying the correlation between customer experience and ROI, also provide a clean kind of reporting for the executives. Simplifying this data seamlessly into digestible insights allows you to include your feedback into the customer experience strategy. This allows your customers to tell their pain points and needs, allowing you to provide aligned results.