Your company’s customer loyalty, and reputation are based on the quality of the customer experience (CX). There is no better way to understand your company’s true customer experience than by listening to the customers themselves.
The emergence of new social channels and customer review sites have made it easy for consumers to share their CX journey; However, they have also redirected your customers away from giving feedback through surveys. The addition of these new channels can make it difficult to capture what your customers have to say about your brand. So how can your company tackle this dynamic task?
In my opinion, for a CX program to be effective, companies need to invest in conversational analytics. This is the only way for companies to get a holistic view of all customer feedback – solicited and organic, direct and indirect. With this approach, your company can leverage the conversations that are already happening about your products and services in order to scale, identify and resolve friction points, and improve customer experience.
For example, one customer may feel more comfortable talking to someone over the phone about an issue while another customer may send a direct message via Twitter. Each of these unique interactions is data rich in customer feedback, and helps educate you on the forms of communication they prefer. Aggregating all communication channels provides an accurate holistic view of CX data.
Nearly every company uses customer surveys to learn about customer feedback and identify potential issues in the customer experience. However, surveys are only one small source of CX data. In order to understand what your customers really want, you must first be willing to listen to them when and where they are providing feedback organically.
Software like Khoros CX Insights curates and contextualizes customer feedback from all communication channels. You can really start to hear your customer when you have software in place that can responsibly listen to your customer feedback on all channels and software that digests insights that are holistic and easy to understand. Here are some of the ways you can start to listen to solicited and organic customer feedback:
- Reach out to customers and ask about various CX journeys with your products and services.
- Ask customers to write reviews on sites that matter in your industry.
- Request customer feedback in a newsletter.
- Request customer feedback across all social media channels.
- Rewrite current surveys to ask more in depth questions about your customer experience in order to help your organization improve the customer experience.
Your company's ability to listen, aggregate, and analyze customer feedback on all platforms will directly impact your company’s success. Oftentimes, I find that companies only ask for customer feedback using surveys on their website and a few communication channels in order to define their current customer experience. This omits other customers giving you solicited and unsolicited feedback on channels you are not listening to. It is rare (other than our clients) that you see companies who can listen to all customer feedback on various channels, and join all that data together to form a unified view of the customer . This holistic approach to CX data allows you to listen to all customer feedback and empowers your organization to resolve friction points with your products and services.
You cannot control everything customers say about your business, but you can control the quality of your products and services by leveraging the feedback they give you. Successful organizations not only walk the walk by identifying and solving issues in the customer experience, but they effectively listen to all their customers talk. “Honor your relationships by developing listening skills.” - Allan Lokos
There is Khoros CX Insights available to help you listen and understand customers on an omni-channel level while honoring the privacy and integrity of your customers. Ultimately, improving the customer experience and your relationship with your customers.
