If your organization does not yet have a survey program in place, you are still receiving feedback from your customers on a daily basis. If your company isn’t interested in making the investment in a survey platform today, don’t let that hold you back. As long as you set up other systematic ways to take in and process customer feedback, you can tap into great insights. Here are some ideas on listening to the feedback you’re already getting.
THROUGH CALLS / ONLINE CHATS / EMAILS
Whether customers reach you through phone calls, online chats, or emails/web forms, it is important that you classify each one of those contacts to understand the top drivers. The classifications are themselves are important here. If a customer calls or emails you and their reason is classified as a “billing question”, that doesn’t give you much to go on. Did their invoice not show up? Did it reflect the wrong amount? Try to be specific enough with your classifications that you can actually act on them, but not too specific that you dilute the results and end up with way too many one-offs.
If you don’t have historical data to look at as to why customers are contacting you or the classifications used in the past don’t give you enough insight, try going back and doing the research yourself. Document all the reasons that people call/chat/email for a week (or whatever the right amount of time is based on your volume). Set up a system to tag what you’re hearing or seeing. if you already have a system in place that does this, reevaluate it and make sure it is actionable information.
THROUGH YOUR FRONT LINE PEOPLE
Your front line people know the reasons that customers contact you. They might not be able to say the highest reason with absolute certainty, but they are going to have a pretty good idea of the main problems. Focus groups are a great way to probe the experience of front line employees; however, for this purpose, you might try sending a free survey through something like Survey Monkey to your employees. You can assure them that their responses are anonymous and that will give them the confidence to provide candid responses. If there’s something the company does that an employee thinks is really stupid, an anonymous survey is a great way to tap into that info. It doesn’t even have to be that formal. Simply walk up to your staff and ask some of them, “What’s the biggest problem we have when it comes to our customer experience?” Whatever method you use to get the front line perspective, track that information.
THROUGH CUSTOMER ACTIONS
There are many customer actions that you can measure to give you clues about whether or not you’re meeting the mark on CX. Think about the systems with which your customers interact and what sort of data trail they are leaving. A few suggestions of areas to investigate: web bounce rate (to see if your pages are providing value); utilization rate of tools available (to see if tools are useful and/or functioning properly); repurchase/renewal rate; or attrition after certain occurrences. The actions that customers perform while engaged with your company are where you want to look. When you’re not asking for direct feedback from customers, things like this can give you a piece of the puzzle.
COMPARE RESULTS ACROSS SOURCES
The last step is to compare results from the all the sources listed above. Most likely you will see a pattern emerging that warrants your attention. You can begin your customer experience improvements in that area. Start taking action and be sure to continue listening through the methods you have set up.
Too often I see organizations spending so much time trying to figure out the “right” thing to fix, the “one thing” that will transform their entire customer experience, and they end up frozen, not taking any action out of fear that it’s not the best possible use of their time and money. Stop waiting for the silver bullet, and get started. Customer experience is work! There’s not a switch to flip that will make it outstanding in an instant. Find some things to improve and chipping away at customer frustrations.