Investigating Information Coming From Voice of Customer (VOC) Surveys and Public Forums

Customers are often your best source of information as to why your site isn’t delivering as much value as you (or they) would like. And they are already talking to you. All you need is a systematic way to listen to them and turn their feedback into something that is actionable.

Tealeaf customers have been telling me how they use customer behavior analysis to take their voice of the customer (VOC) survey data to the next level. For example, one online travel provider’s customer survey contained complaints from some customers that their search results listed hotels in the wrong city (for example, they would search for hotels in Atlanta and get hotels in Chicago). The provider could not reproduce the issue; fortunately, they decided to analyze it further.

Using Tealeaf, our customer discovered that the users who complained had actually started their searches from an affiliate partner’s site (View the complete OnDemand Webinar). This one affiliate was appending extra characters at the end of the search string, and therefore the search was not providing the right results. To add insult to injury, the travel provider was paying the affiliate for these bad searches! 

Similarly, a major European airline was able to take advantage of data from public forums to improve its customer experience. This customer regularly monitors FlyerTalk.com, where forum members were posting that its web site was terrible because they couldn’t book tickets on it. The posters would get the message “town invalid” when they tried to complete their booking forms. This feedback made no sense to the airline because its web analytics and performance management systems showed only a slight uptick in bookings failures. But after using Tealeaf to search for online customers who received the “town invalid” message and replaying some of these failed sessions, the airline quickly discovered the problem: the town field on the address form was not accepting hyphens and dashes. When flyers from these hyphenated towns were getting the resulting “town invalid” message, the majority of them abandoned their purchases. Fixing this single customer experience flaw recaptured at least £30,000 per week in lost bookings.

These examples show why deeper analysis of customer survey data—and any customer experience data that you can access—is a customer experience management best practice. For survey data, you should:

1. Check the data for problem areas that affect customer experience.
2. Review free-text feedback responses that either highlight problem areas or prompt you to ask why?
3. Look for segments of customers associated with interesting free-text responses or low-scores in a particular area. With a customer experience management solution like Tealeaf, you can then replay representative sessions and look for customer experience obstacles that can explain the scores or feedback you received. It’s important to note that the more integrated that VOC survey data is with your customer experience management system, the more it will be able to do what it’s supposed to do—guide improvements. Ideally, you should be able to pivot directly from a survey response into the representative session in order to understand the full context of the experience which garnered the feedback.

For customer data that comes from public forums, you should:

1. Take advantage of any names, email addresses or other information given by customers—any information that can be used to find their online experience. A customer experience management solution can help you to reproduce the experience they actually had and understand their feedback.
2. Use these forums to look for trends in complaints. If you do see such a trend, you can often find problems based on where the customer was on your site, what they did (and commented about) or other information about them that’s available, such as their location. A customer experience management solution like Tealeaf enables you to search for individual customer sessions and drill-down based on all of these types of attributes.

Once you identify an issue, you can then move on to refine, quantify and diagnose that issue.

There has never been a time when businesses of all kinds had more information about what their customers think of them, whether through low-cost VOC surveys or information that’s freely available in blogs, communities and a variety of other public forums. Are you ready to listen?

Learn more: Download the 'Uniting Voice with Customer Experience Webinar' and view the Tealeaf CEM Integration Solution

--John Dawes, Vice President, Product Management