Gathering More Complete Feedback from the Customer

By Michael Smitheman, Product Manager —



"Voice of the customer" seems to be a term being adopted by many organizations today to describe the various tools and methodologies for surveying customers to get their feedback.

Historically, customers have either filled in a survey on the website, or placed a call into the contact center when they want to provide "feedback." Organizations would use this as a way of gauging the sentiment of their customer base. The problem with this approach is you are hearing only from customers who decide to give you feedback. What about all your other customers or prospects who decide not to get in touch? What was their feeling about the experience they had with your company?

I recently tried to order a service from a well known wireless provider. I placed the order online and it appeared to have not fulfilled the promotional offer in the confirmation email. I jumped online and started a chat session with them. After quizzing me on who I am and what I was trying to do for 15 minutes I was told they couldn't help me and instead was given a phone number. I proceeded to call the contact center for help. I answered all the same identification questions in an automated IVR process before finally speaking to a live representative...who asked me all the same questions again. I was put on hold for 20 minutes before being told my problem would have to be dealt with by another department. I hung up and cancelled the service there and then through the chat window! This is a true story. I never provided feedback to that organization, but I did moan about it on Facebook while I was going through the process.

Reality is, to obtain the true "voice of the customer," we need to gather direct feedback, but we should also be making use of all the other sources of information available to us.

Social media has obviously provided a high profile channel for customers to provide indirect feedback to organizations, but a lot of other sources exist within the contact center to help companies gather a more complete picture.

Voice analysis of call recordings, natural text analysis of chat and emails, mining of social media data and web interactions should all come together to give companies the true "voice of the customer," regardless of whether they filled in a survey on the website.

How do you gather feedback from your users?

Comments

[Al]

Agreed that corporations need to implement a system of multi channel feedback capture. The post above suggests that surveys are a 'historically used tool', which is not really the case. Today, the most admired companies in the world have global and comprehensive invitation-based survey listening programs in operation all the time, in addition to social media listening, SMS, and mobile. Apple collects a significant amount of surveys every week in all areas of their operations including retail and customer support, Hilton and all major hotels and most of the airlines have continuously running survey programs that can alert the company about issues, get new product ideas, learn where things are going well, or simply to measure the impact of an operations improvement from earlier feedback. They don't necessarily focus on the data collection, but rather on the outcome and the actionable metrics and insights they can derive. These include NPS, satisfaction, or other indexes which the company can rally around, set goals for, and move the needle for. Web analytics can be an important input to augment this customer entered feedback content, particularly for online products, but many of our daily transactions with companies remain face to face. The most successful companies ensure they capture feedback on all their touchpoints and moments of truth, using a variety of instruments.

[Michael Smitheman]

Thanks for your comment. We are in agreement that companies should be capturing feedback on all their touch points and that invitation based feedback is an essential component of understanding customer sentiment. Making sense of customers' experience in any channel, when they don't leave feedback, though, can help in understanding the true scope and impact of a particular issue. If a customer leaves feedback about an issue, understanding how many other people are leaving similar feedback is important...but what if we could analyze all data available to us and see that there's a whole group of other people who are equally as frustrated (and have dropped out partway through a phone call or an online transaction) but who never directly give us input?

[Al]

Good points as well. For sure, for online or mobile transactions, it's certainly helpful to understand the scope of an issue (beyond those who may have answered the survey). You can address all issues, and it helps to break the problem up into pieces that can be managed. Web analytics tools like Tealeaf can certainly help here. But there are always the more "fuzzy" factors about customers' emotions or feelings about an experience, which is ultimately what you want to evoke referrals on. For these sort of data, sometimes you just need to ask. Note that most advanced VOC tools also include operational and segment data in the analysis. All of these augment the analysis that can't be done with survey questions which you directly ask of the customer. These enterprise grade VOC tools have advance reporting and analytics that automatically review these operational metrics on their own, hunting for patterns which can suggest trouble, even before looking at the survey results.

[Michael Smitheman]

Thanks again for your response. I believe we are in agreement. I was, in fact, trying to highlight the power of combining both approaches to get actionable answers. Clearly there is essential value in capturing the direct, qualitative aspects of VoC. By combining that with the "non-emotional" nature of session replay we can get a sense of what the customer did and how they behaved and understand what drove that response. I see a similar paradigm for voice surveys and call recordings in the contact center. Ultimately, regardless of how we learn about customer sentiment, directly through VoC solutions or indirectly through voice analytics or web site analysis for example, we want to get to the root cause of the problem as quickly as possible and fix it to provide a better customer experience for ALL customers.