These reactions to your products and services are critical data points to help you gain insights to inform your business strategy. However, good quality customer feedback is only gained from a well-structured and targeted customer feedback strategy.

Knowing what your customers want and understanding how to keep them happy not only maintains customer satisfaction, but also helps you grow your business as word spreads that your products, services, and customer service is totally on point.

So, what constitutes a good customer feedback strategy? Let’s find out.

Understanding Customer Feedback Strategies

Imagine having x-ray specs to see inside your customers’ minds so you can discover what they really think about your products, services, and business. A well-structured customer feedback strategy achieves this. Ask the right questions, and you can gain valuable insights to help inform your strategy and keep your consumers happy.

A strong feedback strategy involves collecting and analyzing feedback to improve your products and services. For instance, you can get feedback to ensure your website meets your customer’s needs. Alternatively, it can help you keep your pricing competitive, identify issues with product delivery, and customer service, and help you understand how your brand stacks up against the competition.

In short, developing a good customer feedback strategy helps you understand what you’re doing well, where you need to develop, and how to improve your service to grow your business ultimately.

How to Optimize Your Customer Feedback Strategy

Your customer feedback strategy is nothing without gathering feedback. There are several forms your data collection can take. For example, customer feedback surveys are an excellent way of gathering details on how customers feel about your products and services.

These can be psychographic survey questions or simple yes/no questions. Surveys can take different formats. Email surveys, website pop-ups, chatbot tools, telephone surveys, online forms, and text messages are the most common.

When devising your customer feedback strategy, consider who your customers are. Would they prefer to answer a survey via a mobile device or phone call? To maximize the responses you get, provide your consumers with the proper channels to answer the survey, and don’t make it too long.

It can help to play the role of the customer yourself. Consider whether your questions allow them to express their thoughts about the products or services thoroughly. Ensure the survey will enable customers to select options and provide free text comments clearly and logically. Also, the survey’s functionality should be tested to ensure that it is user-friendly and fit for purpose.

The type and format you choose may depend on your business sector, brand, customers, and precisely what you want to know.

For example, online clothing stores often have a short pop-up survey asking customers to comment on whether they found the style, size, and type of item they were looking for. Similarly, a company providing a VoIP phone service like KrispCall may enquire about the call quality and usability of the system.

Another consideration is whether your survey will be limited or extensive. The scope of your questions will depend on whether you’re looking for specific information in one particular area or trying to gain more generic data, which you’ll sort through and make observations about once it’s been gathered.

Creating an Actionable Feedback Plan

Your feedback strategy should be coordinated, coherent, and carefully crafted. In a sense, it should be as precisely worded as a contract, and just as you might benefit from enterprise contract management software, it can be worth looking at your competitors’ surveys and some survey templates to get a feel for how to put yours together. Here are some important bases to cover:

Importance of Clarity in Customer Feedback Surveys

The most important thing to remember is that good answers can only be provided if you ask the right questions. By this, we mean clear, specific, and targeted questions.

Vague questions produce vague answers. For instance, if you want to know what customers think of a new product, think carefully about what product features you should ask about. Does the design, style, quality, or cost matter to you? Pose your questions in a manner that focuses the customers’ minds on the relevant aspect of your product.

In addition, don’t overload customers with complex questions that attempt to answer several things simultaneously. Target one thing at a time; don’t confusingly cluster topics.

For example, ask: How satisfied are you with the quality of the Patreon Telegram Bot integration? Rather than: Is the Patreon Telegram Bot integration good quality and value for money?

Vary the Questions

Varying the different types of questions you ask helps you gain different information. For example, open-ended questions will give you different outcomes than closed questions. Yet, both questions are valuable in various ways. Again, it will depend on the answers you hope to gain.

Closed questions, which supply a yes/no or simple answer, help make comparisons. Data gathered from these questions can show concrete percentages you can put in a spreadsheet or chart and see clearly.

Open-ended questions, however, can provide more nuanced information that requires more effort to analyze and process. Nonetheless, answers to open-ended questions can effectively show tendencies and general themes.

A solid customer feedback strategy usually includes a combination of both types of questions. For instance, a closed question could be: Would you shop with us again? Meanwhile, an open-ended question could be: Can you tell us what you think of our visual voicemail service?

Maintaining Consistency Across Survey Questions for Clear Insights

If your questions require your customers to rate a product, service, or your business itself, be consistent and logical with the options you provide. Having smiley faces on one part of the survey makes no sense, but words, numbers, or percentages on another.

“Consistency in survey design not only helps in maintaining the integrity of the data but also respects the respondent’s time and effort. When customers see a consistent format, they engage more thoughtfully, providing more reliable and actionable insights.”
— Shep Hyken, Customer Service Expert and Chief Amazement Officer at Shepard Presentations

Similarly, the format of the questionnaire should be consistent too. Asking customers to click on one question but tick, circle, or select from a drop-down list in another is messy and confusing. Moreover, it will make the data you collect harder to process and compare.

If you have to vary the format, group similar formats into groups so that the responses can be compared easily. At the same time, consumers see the logic behind the survey layout.

Never Forget To Ask to Follow Up

It is essential to ask customers if you can follow up. It’s better to establish this when the consumer is surveying since they’re far more likely to give permission at this stage than if you ask them later.

Okay, perhaps don’t follow this meme, but following up on survey questions can help you gain deeper insights into the questions you’ve asked. You can also be selective and follow up with consumers who have provided the most helpful information. For example, you might want to gain more detail in response to negative feedback to help you fix the problem.

Be open to contacting customers via their preferred method. Some customers may be open to a video call or a quick chat via your Canadian business phone number. Meanwhile, others would be happier with a follow-up via email or SMS.

Creating actionable steps based on different types of customer feedback

Once you’ve collected your customer feedback and generated insights from the data, it’s time to prioritize your response.

Look at your customer’s suggestions. Is there anything that chimes with ideas you’ve considered before? Are there any surprising but revealing insights? Are there any repeating patterns? Pay particular attention to these; recurring themes, comments, or answers are usually the most illuminating.

Crunch the numbers and convert the responses into hard figures. What are the numbers telling you? Is a new product popular or failing to hit the mark? Are customers planning on using your services again, or do they prefer a competitor? Do they want access to something like a PayPal transfer Telegram integration? Convert this data into actional plans for your business.

The right customer feedback analysis tool can help quickly identify the chief drivers impacting your CX metrics. Understanding these drivers – the items that have the most significant impact on your NPS and CSAT – allows you to spend less time on analysis and more time on improving your product and customer experience.

If your current CX tool stack doesn’t make this easy, try using a feedback prioritization matrix to determine where you should take action. A prioritization matrix scores possible actions you should take based on two criteria:

1)      The potential value for your business

2)      The complexity or level of effort involved

Each potential actionable step’s place on the matrix shapes your decision to move forward. Every business has limited resources, meaning you must choose how to spend your time and money.

For example, your customer feedback shows a strong appetite for improvement in your email marketing tools. However, there’s an equally strong appetite for a brand-new reporting feature.

How do you decide which projects to work on?

If the new feature requires more effort (because it’s a brand-new development) and delivers less value (because your core product is your email marketing capability), it becomes easier to deprioritize that initiative.

Similarly, customer feedback can help guide your business in a different direction. It might lead you to change your customer service procedures, find ways to drive more traffic to your online store through an affiliate marketing template or take a hard look at pricing.

While a feedback prioritization matrix doesn’t identify the key drivers of your customer experience in quite the same way as a CX tool, it’s still a potent tool in your customer feedback strategy.

Emerging Trends in Customer Feedback 

Recent trends in customer feedback strategies include embedding AI technologies to automate manual data collection and analysis services to help businesses gain actionable insights faster.

With 83% of customers feeling loyalty towards companies that respond to and resolve their concerns and 78% of customers having a more favorable view of brands that actively seek feedback, acting on customer feedback is paramount to businesses wishing to increase customer retention rates, attract new customers, and grow.

AI chatbots are becoming increasingly widespread as a customer feedback tool, allowing customers to interact in real-time to have common queries resolved quickly. In addition, customers can use free text bots to provide feedback, which is then analyzed by AI technology employing machine learning, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis to extract valuable data, analyze it, and provide actionable insights.

Similarly, AI analysis tools allow businesses to look into enormous datasets quickly, extracting valuable data that helps inform an organization’s CX activities and broader product and service strategy.

AI technologies are likely to play an increasingly important role in the CX industry, meaning that businesses that embrace early adoption of AI to help inform their customer feedback strategies can gain a head start on their competition.

Best Practices in Customer Feedback

Proactivity is the watchword when collecting customer feedback. Actively encourage customers to share their thoughts through reviews, social media, and, most importantly, feedback surveys.

Understanding how to design your customer feedback surveys to gain maximum insight is essential.

Begin by identifying the end goal. What is it you want to find out from your customers? Is it feedback on a new product or service or do you want to understand what your customer prefers? Understanding this will help you decide who you need to interview and the questions you need to ask.

In addition, keep simplicity in mind when designing your survey. Quick, concise surveys will maximize response rates and make analyzying the result a fast, simple exercise. Beware of survey fatigue and keep questions relevant.

Avoiding bias is also an essential part of designing a survey. Questions shouldn’t lead participants towards a particular answer, nor should the answer to any question be influenced by previous questions or statements made in the survey.

Finally, optimize your survey to gain the best possible insights. In most cases, you be able to solve a question with a KPI and a “Why” question. For instance, by asking “How satisfied are you with our website, and why?” you can quickly understand customer sentiment towards your online footprint, while also gaining valuable insight about what they do and don’t like about it.

Remember that collecting pointless feedback that adds no value serves little purpose. Take time to structure your surveys to ensure you only collect helpful and valuable data and see it as an opportunity for your business to mature and grow.

Conclusion

It can be challenging to take the plunge and be prepared to find out exactly what customers think of your brand and what it offers. However, a clear picture of your organization’s offerings can only benefit your business.

Ultimately, the aim of gaining feedback and having an effective customer feedback strategy, like using HubSpot integrations, is to grow your business and boost sales. However, a customer survey needs to be well planned to reach this goal, and how your customers will respond is anticipated.

The phrase, knowledge is power may be overused, but it’s very appropriate when it comes to receiving customer feedback. A good customer feedback strategy will give you the information you need to nip problems in the bud and strengthen and grow your business. Think you’re ready for moe customer feedback strategy? Check out our webinar on ‘The future of Customer Surveys (and how to prepare for it)‘ and learn a thing or two in enhancing your strategies in gathering customer insights.

The post Mastering Customer Feedback Strategy: Essential Steps to Enhance Your Business and Service Quality appeared first on Lumoa.

The uptake of AI in customer experience is very visible in its use across diverse industries, from manufacturing to telecommunications. We then concluded that AI is changing the way businesses engage with their customers.

Moreover, with AI-driven personalization expected to significantly impact market growth, it’s clear that AI is not just a supplement but a cornerstone of modern customer experience strategies.

On the downside, relying solely on it, such as a known AI technology which is Generative Pre-trained Transformers GPT presents limitations. Challenges such as loss of the nuanced human touch in customer interactions are notable, with a significant portion of users expressing concerns over the technology making content for example feel less authentic. (Master of Code Global)​.

This article will talk about the comparative effectiveness of using Lumoa and GPT, and a hybrid approach integrating both. By analyzing real feedback across these scenarios, we aim to uncover not only how each performs in isolation but also how they complement each other to deliver superior customer insights and operational excellence.

The Rising Importance of AI in CX

Let’s rewind a bit and check out what’s happening. In our State of AI in CX findings, a notable 70.7% of businesses already utilize AI within their CX strategies, and an overwhelming 86.5% plan to increase their use of AI in the coming years.

This growth is driven by AI’s ability to streamline operations and offer personalized customer interactions, significantly enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction. For instance, AI-powered chatbots have become crucial in managing customer inquiries, dramatically reducing response times from minutes to mere seconds.

However, integrating AI into business processes presents substantial challenges. Nearly 30% of companies have yet to adopt AI, often due to technical and logistical hurdles or concerns about data security and privacy.

Now let’s talk about GPT. While it plays a role in modern business ecosystems, relying solely on GPT for capturing customer feedback often falls short. GPT’s generalist approach may overlook nuanced insights that are crucial for targeted action. How’s that possible?

Our Approach: Real Feedback, Real Scenarios

Using real customer feedback, we conducted a quick study to uncover the best ways to leverage GPT capabilities with a focus on insights gathering. The study was designed to compare three distinct approaches:

1. Using GPT Alone: This scenario tested the capabilities of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) in analyzing and categorizing customer feedback without additional support. The goal was to assess how well GPT could handle the data in terms of understanding and insight generation.

2. Using Lumoa Alone: In this setup, we utilized Lumoa’s proprietary AI to analyze the same set of customer feedback. Lumoa’s strengths in data precision and its ability to derive actionable insights from customer data were put to the test, showcasing its effectiveness in a standalone capacity.

3. Integrating Lumoa with GPT: The final scenario combined the data processing power of GPT with the targeted analytical precision of Lumoa. This hybrid approach aimed to demonstrate how the integration of general AI with specialized CX analytics could lead to a richer, more actionable understanding of customer feedback.

Each piece of feedback was processed under these three scenarios to not only evaluate the performance of each tool individually but also to explore how they could complement each other in a real-world application. We carefully selected a diverse range of feedback examples to ensure that our findings would be comprehensive and applicable across various customer interactions.

The 3 Feedback Problem

In our study, we analyzed a dataset of 10,000 public shopping app reviews using the three distinct approaches described earlier. This analysis allowed us to compare the effectiveness of each method in building categories to surface relevant feedback and extract actionable insights that a business could act upon.

To better illustrate our findings, we will focus on three distinct public reviews and observe how they are categorized depending on the method chosen. Below are the public reviews we will use:

1. “Easiest to use, works the best with zoom feature I use as a severely sight impaired person. Love how easily it works with the Clubcard feature as well. It’s great.”
2. “Totally rubbish, keep asking for valid phone number although I had put the correct number in three times.”
3. “Does not give delivery updates as stated.”

The Findings: Clarity, Actionability, and Efficiency

GPT Alone

tl;dr – Almost 65% of our 10,000 app reviews ended up in the category “General”. This is true also for the 3 feedback above, even though they highlight completely different problems.

GPT’s application to topic modeling revealed its limitations in handling nuanced categorization. By testing it against the 3 feedback samples, we discovered that GPT primarily grouped all of it under a ‘General’ category. With  6492 (64.92%) of the total feedback similarly classified, highlighting significant challenges:

• Clarity: The clarity of GPT’s feedback categorization is notably low. Its approach, which broadly sweeps diverse feedback into a ‘General’ catch-all, lacks the granularity needed to distinguish between different customer issues and concerns effectively.

• Actionability: The insights derived from GPT’s categorization are critically limited due to its generic grouping. Businesses seeking to address specific issues or enhance particular aspects of the customer data may find this level of generality confusing and adds more manual work, as it provides little concrete direction for targeted actions.

• Efficiency:  While GPT is capable of processing the data, its approach to topic modeling is often less efficient in terms of outcome relevance and operational utility. GPT tends to group a substantial portion of feedback into a broad category. This tendency highlights an inefficiency in achieving the depth of categorization necessary for targeted business strategies.

As you can see from the visual above, each piece of feedback, representing a range of customer experiences and issues, was indiscriminately lumped together which highlighted these samples within the expansive ‘General’ category. Such merging into a singular, vague category shows a significant drawback of using GPT alone for customer feedback analysis.

Without the capability to finely parse and categorize feedback, GPT falls short in providing the depth of insights necessary for targeted business strategies. This highlights the essential need for more sophisticated tools like Lumoa that can complement GPT’s broad capabilities by providing the necessary detail and precision in feedback analysis.

Lumoa Alone

tl;dr – Only 24% of our 10,000 app reviews ended up in the category “General”. The 3 feedback have been assigned to their proper category.

Lumoa, on the other hand, demonstrated its categorization capabilities by specifically assigning feedback to distinct topics like ‘Usability’. (See visual below)

Unlike the broad ‘General’ category prevalent in GPT’s approach, Lumoa’s AI excelled at drilling down into the details of each feedback piece, accurately assigning them to specific and relevant topics. For instance, issues regarding ease-of-use, which GPT had lumped under ‘General’, were identified and grouped by Lumoa into a dedicated ‘Customer experience’ category along with 3290 similar feedback entries.

• Clarity:  The clarity with Lumoa is markedly improved, with specific customer issues being categorized correctly, thereby facilitating a more focused approach to understanding and addressing customer concerns.

• Actionability:  With feedback correctly slotted into specific topics, the potential for businesses to take targeted action skyrockets. For example, the ease-of-use issue feedback can directly inform IT and support teams, enabling them to prioritize and address this specific area of concern.

• Efficiency: Lumoa enhances operational efficiency by enabling quicker and more effective decision-making. With its more accurate categorization, teams spend less time deciphering feedback and more time implementing solutions that directly address customer needs.

Let’s see what the other two feedback looks like:

This more accurate categorization by Lumoa offers businesses the clarity and actionability they require for direct and impactful responses to customer feedback. The rest of the feedback samples are also in their own categories. With the ability to classify feedback accurately into distinct topics like ‘Quality’, and ‘Delivery, Option and Clothes’, businesses can now channel their resources more effectively, ensuring that every piece of feedback is utilized to its fullest potential to enhance the customer experience. While this is already impressive enough, we didn’t stop here. Let’s see how well can Lumoa + GPT work together. Let’s check out what they look like when we use both Lumoa plus GPT.

Lumoa and GPT Together

tl;dr – A little less than 24% of our 10,000 app reviews ended up in the category “General”. The 3 feedback are assigned to their own proper category, and the category is easier to understand.

The combined use of GPT and Lumoa AI enriches the customer feedback analysis beyond what is possible when each technology is used separately. While the integration does not significantly reduce the ‘General’ category more than Lumoa alone, it enhances the comprehensibility and relevance of the categorizations. Let’s check out the ‘ease-of-use’ feedback and what it looks like now.

The combination of GPT and Lumoa AI has elevated customer feedback analysis to a new level of sophistication. The feedback that was once relegated to the ‘General’ category from GPT alone, and the ‘customer experience’ category from using Lumoa alone, now finds its place in a well-defined topic that resonates with genuine cx and concerns; in this case – Process topic.

• Clarity: The integration of GPT’s natural language processing capabilities with Lumoa’s precise analytics significantly enhances clarity. This synergy allows the system to produce topics that are not only accurately categorized but also phrased in ways that are easily understandable, aligning closely with how humans

• Actionability: By leveraging both technologies, this approach maximizes the actionability of insights. In addition to similar findings from using Lumoa alone, It also enables businesses to swiftly identify and act on specific areas of customer feedback, aligning interventions closely with customer needs and sentiments.

• Efficiency: While the combination of Lumoa and GPT may involve more complex processing, which can extend the time taken compared to using Lumoa alone, the quality of the output justifies this approach. The system efficiently processes and refines feedback into well-defined categories that significantly aid decision-making processes.

The nuanced understanding of “human language” and the interconnectivity of themes that GPT brings to the table, combined with the precision of Lumoa’s topic modeling, translate into topics that reflect a natural, human-like grasp of the feedback content. Let’s see what the other two feedback look like with this combination.

The ‘GPT + Lumoa’ method demonstrates how the fusion of AI and specialized analytics can create a harmonious and potent tool for businesses. This hybrid system doesn’t just process data; it interprets it in a way that aligns closely with human reasoning, setting a new standard for what businesses can expect from AI in customer experience optimization.

This hybrid approach may set a new benchmark for what businesses can expect from AI in optimizing customer experience, making it a compelling choice for those seeking to enhance their analytical capabilities and customer insights.

Addressing Security in AI Feedback Analysis

You can’t ignore the potential risks when implementing AI technologies, especially in sensitive areas like direct customer feedback. Even with its own security measurements and protocols, using GPT directly with customer data presents specific security and privacy challenges that need careful consideration and management.

Potential Risks of Using GPT with Direct Customer Feedback:

• Data Privacy and Security: GPT processes vast amounts of data, including potentially sensitive customer information. Without proper safeguards, this can lead to data breaches and privacy violations.

• Bias and Accuracy: GPT models can inadvertently learn and perpetuate biases present in their training data, which could lead to skewed or unfair outcomes when analyzing customer feedback. Perhaps they don’t really train their GPT models with your data, but are you willing to take that risk? Maybe not.

• Transparency and Control: There is often a lack of transparency in how AI models like GPT generate their conclusions, which can make it difficult for businesses to understand and control how customer feedback is interpreted.

The Advantages of Partnering with a Vendor Like Lumoa: Partnering with a vendor like Lumoa, which is equipped with ISO certifications (ISO 27001) and GDPR compliance, offers substantial benefits in mitigating these risks. Lumoa’s commitment to data protection and ethical AI use provides a robust framework for safely implementing AI in customer feedback analysis.

• ISO Certifications and GDPR Compliance: Lumoa adheres to international standards and regulations, ensuring that all customer data is handled securely and in compliance with the strictest data protection laws. This adherence helps prevent data breaches and ensures that the privacy of customer information is always maintained.

• No Model Training on Customer Data: Lumoa does not use direct customer feedback to train its models, which means the data remains untouched and unmanipulated. This reduces the risk of exposing sensitive customer information and ensures that the integrity of the data is maintained.

• Anonymization of Sensitive Information: Lumoa offers options to anonymize sensitive data, removing personally identifiable information (PII) from customer feedback before it is processed. This not only protects customer privacy but also helps businesses comply with data protection regulations.

Final thoughts

There you have it! Using both GPT and Lumoa, we showed the impact of integrating a powerful AI into customer feedback processes. It not only improves the efficiency and clarity of data processing, but also makes the insights generated highly relevant to specific business needs.

Superior Balance of Comprehensibility and Business Relevance: The combination of Lumoa and GPT provides a balance of comprehensibility and business relevance. Lumoa’s specialized analytics refine the broad capabilities of GPT, ensuring that the data processed is not only comprehensive but also closely aligned with the strategic objectives of the business. This balance is needed for companies aiming to leverage customer feedback effectively, as it allows for a nuanced understanding that is both deep and wide-ranging.

Security and Privacy Benefits: Using a specialized vendor like Lumoa for sensitive data processing offers significant security and privacy benefits. Lumoa’s adherence to ISO standards and GDPR compliance ensures that all customer data is handled with the highest security measures. Furthermore, Lumoa’s commitment to not training its models on customer data and providing options for anonymizing sensitive information ensures that customer privacy is maintained at all times. These practices are essential in the digital age, where data breaches and privacy violations can severely impact a company’s reputation and customer trust almost on a daily basis.

The Importance of Ethical AI Use: Companies are increasingly integrating AI into their operations, so ethical AI usage becomes increasingly important. The combination of using Lumoa with GPT serves as a model for how AI can be used responsibly in customer experience strategies. Transparency, data integrity, and privacy can help companies avoid the pitfalls associated with AI technologies.

For businesses looking to enhance their customer experience through AI, the insights from this article provide a clear message. The integration of GPT with specialized CX analytics like Lumoa offers a powerful combination for turning raw data into actionable insights. We invite businesses to consider this hybrid approach not just as a technological upgrade but as a strategic necessity for staying competitive in a customer-centric market.

It’s both exciting and challenging to integrate AI into customer feedback analysis. But, with the right tools and approaches, businesses can navigate this path successfully, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and business growth. Interested in learning more about Lumoa’s capabilities? Book a demo now and we’ll help you achieve your goals and KPIs

The post Lumoa and GPT: How Lumoa Complements GPT for Actionable Insights appeared first on Lumoa.

Well, there is a common answer to all these questions- customer insights!

If you have used customer insights data to know what your customers want then you also understand that it holds the key to growth, right? 

But here is the catch- knowing is not enough! The real key lies in the art of leveraging customer data. Effectively using customer insights to grow your business may be not as easy as it sounds but it is not rocket science either.

You just need a good strategy to do so. A powerful customer insight strategy or framework helps you map your customer journey, enhance products or services, and provide a better customer experience. 

Improved customer experience, in turn, strengthens customer loyalty, creates a broader user base, and increases profitability for any business. 

In this article, we will discuss why using a customer insight strategy is valuable and how to create an effective one for your business growth. 

And if you haven’t taken the time to learn what your customers want, then this is high time that you did that.

If you are new to the world of customer insights and the art of leveraging it, let’s start from scratch.

What are customer insights?

Customer insights are not just customer feedback. Customer feedback is direct responses received from customers and are often obtained through surveys or reviews. 

Even though customer feedback data provides detailed and specific information regarding their satisfaction level or complaints, they do not offer a deeper understanding of factors like customer behavior, market trends, personalization needs, etc. 

On the other hand, customer insight goes beyond individual feedback!  

Technically speaking, customer insights refer to a deeper understanding, analysis, and interpretation of customer data points. Those data points typically include information like buying behavior, needs, wishes, preferences, and motivations. 

Customer insights are crucial for building lasting brand-customer relationships and staying competitive.

And from where these customer insights are derived? They come from various data points such as customer feedback, purchasing patterns, social media interactions, website usage, and other communications with the business. 

Let’s explore more with some examples-

Understanding Customer Behavior: Wants, needs, and wishes

Here’s a recent trend to give you an insight into what’s going on in various industries. Capgemini conducted research and found that brands and retailers are leveraging technology and generative AI to become more consumer-centric, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency to adapt to shifts in consumer behavior. Understanding customer behavior is central to these efforts. In addition to exploring new revenue streams through social commerce and influencer partnerships, particularly targeting Gen Z, they are also striving to balance affordability with sustainability efforts, such as reducing food waste and educating consumers about sustainable shopping.

Brands that actively listen to customer feedback and enhance their product create stronger customer relationships.

Imagine a big clothing brand like Levi’s. It listens to its customer feedback and discovers that more people are interested in eco-friendly clothes. 

So, the brand now relies on Water Less Technology to reduce water usage in their jeans production, offering customers an option to choose what they care about. 

Personalizing services and marketing communication

Think about a popular streaming service like HBO Max. It feels like they know your taste so well. It is because they pay attention to what you watch and what you like. 

Then, they send you suggestions based on your interests. It is like they know you so well! 

HBO uses customer insight analytics and machine learning to process its customer data. Afterward, the insights are unified by their data science teams to sync with HBO Max’s different teams and their goals. The end goal of all this is to offer personalized viewing suggestions to the customers. 

HBO Max’s recommendation service also uses voice-enabled language processing through Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. If a user says ‘Alexa, play something romantic’. The users are probably going to get romantic movie recommendations when they open HBO Max.

Customer Personalization, as exemplified by streaming services like HBO Max, contributes to higher customer retention and satisfaction. A study by Segment states that 44% of consumers are likely to become repeat buyers when offered a personalized shopping experience.

Allocating resources wisely

Suppose a SaaS-based company notices its customers are increasingly asking questions about a specific feature. So, they decided to make that feature better. 

It means happy customers who got what they asked for. 

Companies that invest resources in enhancing specific features based on customer needs align with changing expectations. 

A report by Salesforce says that 68% of customers say the pandemic has raised their expectations of companies’ digital capabilities. 

Assessing Marketing ROIs

Businesses that recognize the impact of social media ads can allocate budgets more effectively. According to a report by Hootsuite, 73% of marketers believe social media marketing has been effective for their business.

A baker in your hometown notices that ads on social media bring more customers, as opposed to regular banner ads. So, she decides to spend more on social media ads. 

It is a win-win situation for both. You discovered yummy cakes because you found that ad on social media.

Keeping up with changing market trends

It is amazing to note that the global mobile banking market is estimated to reach $1.36 billion by 2028. Based on such estimations, banks that had embraced digital transformation to offer their services made more evident progress than their peers. 

This highlights the importance of strategically following future trends based on customer insights.

For instance, Singapore’s leading financial establishment DBS Bank has been recognized as one of the forerunners of digital innovation in banking and financial services. Their investment in technologies such as artificial intelligence and data analytics delivered an economic value of SGD 180 million, comprising a revenue uplift of SGD150 million and SGD30 million from cost avoidance and productivity gains.

All of these examples suggest one thing- customer insights carry information that can transform the way we do business. 

But simply analyzing the insights will not work. You will need a strategy to leverage those insights so that teams can chase common KPIs and businesses can make informed and strategic decisions. 

So, why is having a customer insight strategy a big deal? In the next part of this article, we will discuss that.

What is a customer insight strategy?

Think of it like a mind game and only with accurate answers! So, it’s all about finding what customers want and how to use customer feedback to make your business thrive.

Once you have figured out how to gather, understand, and put all the customer feedback data to good use, you can make business decisions that keep you ahead of the crowd.

Going by the definition, a customer insight strategy means a comprehensive plan for systematically leveraging customer insights to drive profitability. 

And how does it help? 

A good customer insights strategy creates magic and transforms your products or services into popular ones. In addition to increasing your revenues, this also adds an extra glitz to your overall customer experience.

From a webinar – Customer Support: Using Insights to Hear Your Customers Engage Your Employees, and Improve Your Profits, Taru Aalto had a one-on-one conversation with Richard  Jeffreys concerning the changes in the landscape of customer expectations.

“Are you caring about me and my family? Are you keeping your employees safe?… There’s a real shift to people looking at companies that meet their own values and doing business with those.” – Richard Jeffreys

When you offer unmatched customer experience, it broadens your customer base, enhances customer loyalty, and eventually your overall business grows. 

A customer insight strategy typically explores ways a business plans to collect, analyze, and leverage customer data to make informed and strategic business decisions. 

However, comprehending what customers are saying has gotten tricky. With the overflow of feedback and online chatter, companies are hustling to create personalized experiences. A well-planned customer insight strategy is the solution for this issue.

The business value of having a smart customer insight strategy

We are listing down a few pointers below to elaborate on the business value of having a workable customer insight strategy-

1. Data overflow: Businesses strategically leveraging customer insights are better equipped to handle the data overflow in the digital age and make smarter decisions.
2. Personalization: Businesses that employ customer insights to tailor products and services tend to see increased customer satisfaction and engagement.
3. Real-time insights: Businesses using customer insights in real-time can respond promptly to feedback and capitalize on immediate opportunities, contributing to enhanced customer satisfaction. 
4. Multi-channel juggling: A customer insight strategy helps businesses create a seamless customer journey across various digital channels, improving overall user experience.
5. E-commerce Magic: Businesses, especially e-commerce sites, using a customer insight strategy often witness improved online sales, optimized digital storefronts, and enhanced user experiences.
6. Predicting Trends: Businesses that stay ahead of trends through customer insights tend to be more innovative, meeting customer expectations even before a trend hits the market.
7. Customer Journey Mapping: Fancy, Right? Companies using customer insights for journey mapping can enhance, identify, and address pain points, resulting in a more satisfying user experience.
8. Staying quick and ahead: Businesses utilizing customer insights can adapt more quickly to changing market conditions, fostering an agile and responsive approach to challenges.
9. The ‘cool’ factor: While measuring the “coolness” index is a tricky business, companies with a top-notch customer insight strategy often gain a competitive edge because they understand and meet customer preferences better than their competitors.
10. Loyalty rate: A robust customer insight strategy helps businesses identify and implement strategies to retain their customer base, building long-lasting and loyal relationships.

Now that you understand the impact of having a customer insight strategy, the next step is to see how to achieve that for your company. 

Every company has a different customer base. The ways you measure data may be different from your peers. But it is okay! It just means that your strategy will be different as well.

Creating a customer insight strategy should be aspirational but grounded in your resources and capabilities. 

First, You need a clear picture of what you are trying to fix and understand how that will impact the future. To do that, you will need your customer metrics at your fingertips, see what else is required, and decide who will be responsible for it. 

Let’s find out more.

Develop Your Customer Insight Strategy

Let’s quickly go over how you can create a workable customer insight strategy in 10 steps to make it more comprehensive.

Here we go-

Step 1: Define objectives and goals

1. Identify business objectives: Outline your business goals and what you aim to achieve through customer insights as clearly as possible.
   You may include objectives like improving customer satisfaction, increasing retention or launching successful email marketing campaigns.
2. Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define your KPIs, see if they are measurable, and align them with your objectives.
   These might include customer satisfaction scores, retention rates, conversion rates, and others important to your business.

Step 2: Develop a data collection strategy (Source and method)

1. Identify data sources: Determine and list the sources of your customer data, including CRM systems, social media, website analytics, surveys, and customer feedback.
2. Choose data collection methods: Select and Implement various methods to collect data, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social media monitoring.

Step 3: Segment your audience and create customer personas 

1. Segment your audience: Analyze collected data to identify customer segments based on demographics, behavior, preferences, and other relevant factors.
2. Build personas: Develop detailed personas for each segment, including their needs, challenges, preferences, and communication channels.

Step 4: Analyze and interpret data insights

1. Use analytical tools: Use data analytics tools to interpret and analyze customer data. Identify patterns, trends, and correlations to gain valuable insights.
2. Map customer journey: Understand the end-to-end customer journey, from awareness to conversion. Identify touchpoints and pain points.

Step 5: Implement personalization

1. Tailor products and services: Use insights to customize offerings based on customer preferences, behavior, and feedback.
2. Implement personalized marketing: Develop targeted marketing campaigns and communications that resonate with your desired customer segments.

Step 6: Enhance customer experience

1. Address pain points: Identify and address areas where customers may face challenges or dissatisfaction. For example, improving processes or communication can be one way to enhance the experience.
2. Optimize customer service: Use insights to enhance customer support by understanding common queries, concerns, and preferred channels.

Step 7: Implement real-time feedback mechanisms

1. Use feedback systems: Use real-time surveys and feedback mechanisms to capture immediate customer sentiments and experiences.
2. Act immediately: Develop a system for addressing urgent feedback promptly. It demonstrates responsiveness to customer needs.

Step 8: Foster a customer-centric culture

1. Promote customer-oriented values: Encourage team members to prioritize and value customer insights. Ensure that a customer-centric mindset is a part of the company culture.
2. Train your team: Offer training to employees on the importance of customer insights and how to leverage them in their respective roles.

Step 9: Measure and iterate

1. Regularly measure performance: Continuously monitor KPIs and assess the impact of your customer insight strategy on business objectives.
2. Iterate and improve: Based on performance metrics and evolving customer needs, refine and adjust your strategy to stay ahead.

Step 10: Stay informed about trends

1. Research and stay updated: Regularly research and keep your teams informed about evolving industry trends, technologies, and customer behaviors.
2. Embrace emerging technologies: Explore and adopt new technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) in customer feedback analysis , to enhance the effectiveness of your customer insight strategy.

By following these steps, you can develop and implement a powerful customer insight strategy that meets your business objectives and positions your company as customer-centric and adaptable in a dynamic market.

Conclusion

Trying to leverage every detail of customer insight might be a challenge, but with good strategy, it becomes a practice that contributes to organizational success as well as creating better customer experience programs.  

When used effectively, a customer insight strategy can improve brand loyalty, expand user base, and increase profitability. 

But before acting on it on an impulse, first, analyze what your company wants to achieve and set up your strategy accordingly. Assess how feasible are your goals with your current company structure, scope, and budget. Then, assess your customer needs and desires to determine the level of your current product experience. 

Once you have a hang of it, you can start to branch out into innovative and exciting new customer insight strategies to inform product, marketing, support, and everything in between.

The post Creating a Powerful Customer Insight Strategy appeared first on Lumoa.

Customer feedback is a precious resource for understanding what’s effective and what needs improvement. However, manually sifting through and evaluating this feedback can be incredibly time-consuming.

Around 30% of IT professionals worldwide have reported that their organizations are witnessing time-saving benefits thanks to implementing new AI and automation software.

In this article, we’ll explore five innovative and creative ways to leverage AI for sentiment analysis. From enhancing customer support experiences to predicting market trends, AI empowers businesses across industries to make data-driven decisions that resonate with their audience.

Traditional sentiment analysis

Traditional sentiment analysis, often called manual sentiment analysis, relies on human analysts to evaluate and interpret text data to determine the sentiment expressed within it. This process involves reading and assessing the content to classify it as positive, negative, or neutral. 

Analysts might also assign a numerical score to indicate the intensity of sentiment. Traditional methods often use sentiment lexicons or predefined lists of words and phrases associated with specific sentiments.

However, this manual sentiment analysis has its limitations and challenges. Firstly, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive, making analyzing large volumes of data impractical. Human analysts can also introduce bias, as their interpretation of sentiment can be subjective.  

AI-driven sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool for businesses that seek more accurate and scalable sentiment analysis solutions.

Types of sentiment analysis

Within sentiment analysis, various types are tailored to specific use cases:

• Aspect-based sentiment analysis. This type focuses on breaking down text into specific aspects or features and assessing sentiment towards each one. Regarding a product review, it can analyze sentiments related to various product attributes, such as design, performance, and price
• Fine-grained sentiment analysis. Fine-grained sentiment analysis goes beyond the typical positive, negative, or neutral classifications. It aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of sentiment, often categorizing it into multiple levels, such as very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, and very negative.
• Emotion detection. Emotion detection involves identifying and categorizing the emotions expressed in the textual content. This type of sentiment analysis aims to understand whether specific emotions are involved, such as happiness, frustration, or sadness.
• Intent analysis. Intent analysis delves into understanding the intentions or objectives behind a user’s text. For example, it can determine whether a customer’s comment implies a purchasing intent or help from customer support.

AI and machine learning are key in performing sentiment analysis using two primary approaches: 

• Rule-based approaches use predefined linguistic rules and patterns to classify sentiment, making them useful for simple cases. 
• Machine learning-based methods, like deep learning algorithms, utilize vast datasets to train models that can automatically identify sentiment. These machine-learning models can handle more complex language nuances and adapt to different domains and languages, making them a preferred choice for sentiment analysis tasks.

Five creative ways to use AI for sentiment analysis

AI has opened up opportunities for sentiment analysis beyond its conventional applications. Here are five creative ways to use AI for sentiment analysis:

Use AI to detect emotions and provide better support experiences

AI tools can assess emotions conveyed in substantial text inputs, such as customer reviews or feedback. These algorithms classify the sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative, providing valuable insight into customers’ feelings.

Traditional manual analysis of extensive text data is impractical and time-consuming. With its natural language processing capabilities, AI excels at quickly processing large volumes of text. 

It can help companies pinpoint areas for improvement within customer feedback. This information can later be used to assist and train chatbots to provide more human-like experiences.

Once emotions are detected, AI chatbots and virtual assistants can assess customer sentiment during conversations and tailor responses accordingly. For instance, if a customer expresses frustration in their feedback, an AI-powered chatbot can be trained to respond with empathy and understanding, offering solutions that align with the detected sentiment.

Detect liked or disliked product or service features 

AI for sentiment analysis is a game-changer, not just for marketers. Developers and UX professionals can also tap into its potential to enhance products and services. This aspect of AI sentiment analysis can pinpoint product features that receive praise or criticism.

Let’s say a mobile app receives positive sentiment regarding its user-friendly interface but negative comments about slow loading times. AI can flag these issues, clearly defining where the focus should be. Dev teams can make targeted interface changes and prioritize enhancements directly impacting customer experience.

Unveil and predict market trends

AI goes beyond customer data analysis. Using NLP algorithms like RNNs and LSTMs, it analyzes vast textual data from social media and news to spot emerging topics and sentiment shifts.

Businesses can extract these insights to adjust their strategies according to market trends and consumer preferences. AI has become a vital tool for navigating the ever-changing landscape of consumer behavior and market dynamics.

Here are three examples of AI applications in unveiling market trends:

• Social media sentiment analysis: Some AI-powered tools can analyze social media conversations and identify trends and shifts in customer sentiment related to specific products, brands, or industries. For example, companies can track brand mentions on X, formerly known as Twitter, to track public opinion and identify emerging trends.
• News and content analysis: AI can process vast amounts of news articles and online content to detect emerging topics, keywords, and sentiment changes within specific industries. This allows businesses to stay informed about the latest trends and adapt their strategies accordingly.
• Customer behavior analysis: AI-driven data analysis can reveal patterns in consumer behavior by examining large datasets of customer interactions, purchasing histories, and online activity. This information helps businesses anticipate market trends and make data-driven decisions, such as launching new products or adjusting pricing strategies.

Monitor and understand brand perception 

Monitoring and understanding brand perception is critical, and AI-driven sentiment analysis has revolutionized this process. Applying AI-powered sentiment analysis to market research gives companies a multifaceted view of how customers perceive their services or products. This involves analyzing information from various sources, including customer reviews, surveys, and social media conversations.

AI-driven sentiment analysis can assess whether a brand’s messaging aligns with customer perceptions. This alignment check empowers companies to refine their communication strategies, adopt a customer-centric approach, and cultivate a brand image that genuinely connects with its audience.

Product and employee satisfaction surveys

Through sentiment analysis, AI can determine whether the feedback is positive, neutral, or negative and identify specific product or service aspects that are being praised or criticized. This allows businesses to gain valuable insights into customer perceptions, uncover emerging trends, and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Here are some case studies to show how AI is making this happen:

• Bank of America employs AI-driven sentiment analysis to capture VoC and identify customer pain points. Erica, their advanced virtual financial assistant, has had over one billion client interactions. This award-winning AI technology, launched in 2018, has assisted almost 32 million clients with daily financial tasks. This data-driven approach allows Bank of America to proactively enhance its services, ultimately improving the overall banking experience.
• Ford uses advanced AI-driven sentiment analysis to carefully study customer feedback, helping them gain valuable insights into vehicle performance. This real-time feedback analysis has empowered Ford to identify concerns and implement necessary vehicle enhancements. As a result, Ford continues to deliver an improved driving experience to its customers while staying ahead in the automotive industry.
• T-Mobile developed Natural Language Understanding machine learning models that extract meaning from vast textual data. They manage an extensive dataset comprising hundreds of thousands of daily customer requests and a knowledge repository containing answers to potential customer inquiries. These machine learning models forecast the information required to address specific customer needs, like bill payments or adding phone lines, and then present it to customer service agents. T-Mobile employs AI-powered sentiment analysis to detect and resolve issues, reducing customer complaints.

AI for sentiment analysis extends its utility beyond customer feedback to internal processes. It can be used to evaluate workplace satisfaction and understand the employee’s voice within the company. 

By analyzing employee feedback, whether through surveys, performance reviews, or other channels, AI can help identify areas where improvements can be made in the workplace.

Benefits and challenges of using AI for sentiment analysis

Using AI for sentiment analysis comes with substantial benefits, including:

• Efficiency: AI algorithms can swiftly assess sentiment across numerous texts, making it ideal for handling large-scale data, such as social media comments, reviews, or feedback strategies.
• Scalability: AI systems can effortlessly scale their analysis capabilities to handle an increasing volume of data. Whether a business is dealing with a small customer base or a massive global audience, AI can adapt and accommodate the workload.
• Accuracy: AI algorithms continuously improve their accuracy by learning from large datasets. This enables them to identify subtle nuances, providing more precise and reliable results over time.

Challenges associated with AI sentiment analysis include:

• Context understanding: AI sometimes struggles to grasp the context of language, leading to misinterpretations of sentiments. This is particularly challenging when dealing with sarcasm, irony, or cultural nuances.
• Data privacy: Gathering and analyzing customer data for sentiment analysis raises concerns about data privacy and security.
• Bias and fairness: AI models may inadvertently incorporate biases in training data, which can lead to unfair results. Efforts must be made to reduce bias and ensure fairness in sentiment analysis.

Final thoughts

When it comes to understanding customer feedback, AI-powered sentiment analysis can be a powerful tool. AI enhances analysis accuracy and efficiency by delivering real-time insights. However, ethical concerns, including bias, privacy, and transparency, require consideration.

Exploring these innovative approaches in your domain can be rewarding. AI sentiment analysis trends will include natural language processing, multimodal analysis, contextual analysis, explainable AI, and real-time analysis. Embrace these innovations for a competitive edge and improved customer experiences.

The post 5 Creative Ways to Use AI for Sentiment Analysis appeared first on Lumoa.

Gone are the days when businesses could afford to sit on piles of survey data, waiting for end-of-quarter reviews to make sense of them. Today, customer feedback is immediate, public, and powerful; not to mention louder. It’s out there shaping opinions about your brand before you’ve even had your first coffee of the day.

It’s true, collecting feedback is one hurdle, but analysing it? That’s another level. Because let’s face it, the volume of feedback is overwhelming. In this sea of opinions, valuable insights often slip through the cracks — the kind of insights that can steer your business in the right direction or send it off the cliff.

So, what’s the secret to analysing customer feedback in real time? How do we sift through the noise and spot the gems that can guide our next business move? Stick around. This isn’t just another article; it’s going to be your playbook for understanding the real value of real-time feedback analysis.

Why a Structured Approach Matters in Feedback Analysis

Before we jump into the ‘how,’ let’s talk about the ‘why.’ Why is it so crucial to have a structured approach to analysing customer feedback? Well, as mentioned earlier, opinions are formed in seconds and shared just as quickly; businesses can’t afford to be slow. But speed without strategy? That’s just noise without direction.

We found out in our research on the state of customer experience (CX) that more companies are focusing on CX than ever before. Primarily because customers now demand more from their brands. Astonishingly, 4 out of 5 customers today believe that the experience a business provides is as significant as its products and services.

Furthermore, 66% expect brands to understand their unique needs. However, there’s a gap: 54% feel companies fail at providing the right information, and a staggering 66% feel treated like mere statistics.

The challenges companies face in implementing a solid CX strategy are multifaceted:

• Budget and Profitability: Investing in a strategy, deploying solutions, monitoring metrics, and converting insights into actionable plans requires significant resources.
• Technical Variables: Overcoming ineffective data silos, outdated tools, and inadequate personalization options remain daunting tasks for CX-driven companies.
• Human Interactions: Instilling the value of consistent CX best practices in team members is challenging, irrespective of the budget size or advanced technical solutions.

Moreover, customer expectations are increasing: 76% anticipate consistent interactions across departments, 74% use multiple channels for transactions, 52% expect always-personalized offers, 88% want companies to speed up digital initiatives, and 61% feel they’ve lost control over their personal data.

Customer feedback is everywhere – in your survey responses, online reviews, social media comments, and more. You can find valuable insights, but only if you know what to look for. Without a clear, structured method, you’re not just missing out on valuable input; you’re potentially misinterpreting the feedback you do manage to catch. And let’s not even get started on the data overload!

That’s where a structured approach comes in. It’s not about collecting feedback for the sake of it; it’s about gathering insights you can act on. Insights that will not only meet but exceed the modern customer’s expectations, and in doing so, propel your business forward.

Timing is Everything: How to Collect Customer Feedback at the Perfect Moment

In understanding the ‘why’ behind real-time feedback analysis, we recognize the need for immediacy and relevance. Now, let’s explore the ‘how,’ starting with the element of timing. Customer stories, experiences, and what motivates them are the best ways to get to know them. And timing is everything.

How does this work in the real world? If you send out a feedback request long after the customer has interacted with your product or service, you’re not just getting stale news; you’re missing out on the heat-of-the-moment insights that could drive your business forward.

So, how do you nail the right timing? Here are some practical steps.

1. Be Proactive with Prompts: Implement systems that automatically ask for feedback after key customer interactions. Whether it’s a purchase, a customer support call, or a product return, that’s your cue to jump in and ask how it went.

2. Make it Easy and Immediate: Feedback tools should be a no-brainer to use. Think of one-click ratings, short surveys, or quick polls right on your app or website. The easier it is, the more likely customers will share their thoughts on the fly.

3. Keep it Relevant: Tailor your feedback questions to the specific interaction. Generic queries get generic answers. But ask about their recent experience? Now you’re getting the good stuff.

4. Respect Their Time: Don’t bombard customers with requests. You need to be strategic about when and how often you reach out. You will lose their attention if you do it too much. Not enough, and you’re flying blind.

Word of advice: there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy here. The best approach is the one that fits your customers’ journey. Additionally, there are various customer feedback practices that you can follow. Practicing it will grant you actionable feedback. This strategic approach is a significant step towards achieving success.

Data to Action: Efficient Strategies for Analysing Customer Feedback

After establishing the importance of timely feedback collection, we must address another core challenge: transforming this abundance of data into actionable insights.

Picture this: you’ve just rolled out a new product or service, and you’re on pins and needles waiting for the feedback to roll in. But we already know that collecting feedback is only half the battle. Sifting through it all and figuring out your next move fast is the real deal.

Here’s our game plan for this part:

1. Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize: Not all feedback is created equal. You can use text analytics tools to identify trends and urgent issues. That way, you’re not just putting out fires; you’re making strategic improvements that matter.

2. Empower Your Team: Build a CX team that has access to real-time feedback and the authority to act on it. Whether it’s a customer service rep who can offer an instant apology discount or a product manager who can fast-track a bug fix, immediate action can turn a critic into a fan.

3. Measure the Impact: Be aware of how your changes will impact customer satisfaction, retention, and profitability. Remember, the goal here is strategic growth.

4. Choose the Right Tools: Invest in CX platforms that don’t just collect feedback but analyse it in real time, providing clear, actionable insights that your whole team can access and act on.

Before we move on: Don’t (and shouldn’t) react to every piece of feedback whether you’re doing it manually or not. Build a system that helps you filter out the noise and find the critical insights. That’s how you stay agile, informed, and ahead of the curve.

Beyond Listening: How to Effectively Respond and Act on Customer Feedback

We’ve all been there — a bad experience leads to a complaint, which sometimes disappears into the void, followed by a generic apology way too late.

It’s not just about haircuts gone wrong; this applies to any customer experience, from downloading software to waiting on a service technician. The point is, a delayed or insincere response can turn a small hiccup into a deal-breaker.

So, how do you ensure feedback doesn’t just get collected but gets acted on in a way that wins back hearts? Check out these 4 points to remember:

1. Personalize the Follow-Up: A generic apology won’t cut it. Personalize your responses based on the issue and the customer’s history with your company. Make sure they know you care about them.

2. Take Action and Communicate: Fix the issue, of course, but also let the customer know what you’ve done. This communication is important; it turns a closed loop into a continuing conversation.

3. Check Back: Don’t be afraid to follow up again later to confirm the customer is satisfied or to ask for more feedback. It shows your personality and commitment.

4. Learn and Improve: Use this feedback to make systemic changes in your product or service to reduce the likelihood of the problem recurring.

Closing the feedback loop isn’t just damage control; it’s an opportunity. Handle it right, and you’ll retain customers and possibly turn them into your biggest advocates.

Methods in Analysing Customer Feedback

There are multiple ways to analyse customer feedback. And with these methods, you can uncover trends, emotions, and quantify your customers’ expectations. Let’s look at the top ways in analysing customer feedback:

1. Sentiment Analysis: It’s the emotional tone behind the words. Using AI, it interprets feedback to categorize responses like happiness, frustration, and disappointment. It’s like having a mood ring for your customer reviews, but way more accurate.

2. Text Analytics: Go beyond surface-level responses. This technique examines open-ended feedback, identifying common keywords, phrases, and topics. It’s about seeing the forest and the trees, understanding not just what terms are popping up, but also how they’re interconnected.

3. Conversation Analysis: Look into customer conversations. This allows you to see the entire dialogue, helping you understand the customer’s journey and experience. By focusing on keywords and categorizing feedback, you can identify patterns and issues that need immediate attention. What an excellent way to listen to your customers!

Automation for Real time Analysis

Generative AI exploded like a bomb this year and is rapidly branching out. With 4 out of 5 customers demanding more personalized, immediate interactions, businesses are scrambling to adapt.

The rise of self-service and automated customer processes reflects more than a trend; it’s a loud and clear message from consumers craving efficiency and authenticity. Generative AI tools like GPT don’t just process feedback; they understand it, diving into the emotional undertones and subtle hints hidden in your customers’ words.

Considering the world is racing toward deeper, more meaningful customer experiences, you have to ask yourself: are you keeping up, or are you lagging behind?

Conclusion

Okay, let’s wrap this up: Analysing customer feedback in real time will level-up your customer experience. Imagine knowing what your customer thinks right at the moment they’re thinking about it. That’s powerful stuff.

With customer experience analytics tools today, you can sort through this feedback fast. This process helps you determine what requires immediate attention and what can wait.

But remember, collecting feedback is just the beginning. Start engaging in a dialogue with your customers. Had a hiccup with a customer? Reach out, extend a genuine apology, and address the issue. You’d be surprised how a simple, sincere ‘we’re on it!’ can turn a critic into a fan. In fact, studies, like the one from Carey School of Business, show that a heartfelt apology can skyrocket customer satisfaction by up to 74%.

Sure, you’ll receive an array of feedback, and while it’s tempting to dive into action mode, the real art lies in stepping back, pausing, and connecting the dots. You have to look at the big picture, discerning patterns, and understand what’s enhancing the customer experience and what’s pulling it down.

Setting up a real-time customer feedback system seems daunting, and yes, it does require resources. But consider this: the insights you’ll gain aren’t just about fixing what’s broken; they’re also about forging stronger, more meaningful connections with your customers. And the beauty of it? You’re not in this alone.

There’s a whole arsenal of guides and tools designed to help you design your CX strategy. The bottom line is that analysing customer feedback in real time doesn’t just fix problems; it develops communities around your brand. Get it right, and your customers won’t just stick around; they’ll become your most powerful advocates.

The post How to Analyse Customer Feedback: A Real-Time Approach appeared first on Lumoa.

Welcome to a guide that’s all about making sense of those stories hidden within your survey data. Whether you’re a seasoned CX professional or just dipping your toes into the waters of customer feedback, this article is your friendly companion in turning those responses into actionable insights.

We’ll walk through the essentials and gradually go a bit more detailed in survey analysis, ensuring you’re well-equipped to elevate your customer satisfaction, boost sales, and fortify brand loyalty. From uncovering the basics to tackling common challenges, we’re here to help you navigate through the fascinating journey of customer feedback analysis.

Why Voice of Customer (VoC) Matters

To kick things off, we should first understand why Voice of Customer matters and how it affects your business. Customers are an integral part of any business’s success. Obviously, businesses wouldn’t exist without them! So it’s important to listen closely and understand what customers want from brands – that’s where the voice of the customer comes in.

Whether it be through surveys, focus groups, or even social media, businesses have access to valuable feedback on their products and services. This feedback helps inform how they operate going forward. And remember, feedback isn’t just about addressing criticisms—it’s also about recognizing and building on what you’re already doing well.

In one Gartner research, leveraging the data obtained from direct customer feedback can increase the chances of upselling and cross-selling by 15-20%. This shows the tangible, bottom-line benefits of listening to your customers.

Additionally, a well-executed VoC initiative also helps enhance customer retention, resulting in higher customer loyalty scores, reduced customer turnover, and increased customer lifetime value through repeat purchases. A ripple effect will occur – those businesses able to stay in tune with customer desires will have an advantage over their competitors. After all, if you know what your audience wants before they do – you’ll be miles ahead!

Why Analyzing Survey Results is Essential: Addressing Common Business Challenges

Imagine you’re running a bustling café in a busy city center. You pride yourself on the quality of your coffee and the ambiance of your space. To understand your customers better, you conduct a survey asking for feedback on everything from the coffee to the service. But what happens next is crucial. If you merely collect these responses without thorough analysis, you might miss key insights that could drive your business forward.

For instance, let’s say many customers subtly mention that they love the coffee but find the seating uncomfortable. Without proper analysis, you might overlook this feedback, focusing only on the positive comments about your coffee. This oversight could lead to a decrease in repeat visits, as customers choose other cafes with more comfortable seating.

This scenario highlights a common pain point for businesses: the gap between collecting customer feedback and effectively analyzing it to uncover actionable insights. Just as a chef needs to skillfully combine ingredients to create a gourmet meal, businesses need to adeptly analyze survey results to transform raw data into strategies that enhance customer satisfaction and drive growth.

When you know how to properly analyze survey results, you’re uncovering the story behind your customers’ experiences. It is this insight that enables you to make informed decisions, such as rearranging your café’s seating arrangement or tailoring your services to better suit your customers’ needs.

Categories of Questions to Ask in Your Survey

Okay, so now you understand the importance of not just collecting but also effectively analyzing your survey results. But where does this process start? It all begins with asking the right questions. Let’s shift our focus to the heart of any survey: the questions themselves. When creating surveys, asking the right questions is the key to unlocking meaningful insights from your customer feedback.

By asking relevant and targeted questions, you can create a comprehensive picture of customer sentiment and gain valuable insights into what customers want from your brand. Let’s check out the types of questions that can supercharge your VoC surveys.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) question: This is a popular metric used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. This particular question seeks to gauge how likely a customer would be to recommend a company’s products or services to their friends, family, or colleagues. Customers are asked to rate the company on a scale from 0-10, with higher scores indicating higher customer satisfaction.

A high NPS score is a strong indicator of customer loyalty, which can drive repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals, thereby contributing to your company’s growth and reputation.

Customer Satisfaction questions: are designed to assess a customer’s overall satisfaction with the product or service they received, as well as their entire customer experience. How customers rate these questions can provide insights into how effective a business is, at meeting the needs and expectations of its customers.

In a nutshell, high CSAT scores often correlate with customer retention and loyalty, directly impacting your bottom line.

Demographic questions: These questions gather information about the respondent’s age, gender, income, education level, and other demographic information that can be used to segment and analyze the data. Knowing the demographic makeup of customers can help identify trends and correlations between certain demographics and customer satisfaction.

When conducting a survey, it’s essential to avoid any questions that could be seen as discriminatory. We should also make sure the collected data is relevant and our respondents understand how their information will be used; all while adhering to legal/ethical guidelines around demographic info collection!

It can be tempting to ask a ludicrous amount of demographic questions, to truly understand your customer and where they are coming from. Unfortunately, these can be tiring to fill out from a user’s perspective.

Remember that each additional question you have in your survey will decrease the amount of responses you get, sometimes only by a little bit, but they add up! Try to ask questions for things that you aren’t already tracking in your CRM or other business tool so that the information is important and the survey is kept light.

Behavioral questions will give you the bigger picture and help you assess how customers interact with a given product. This includes how often they use it, how much they spend, and how long they have been a customer.

What’s more, behavioral type of questions can help you customize your products and services accordingly.

Examples of some behavioral questions:

• How do you go to your workplace?
• How often do you buy travel tickets?
• Do you pay by card or cash?

Open-ended questions on the other hand, help you understand customer sentiment. It provides insights into customers’ thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain hidden.

With these questions, customers can express their opinions and frustrations in more detail than with a structured question. The most exciting part? It may reveal underlying customer sentiments, helping you identify potential areas for improvement and innovate your offerings based on real customer feedback.

Examples of some open-ended questions:

• What were the main reasons you chose our product?
• How would you describe your experience with us?
• How can we make our product better for you?

Common Ways to Analyze Survey Data

Now that we’re all on the same page in the kind of questions to ask, let’s discuss the ways to analyze it. Analyzing survey data can be an overwhelming task, but with the right approach, it’s possible to extract meaningful insights from customer feedback and develop actionable strategies for improvement.

One such tool that can help is Lumoa, the first CX platform to offer GPT. thanks to its propriety AI, employees can now tap into any customer feedback, get clear answers, and take actions with a positive influence on KPIs.

In this section, we’ll explore some of the most common techniques used to analyze survey results, all of which can be easily performed using Lumoa. We’ll also provide screenshots from the Lumoa platform to give you a visual understanding of how these techniques work in practice.

From basic analysis methods to more advanced techniques, you’ll gain a better understanding of how to unlock the potential of your customer feedback.

1. Frequency analysis: This involves counting the number of times a particular response is given to a question. It helps to identify patterns and trends in the data, such as which options are most popular or least popular.

   In the visual above, we see the frequency of responses to a question like “What region are you from?” This illustrates how frequency analysis can provide a clear snapshot of the distribution of responses, revealing patterns and trends.

   For instance, you can easily identify the most and least represented regions among your respondents. This logic can be replicated for each question in your survey, helping you understand the most and least common responses.

   Understanding these patterns can help you prioritize improvements and capitalize on what’s working well.

2. Sentiment analysis: This is a method of using natural language processing and text analysis techniques to determine the emotional tone behind a customer’s response. It can be useful for identifying positive, negative, and neutral sentiments in open-ended survey responses.

   In the visual above, we see Lumoa’s AI in action, determining whether parts of a comment are positive, negative, or neutral. In this example, the AI has identified a portion of the comment as “positive.”

   With this information, you can address specific areas of concern and build on what’s working well to enhance customer satisfaction.

3. Regression analysis: This method is used to identify relationships between different variables in the data and can help to identify patterns and trends over time.
   Here, we see an example of Lumoa’s AI performing regression analysis. In this case, the AI is determining that when people use the word “Price” in their open text response, they often do so when they are from regions like “Mexico” or when speaking to certain team members through support.

   This information will help you identify specific factors that influence customer feedback, enabling you to tailor your strategies and responses accordingly. For instance, you might decide to provide additional training for certain team members or review your pricing strategy for specific regions.

4. Cluster analysis: This method groups similar responses together, which is useful for identifying patterns or segments within the data.

   In this case, Lumoa’s AI is showing us that when people mention “price” in their open text response, they often use the words “account” and “banking” in the same comment.

   The smileys represent the sentiment when those words are used. This insight identifies common themes or issues in customer feedback, enabling you to address specific areas of concern.

   For instance, if customers often mention “price,” “account,” and “banking” together in a negative context, you might decide to review your pricing strategy or improve your account management and banking services.

5. Text mining: This method extracts useful information from unstructured text data, such as open-ended survey responses. It’s used to identify common themes or keywords in the data.

   In the visual above, we see an example of Lumoa’s AI performing text mining. In this case, Lumoa has created overall groupings of themes found in open-text responses. These groupings, called “Topics”, can be managed and edited by your organization.

   This is beneficial in identifying common themes or issues in customer feedback, enabling you to address specific areas of concern.

   For instance, if a particular topic frequently appears in negative feedback, you might decide to focus your improvement efforts on that area.

6. Data visualization: This method displays data in a graphical format, such as charts, tables, and graphs. It can be used to make the data more understandable and to identify patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent in the raw data.
   In the visual above, we see one example of how Lumoa can help you make sense of your data.

   Lumoa offers a variety of graphs and charts for different purposes, such as determining trends and recurring issues, as well as tracking issues over time.

   By presenting data in a visual format, you can gain a clearer understanding of your customer feedback, making it easier to identify areas for improvement and monitor the impact of your actions over time.

Best Practices for Interpreting and Utilizing Survey Insights

Having the right approach to analyzing survey data is essential for unlocking its potential, but it’s also important to know how to interpret and utilize the insights you uncover. Check out some best practices for interpreting and utilizing survey insights.

From understanding customer sentiment to developing actionable strategies, we’ll go over all the key steps involved in creating a successful VoC program.

1. Clearly define your research objectives: Before beginning the survey, be sure to establish clear research objectives that will guide the design and analysis of the survey.

2. Use a representative sample: Make sure that the sample of participants is representative of the population being studied in order to ensure the validity of the survey insights.

3. Use open-ended questions: Open-ended questions allow customers to provide detailed feedback in their own words, which can provide valuable insights into their thoughts and feelings.

4. Use data visualization: Use data visualization techniques such as charts, tables, and graphs to display the data in a way that is easy to understand and identify patterns and trends.

5. Use statistical analysis: Use statistical analysis techniques such as frequency analysis, cross-tabulation, and regression analysis to identify patterns and trends in the data.

6. Use text mining: Use text mining techniques to extract useful information from unstructured text data, such as open-ended survey responses.

7. Look for patterns and trends: Look for patterns and trends in the data that can help identify areas for improvement or opportunities for growth.

8. Identify key drivers: Identify key drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and behavior that can be used to improve the customer experience.

9. Prioritize your findings: Prioritize your findings based on their importance and potential impact on the business.

10. Act on your findings: Use the insights gained from the survey to make data-driven decisions that will improve the customer experience and achieve organizational goals.

To illustrate the practical applications of analyzing survey results and implementing changes based on VoC insights, let’s look at a real-life example.

Huel, a popular meal replacement company, recognized the need to better understand their customers’ experiences and improve their Net Promoter Score (NPS). Before, they tracked NPS without taking any significant action. However, as the company decided to make NPS a key business KPI, they needed a scalable and efficient way to analyze and act upon customer feedback.

This led Huel to adopt Lumoa, a platform that enabled them to analyze NPS data, answer customer questions, and create targeted strategies. Lumoa’s intuitive interface and text analytics allowed everyone in the company to better understand customer sentiment, making NPS a more accessible and successful KPI.

One of Lumoa’s most impactful features for Huel was the ability to segment NPS data by different customer segments. This allowed them to track customer lifecycles and understand how perceptions and pain points evolved over time. As a result of implementing Lumoa, Huel saw their NPS score increase by 10 points and their global response rate increase by 164%, which significantly improved their customer experience and decision-making capabilities.

This example illustrates the power of effective survey analysis and the impact it can have on a company’s success.

Creating an Action Plan

Creating an action plan based on survey results is an effective way to turn customer feedback into meaningful insights. This will drive your business forward. It can help you identify key drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and behavior so that you can make informed decisions and create strategies that improve the customer experience and achieve organizational goals.

1. Identify Key Insights: Start by reviewing your survey results and identifying the most important insights. Look for patterns, trends, and key drivers that stand out. You can find out where customers are most satisfied or dissatisfied, what common themes are in open-ended answers, and what correlations there are between them.

2. Prioritize Based on Impact: Not all insights will have the same potential impact on your business. Rank your findings by their potential to drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth. Consider the number of customers affected, the severity of the problem, and the potential for improvement.

3. Set Clear Objectives: For each priority insight, set clear objectives. These should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, if customer service is a common complaint, you could aim for a 25% reduction in wait times within six months.

4. Develop Strategies: Next, develop strategies to achieve your objectives. It may involve improving processes, investing in new tools or training, or making changes to your products or services. Consider investing in more customer service staff, implementing a new platform, or improving self-service options to reduce wait times.

5. Assign Responsibilities: Assign responsibility for each strategy to a specific person or team. In this way, accountability is ensured and a clear point of contact is provided.

6. Create a Timeline: Develop a timeline for implementing your strategies. To keep everyone on track, you should set key milestones and deadlines.

7. Monitor Progress: Regularly monitor your progress toward your objectives. Tracking metrics, doing follow-up surveys, and getting feedback from customers and staff could be part of this process. Be prepared to reassess your strategies and make changes if you’re not making the progress you expected.

8. Communicate Your Plan: Finally, communicate your action plan to all relevant stakeholders. This includes not only your staff but also your customers. You can build trust and improve customer satisfaction by letting them know you’re taking their feedback on board.

Wrapping up

Customer-centric businesses need to understand their customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points. Surveys are great tools for collecting this information, but their real value comes from analyzing and acting on it.

Throughout this comprehensive guide, we’ve explored why Voice of Customer (VoC) matters, the importance of analyzing survey results, the types of questions to ask in your survey, and the common ways to analyze survey data. We’ve also covered how to interpret and use survey insights, as well as how to create an action plan.

Remember, the goal is not just to collect data, but to transform it into actionable insights that drive your business forward. Getting the right approach to your survey data can boost customer satisfaction, sales, and loyalty.

Now, armed with this knowledge, you’re ready to take your survey analysis to the next level. No matter where you’re at with customer feedback, these strategies and techniques can help you get more value out of it.

So, don’t wait! You’ll see the impact it can have on your business when you apply what you’ve learned today. Remember, every piece of customer feedback is an opportunity for growth and improvement. Take it on, act on it, and watch your business grow. If you need more ways to boost your CX strategies, how about you check out the State of Customer Experience 2023? Download your copy now!

The post How to Analyze Survey Results: A Guide to Mastering Customer Feedback Analysis appeared first on Lumoa.

This article explores how to augment the customer experience through feedback sentiment analysis, demonstrating the variety of actionable solutions it offers businesses.

You may be wondering how sentiment analysis can truly make a difference in your organization. As you read through this article, you’ll learn what role customer sentiment plays in business. In addition, you’ll learn how to use sentiment analysis to drive emotional impact. Furthermore, you’ll learn how cutting-edge technologies can help you overcome the challenges of delivering high-quality sentiment analysis.

Why is Sentiment Analysis on Customer Feedback Important?

In business, everything begins with the customer. All our revenue is voluntarily given to us by our customers. Most of our activities and expenses are all about creating value for the customer, spreading the gospel of that value, and convincing customers one by one about how products and services will solve their problems and improve their lives. Every day the customer gives, or take away, and his/her gratification or irritation can either make or break our business.  

At the same time, we – as humans – tend to be driven by our deep emotions. Underneath our motivations, there’s really nothing else. Joy, satisfaction, pain, frustration, and anger drive our behavior and drive our learning. Give one delight, and one wants more of it and may recommend it to friends. Deliver one frustration, and one will start avoiding you or – worse – resent you and harm your reputation.  

Our deep dependency on our customers and this deep emotional drive explain why sentiment analysis on customer feedback is so important in this overly digital world. You simply cannot act on the customers’ pains and frustrations if you are not aware of them and their causes.  You cannot intensify the good of your product either even if you cannot recognize the fundamentals and the details in your product that your customers truly love and cherish.

What is Sentiment Analysis on Customer Feedback and How Does it Work?

To better understand sentiment analysis’s practical applications, imagine its benefits in the retail industry. Let’s say a retail company uses sentiment analysis to identify customer pain points in their online shopping experience.

By analyzing customer feedback, they can discover recurring issues with website navigation and the checkout process. And with this information, the company may target improvements to their website by incorporating website navigation best practices. This will result in a more seamless and enjoyable online shopping experience for their customers.

This example demonstrates how sentiment analysis can be leveraged to pinpoint specific areas that need attention. This allows businesses to make informed decisions and enhance customers’ experiences.

Let’s do another one but this time, in a SaaS environment. A software company leverages sentiment analysis to prioritize bug fixes and feature updates based on customer feedback. They can find out what’s frustrating users and which features are most requested by analyzing user comments and reviews.

By doing this, the company can allocate resources efficiently and focus on improving things that will have the biggest impact on user retention and satisfaction.

Like the first example, this one illustrates how sentiment analysis can help businesses make decisions based on data and improve their products and services according to customer preferences.

Now you know how it works in the real world, let’s further explore ways how to use sentiment analysis to drive emotional impact in more detail.  

One needs to identify something that drives emotions and is actionable. The first step is what we call sentiment analysis. In its fundamentals, it’s about identifying the emotional tone – the sentiment – of a sentence. In practice, it’s about recognizing the text ‘I love the app’ as positive, ‘I saw the app’ as neutral, and ‘the app is driving me crazy’ as negative.  

This sounds nice and easy and for the user – easy it is. Lumoa’s user interface (UI) provides a clear and intuitive way to visualize sentiment analysis results. In the Lumoa UI, users can see a graphical representation of the sentiment scores for different categories or topics, as well as individual customer feedback with their corresponding sentiment labels. At the same time, the results can also be filtered by date, sentiment category, or other relevant factors, making it easy to find trends and patterns. Here’s a view of the sentiment analysis in the Lumoa UI.  

Yet, it’s quite a challenge to deliver high-quality sentiment analysis in a real-world application. This difficulty is raised by several factors. One core issue is the diversity of languages. For example, while Lumoa can deal with 120 languages through translations, it also supports more than a half-dozen languages as translation targets. It means that sentiment detection needs to operate over multiple languages. Another issue is the diversity of humane expressions.

The richness of emotionally loaded words that range from ‘good’ to ‘niggle’, different ways to express irony or negation ‘could have been better’ and plain typing mistakes ‘it was great’ mean that the machinery needs to master extremely wide vocabulary and nuance of expression. 

A third more practical issue relates to the unit of sentiment.

Many sentiment analysis solutions make the mistake of predicting sentiment on too high levels, or in a worst-case scenario, on the document level.

This makes it difficult to assign a sentiment to a specific theme. For example, the text ‘content is great but the app crashes’, has 2 separate sentiments: one related to the application content and another to its quality.  

Nowadays, the-state-of-the-art sentiment detection is typically done with pre-trained and large deep-learning networks. Lumoa is no exception, as we are using an XLM-RoBERTa, which is a large multi-lingual language model pre-trained with 100 languages and 2.5TB of text. For reference, that’s about 100 times the size of the 2023 English Wikipedia. The use of this model solves many issues. The cross-language nature of this model means that it can understand about 100 different languages without separate training.

Large language models contain huge amounts of individual details (270M parameters), which capture diverse vocabularies and human expression. Lumoa also has additional logic for separating text for sensible units for sentiment analysis, and for incorporating additional contextual data in predictions. As a result, Lumoa can reach 80%-85% sentiment detection accuracy across various languages, which is considered a highly competitive result in the industry. 

How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Drive Emotional Impact? 

While one needs to identify emotional context to drive emotional impact, this is only a part of the story. According to the Lumoa Actionability framework, for an insight to be actionable, it needs to have 3 different properties:  

1. Impact 

1. cause 

1. and novelty 

The reason why these 3 different aspects need to be present is somewhat obvious. Let’s consider a statement ‘recent update was ok’. Even if the insight has a clear cause (‘update’) and it’s a novel (‘recent’), if it doesn’t imply an issue or a pain it’s not something you can or need to fix. At the same time the statement ‘everything has become horrible’ may be impactful and novel, but if it lacks a clear root cause, you cannot really act on it. 

On the other hand, while the theme ‘price is still high’ implies a clear issue and its cause, if the same theme has been present from day 1 and no one has acted on it: one will likely act on it now. It’s quite typical that there is always someone complaining about the price or some other aspect of a service, which is less of a bug and more a feature of the business model. 

So, in practice, the sentiment can become an unactionable ‘vanity metric’ unless it’s bound to the cause of the sentiment and to some kind of trend analysis. For example, in Lumoa this coupling of the emotional impact of the cause and novelty is done in 2 places:  

1. On impact calculation  

1. And with insights, especially the ‘actionable insights’ 

The following screenshot demonstrates how the different aspects work when combined. The top left answers to questions: “What the sentiment is and how it has changed?”. There, you can see the total positive sentiment for November and that it has dropped significantly. The top right answers the question “Why has it dropped at a high level?”. There you can see for example that the sentiment has dropped by 0.23% points, because of the Price and Payment topic.

On the middle-left, you can find this answer more granularly and find that the main subtopic driving the change is Discounts and Promotions. On the middle-right, you can find the exact causes behind the Discounts and promotions negative sentiment. One example is the actionable insight related to the Pull&Bear application Setup and Registration topic. When you read the feedback, the problem becomes clear: customers are not getting the promised 10% discount for downloading the app. 

In this way, the sentiment analysis can be combined with cause and trend analytics to form a coherent overview, that leads you from the top-level change (-7.3%) to changes to the concrete actionable details, that drive the emotional impact. 

Conclusion 

Because emotions drive customer behavior, sentiment analysis on customer feedback forms a tool for driving improvement in customer sentiment, customer behavior, and the business itself. In turn, these can drive directly not just loyalty, but also conversion to paying customers by guaranteeing a better early-stage customer experience. Sentiment analysis can also help organizations become more customer-centric, by making it better tuned to the customers’ pain and delight.  

Still, sentiment analysis is not trivial, and it comes with its caveats and challenges, that need to be managed to deliver high quality. Sentiment analysis is often not enough alone to deliver value, but it needs to be combined with some kind of cause/theme analysis and trend analysis to provide insights that are interesting and actionable.

The post Sentiment Analysis on Customer Feedback: A Guide to Enhance Customer Experience appeared first on Lumoa.

You probably know this. But where do you start? One of the best analysis techniques available is the voice of customer (VoC) template. It will help you gather valuable feedback, identify customer pain points, and work towards better solutions.

This article will explain what VoC is, how to use it, and tips on creating your own voice of customer template for your business.

Ready to dive in?

What is Voice of Customer(VoC) and Why Is It Important?

A voice of the customer (VoC) is the process of gathering customer feedback to discover what they need, want, and expect from you.

The goal is to better understand your customers, earn their trust, and improve customer experience. The voice of the customer can also help you identify and address any issues preventing you from achieving key goals.

Additionally, the voice of the customer encompasses both positive and negative feedback on a variety of topics. It could cover products, services, prices, and brand perception. In recent years, VoC has gained popularity as new technologies have expanded how companies receive and process customer feedback.

We’ll say it here – It’s impossible to overemphasize how important customer feedback is. Without it, you’ll never know what a customer wants or expects. Business owners have always sought out customer opinions. But in our digital age, receiving feedback has never been easier. Thanks to the Internet, customer feedback has never been so accessible. 

Learning what your customers think about your products or services isn’t difficult. Customer experience templates, customer survey templates, or customer satisfaction survey templates allow you to make informed decisions on improving the customer journey.

Without customers, there is no business. That’s why the voice of the customer is an essential part of any successful business strategy. 

By understanding what your customers want and need you can ensure that you are providing them with the best possible service or product which will help you stay ahead in an ever-changing market.

When to Use Voice of Customer

Before we cover building your own VoC template, let’s talk about when to use this type of analysis. Remember, you should always care about what your customers say. Using the voice of the customer isn’t something you only use once and never turn to it again. It should be a regular part of your customer experience strategy.

Instead, you should see VoC as a tool to gain unique insights. Let’s look at several reasons you should consider using VoC.

• Verifying customer feedback. Use VoC to verify customer feedback, enabling businesses to make more informed decisions based on actual customer experiences. In addition, VoC can provide insights into customer preferences, allowing companies to tailor their communication, featured items, or other offerings. 
• Quantifying customer feedback. It might feel impossible to put a number by feedback. How do you “rate” an emotional response complaining about a problem with your website? The good news is that you can assign a rating or score based on the relevance and importance of each insight. These insights can help you make better decisions. They will also help you train your customer service reps in de-escalation.
• Launching new initiatives. Insights from data analytics can help create new product designs or services. Data can also inform pricing strategies for a better return on investment.
• Keeping up with industry standards or new trends. You need to remain competitive in the market and make a profit. But you also need to maintain relationships with your customers. Continue to create meaningful connections with customers while still keeping your business profitable.
• Improving brand perception. This can include analyzing customer reviews and surveys, understanding what customers are saying about the brand online, and taking steps to address any issues that may be affecting your reputation. By doing this, businesses can ensure that their brand is well-regarded by customers and potential customers alike.
• Increasing customer loyalty. Feedback will reveal what customers want and how you can improve your products or services. This information helps create targeted campaigns that will help increase customer retention rates and build long-term relationships with customers.

How to Create a Voice of Customer Template

A voice-of-customer template helps you collect and interpret customer feedback. The template is a framework for setting goals, involving the right people, identifying solutions, and tracking progress throughout the process. 

While a VoC template may be different depending on the company profile and industry, each template should have the following elements.

Setting Your Goal

By gathering customer feedback, you’ll gain a better understanding of where your customers are coming from and what they want. Use this data to identify opportunities for improvement and insights so you can better meet their needs. In the end, you want to see increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Everyone involved in the VoC process must understand how important it is for the success of the business. 

Identifying Key Stakeholders

When it comes to collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback, involve every key stakeholder. This includes departments such as customer service, marketing, product development, sales, and even executive leadership. 

Each department will bring its own unique perspective to the table. You want as many valuable insights as possible to inform decisions that will improve the customer experience.

Gathering Direct Feedback

Obtaining feedback from customers is essential. But how do you get well-rounded data? Only if you get direct feedback using every possible medium. With an omnichannel approach, you’ll gather feedback from the following:

• Online surveys
• In-App surveys/rating request
• Chatbots
• Customer interviews
• Your Net Promoter Score
• Online product reviews
• Social Media mentions and DMs

You’ll gain deeper insights into a customer’s behavior and preferences by collecting their direct feedback. Being proactive here will help you get ahead of the curve by measuring customer satisfaction. 

As you work through the template, you’ll see that this collected feedback will be used to identify areas for improvement in service delivery, product design, and more.

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Finding the Primary Request

Every piece of customer feedback, no matter how lengthy or detailed, can boil down to a primary request. To do this well, customer feedback must be carefully analyzed and interpreted to identify the underlying issue that needs a customer has. 

This might mean some translation work on your part. Not every customer will state explicitly what their main problem is. It’s important to read between the lines to find any hidden issues.

Providing Solutions

In certain cases, large feature updates may be needed to successfully resolve an issue while in other scenarios, smaller bug fixes and modifications as well as ensuring that customers have the right information about a product or service. The choice of which fix to use depends on the complexity of the problem, availability of resources, and time constraints.

When trying to enact changes in your organization, it is important to rank them based on your resources and the time available. This is where prioritization comes into play.

Prioritizing the Needs

After completing the preceding steps, rank each solution based on its potential value and return on investment. Due to limited resources and bandwidth, you should focus on those initiatives that will have the greatest impact. Which need would benefit the largest number of customers in the shortest amount of time?

You’ll want to consider the main project goal as you do this. If not, you’ll spend time, energy, and money on priorities that won’t help reach your desired outcomes or increase the bottom line.

Here’s a visual representation of what a template could look like:

Using this template will help you act quickly and efficiently when customers provide feedback. It is valuable for short-term and long-term feedback strategies. And it will help your company stay agile amidst changing customer needs. 

Voice of Customer Best Practices

Now that you have a framework for creating your own VoC template, here are five best practices to help keep in mind.

1. Personalize the Questions You Ask

Customers expect to receive personalized attention. Companies that wish to cultivate loyalty and strong communication should focus on providing more personalized interactions with their customers. This can help them to build a better relationship with their customers.

Your goal is to build stronger relationships and customer loyalty. How you phrase questions can help you do this. Craft questions that put the customer at the center of attention. The way to do that is to help them feel like an individual. Not a number or someone lost in the crowd. This helps the customer feel valued in communication and it creates a more positive customer experience.

2. Gather Feedback at the Right Time

Best practices for obtaining customer feedback involve not only determining which platform they feel most comfortable providing their opinion on, but also the timing of the request. It is usually best to ask them immediately after their experience so that you will receive more accurate responses.

Even as you gather feedback, you want to enhance the customer experience. So try to time interactions with customers according to their individual journeys. Great moments to engage are when a customer’s behavior changes or when an already-purchased product is upgraded or bought again.

3. Share Feedback with Your Whole Company

The success of any business depends on all employees functioning efficiently and effectively together. Though some team members may not have direct interaction with customers, their roles still contribute to the ultimate goal of customer satisfaction.  A comprehensive business plan template serves as a guiding framework to align these collective efforts toward achieving organizational objectives. All departments must work as one for a company to thrive.

So that customer feedback is maximized, it should be made available to every employee in the company. The customer success team can create a detailed profile of customers which includes their demographic information, buying preferences, past purchases, as well as other relevant data which can then be shared with every department. 

This will enable each department to have better insights into the needs and wants of their target customers. Most importantly, it will help the business as a whole make informed decisions about product offerings.

4. Continue to Listen to VoC

Fostering strong customer relationships often depends on recording their order history and online clicks. In an omnichannel Voice of the Customer (VoC) approach, customers can be asked to periodically answer questions about their lifestyles, routines, and preferences. This helps to deepen the understanding of their needs.

A continued conversation about the customer and their lifestyle, rather than just their immediate needs, can yield deeply useful data to help shape future engagement.

5. Always Respond to VoC

You want all customers to feel appreciated and valued. So it is critical to act quickly and meaningfully upon any feedback received–whether they’ve purchased a product or yelled at a customer service rep on the phone. 

Preparing for potential risks in advance is critical to any business’s success. It will help reduce the damage and allow for timely and efficient decision-making.

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How to Analyze Your Voice of Customer Data and Generate Actionable Insights

You built your template, followed best practices, and gathered feedback. Exciting! Now, what do you do with the data?

Analyzing VoC data is just as critical as getting the data. It will help you develop strategies to improve customer pain points and satisfaction levels.

Here are three things to help analyze your VoC data.

1. Prepare and Structure Data

Unstructured data sources are pervasive in business and need to be effectively managed. You’ll likely pull data from many sources: text, audio, email surveys, in-person feedback, etc.

Audio recordings are a prime example of unstructured data. An audio file is would need to be manually transcribed for usability purposes. Speech analytics tools allow you to transform a voicemail into a transcription that is organized and searchable. Once you do that, you’ll have an accessible transcript of the message that allows you to convert your data into usable files.

2. Import Data into a Reporting Tool

So you’ve received all the data. And it could be a lot. You’ll need a tool to help you

The reports you end up generating should focus on answering these initial questions. For example, if you are the Director of Customer Experience at a call center, you will likely want to structure a report that highlights caller sentiment, call outcomes, time to resolution, and other customer-centric data points.

Thankfully, we’ve got you covered. You can import your data from a third-party tool. Or you can create your own survey directly with Lumoa and then get started analyzing. Get a free demo of our text analytics or survey analytics tools.

3. Gather Analytics Insights

Analyzing customer feedback is the most important part of the process. You can have data for days, but what’s the point if you don’t learn from it and make the data actionable?

Look for trends in your customers’ emotional and sentiment responses, positive or negative. These will give insight into why they bought something and if they’re likely to be a repeat customer. Don’t forget to focus on the big picture, too. How does the brand appeal to your customers? Do they recommend you to others? Do they leave feeling positive about your brand?

As you take action on these insights, you will make better decisions for your customers and the long-term health of your company.

Wrapping It Up

Creating a great voice of customer template is key to understanding customer feedback and making data-driven decisions. By following the tips outlined in this article, you can create a VoC template that will help your business capture the right information from customers and use it to make more informed decisions.

Your VoC template will lead to valuable insights into customer sentiment and preferences, allowing them to better serve their customers and improve their experience.

Lumoa’s call and voice analytics solution helps you automate the process of listening to your customers share what’s important to them. It automatically detects topics, sentiments, and insights so you can analyze calls at scale. Start your free trial today.

The post How to Create a Voice of Customer Template for Your Business appeared first on Lumoa.

This comprehensive guide will take you step-by-step through the essential elements of measuring customer satisfaction. So let’s get started and find out just what it takes to make sure your customers are as satisfied as possible!

The Basics of Customer Satisfaction Measurement

Before you can begin measuring customer satisfaction, it’s important to understand the basics. What exactly is customer satisfaction and why is it important to measure?

What Is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is the degree to which a customer’s needs and expectations have been met. It’s an important factor in measuring the success of any business and can help you identify areas that need improvement. A satisfied customer is more likely to be loyal and purchase more products or services from your business.

Why Is It Important to Measure Customer Satisfaction?

By now, we all know that measuring customer satisfaction is essential for any business. Measuring customer satisfaction will help you better understand customers’ needs and expectations, identify areas that need improvement, and ultimately increase customer loyalty and repeat business.

By measuring customer satisfaction, you can also identify potential problems and take action to prevent them from occurring in the future. In short, measuring customer satisfaction is essential for ensuring your customers are happy and healthy!

Techniques for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Once you understand the basics of measuring customer satisfaction, you can begin exploring different techniques for measuring it.

There are three main approaches when it comes to measuring customer satisfaction: interviews and surveys, focus groups, and online feedback and reviews. Each of these methods has its own pros and cons, so it’s important to consider which method will work best for your business.

Interviews and Surveys

Interviews and surveys are a great way to collect feedback from customers. These methods allow you to ask specific questions that can help you gain insights into customer experiences. You can use interviews or surveys to get an overall picture of customer satisfaction and more detailed information about individual customers.

It’s important to make sure that the questions you ask are clear and relevant so that you can get accurate results.

Conducting interviews and surveys may be good but on the other hand, they do have some drawbacks. One major disadvantage is the time required to conduct interviews or surveys. It can be more time-consuming to gather customer feedback through these methods than it would be with other methods such as focus groups or online reviews/feedback.

Additionally, interviews and surveys are often seen as intrusive by customers, which can make it difficult to get honest and accurate feedback.

Overall, interviews and surveys are a great way to measure customer satisfaction. They allow you to ask specific questions that can help you gain insights into customers’ experiences with your business. While there may be some drawbacks such as the time required for conducting interviews or surveys, they remain an effective method of measuring customer satisfaction.

With proper preparation and execution, this technique will provide valuable feedback on how well your business is meeting its customers’ needs and expectations.

Focus Groups

Focus groups involve gathering a small group of customers together and asking them questions about their experiences with your business. Moreover, having focus groups can provide more detailed insights into customer experiences.

Unlike interviews or surveys, focus groups allow you to have an interactive conversation with customers and get their opinions on various topics. This makes it easier to identify areas of improvement, understand customer needs and expectations, and gain valuable feedback that would not be possible with other measuring techniques.

One disadvantage of having a focus group is that, like interviews and surveys, can be more time consuming and costly than other measuring techniques. Additionally, customers may feel uncomfortable speaking in front of a large group and this could impact the accuracy of feedback collected.

Overall, focus groups are an effective way to measure customer satisfaction and gain valuable insights into customers’ experiences with your business. However, it’s important to keep in mind that focus groups require time, money and preparation before they can be conducted successfully.

With proper planning and execution, measuring customer satisfaction through focus groups will help you understand how well your business is meeting its customers’ needs and expectations so that you can make informed decisions about how best to serve them going forward.

Online Feedback and Reviews

Online feedback and reviews are another great way to measure customer satisfaction. Many businesses use online review platforms such as Yelp or Google My Business, which allow customers to leave detailed reviews of their experiences with your business. These reviews can provide valuable insight into how customers feel about your business, as well as any potential problems they may have encountered.

A study by Bigcommerce shows that the likelihood of a product selling is 270% higher if it has five reviews.

One disadvantage of getting feedback and reviews online on the other hand, is that it does not always provide the most accurate representation of customers’ experiences. Online reviews are often biased and customers may be more likely to leave negative reviews than positive ones. This can make it difficult to get an accurate picture of customer satisfaction, as some customers may post reviews out of spite or even malice.

Additionally, customers may not be willing to provide detailed feedback online, as they may feel uncomfortable disclosing too much personal information.

Nonetheless, online feedback and reviews can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction levels. However, it is important to be aware of potential biases in online reviews and ensure that you are getting an accurate representation of customers’ experiences.

Tips for Maximizing Customer Satisfaction Measurement Effectiveness

One of the most important steps in measuring customer satisfaction is to maximize effectiveness. This means ensuring that the measuring techniques chosen are reliable and accurate, as well as providing customers with an enjoyable measuring experience. Here are some tips for maximizing customer satisfaction measurement effectiveness:

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is an essential part of measuring customer satisfaction. It’s important to understand who you are measuring and what their needs, concerns, and expectations are in order to obtain accurate feedback. It’s also important to consider the customer’s experience when measuring customer satisfaction, as this will affect the accuracy of the data.

Utilize Automation Tools to Streamline the Process

Utilizing automation tools can help streamline the measuring process and make it more efficient. Automation tools such as surveys, chatbots, or customer feedback platforms can be used to quickly collect data from customers in an efficient manner. Additionally, automation tools can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction levels that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

Analyze and Act on Your Data

It’s not enough to simply measure customer satisfaction levels; it’s also important to analyze and act on the data that is collected. This means taking the time to review customer feedback and using it to inform decisions about how to improve customer service or product offerings.

Additionally, measuring customer satisfaction should be an ongoing process that is continually monitored and improved upon over time.

You know what they say: it’s not enough to just hear your customers – you have to listen and act on their feedback too! Closing the loop with customers is essential for measuring customer satisfaction, as it allows you to really understand how they feel about your products or services and make adjustments accordingly.

Make Use of Quality Assurance Strategies

When measuring customer satisfaction, it’s important to make use of quality assurance strategies. This means taking steps to ensure that data is reliable and accurate. For example, double-checking survey responses or making sure the right questions are asked in focus groups can help ensure that the data collected is valid.

Additionally, using a combination of measuring techniques such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews can help provide a more comprehensive view of customer satisfaction levels. Quality assurance strategies ensure that measuring customer satisfaction is an accurate process.

Offer Incentives for Customer Participation

In order to maximize the effectiveness of measuring customer satisfaction, it’s important to offer incentives for participation. Incentives such as coupons or discounts can be used to encourage customers to provide feedback and reviews.

It can also be a good benefit to offer rewards to provide and ensure detailed and more comprehensive feedback data is collected. Let’s also not forget that offering incentives also helps make measuring customer satisfaction an enjoyable experience for customers, which further increases the accuracy of the data.

There are various incentives you can choose to give or do but here are some common examples of an incentive or rewards:

• Freebies
• Money
• Discount coupons or giftcards
• VIP access

Regularly Monitor Your Metrics and Measurement Techniques.

Measuring customer satisfaction is an ongoing process, and it’s important to regularly monitor your metrics and measuring techniques. Keeping track of customer feedback and measuring results can help identify areas where improvement may be needed.

Staying up-to-date with the latest measuring trends can ensure that you are utilizing the most effective measuring techniques for accurate customer feedback collection. By monitoring your measuring techniques and metrics, you can ensure that measuring customer satisfaction is an effective process.

Conclusion

We’re finally on our last part! Just remember this. Measuring customer satisfaction is an important part of any business. It provides valuable insights into how customers are feeling about the products and services they receive, and it can be used to make informed decisions about how to improve customer experience.

Utilizing automation tools, analyzing and acting on data, making use of quality assurance strategies, offering incentives for customer participation, and regularly monitoring measuring techniques are all important steps to take when measuring customer satisfaction.

When done properly, measuring customer satisfaction can be an effective process that helps businesses better understand their customers and make improvements to their products or services.

The post Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Tips and Techniques appeared first on Lumoa.

Companies are finding that innovative technologies can make collecting voice of customer analytics more effortless than ever—and these technologies have opened up exciting new possibilities for improving customer experiences.

In this article, we’ll go over what  Voice of Customer data analytics is and the different types. Plus, look at how to create a VoC strategy from scratch in five simple steps.

What is Voice of Customer Data Analytics?

Voice of Customer Analytics (often abbreviated as VoC) is a process of understanding the needs, motivations, and challenges customers face in their encounters with your business. It allows you to identify gaps in customer satisfaction and take corrective actions.

Collecting feedback from customers gives you powerful data to improve performance, making it one of the most valuable and cost-effective business tools. But you have to do more than listen. You must understand their needs and motivations.

VoC analytics improves products, services, and processes to meet consumer expectations better.

You can apply the data to every part of the customer experience. Think marketing, sales, service, and support.

To use VoC correctly, you need to listen and identify customer needs, then take action and repeat.

For example, a business insurance company can use VoC analytics to determine which industries they should target. They can do this based on the feedback they get in a survey asking email subscribers which one they work in.

You can also use VoC to understand your customers’ pain points, then address them by providing valuable content.

For example, a personal injury law firm could survey current clients to determine which topics they were most confused about, making them seek professional help. Say the most popular answer was, ‘What is the response time to expect when I send a demand letter?’—they could then write an informative blog post or create helpful social media content to attract more potential clients.

Types of Voice of Customer Analytics

The type of Voice of Customer analytics you’ll use depends on your audience and the questions you want to answer.

Getting Started

There’s a variety of survey tools you can take advantage of, like the one we offer at Lumoa.

Lumoa is a customer experience analytics platform that lets you look at customer data in real-time so you can make better decisions for your business. Its automation technology takes the time-consuming manual work out of collecting, analyzing, and implementing VoC data. 

As a result, you can prioritize closing the loop with customers as soon as possible.

If you decide to move forward with Lumoa, the platform also helps you see data from all of your customer feedback channels, whether that is from surveys, phone calls, chat conversions, or online reviews. 

It essentially gives you a bird’s eye view of what your customers are saying about your business which is the most valuable data a company can look at to improve.

Customer Surveys

You need to listen first to gain insights into your customer’s experience.

These one-off surveys provide more comprehensive insights into how customers feel about their experience with a brand.

They tend to be longer than other VoC gathering methods and may require participants to spend more time answering questions. Like “what was your favorite part about using this product?” and “how likely would you recommend this product to someone else?”

For example, take a look at this customer satisfaction survey from Capital Bank:

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They’re asking for more than a simple five-star review and identifying specific areas on which they want to receive feedback—such as how long it took to handle transactions and the usability of the digital banking options.

There’s also a free space for customers to leave their own suggestions at the bottom.

You can collect VoC data through surveys like Capital Bank’s, social media monitoring, customer service interactions, or other qualitative sources.

You can also use quantitative data such as website analytics or app usage patterns. Combining both types of information gives you a complete picture of how your customers feel about your business and its products more than a single method.

For banking and telecommunication companies, customer surveys will likely be your largest pool of customer feedback. Most of the interactions customers have with you are either…

1. On your website or mobile app
2. On the phone with a customer service representative,

This is why surveys that pop up on-screen while a customer is using your product work so well for brands like Capital Bank–it could very well be the only time they interact with the customer after their purchase.

For telecom brands, you can also take this a step further by asking your customer service team to call existing or past customers to conduct surveys for feedback. Record these calls (with the consent of the customer, of course) and review them later to analyze the results and implement the feedback.

Listen to what they say about your products or services and how they talk about their experience with you. Also, pay attention to what they don’t say. For example, negative expressions like “I hate how long it takes for…”.

Then identify the customer needs that are important to them. These could be:

• Functional (i.e., better mobile app)
• Emotional (i.e., friendly staff)
• Status-related (i.e., feeling like VIPs)

Once you’ve identified these needs, prioritize them based on their impact on business outcomes such as sales revenue growth or market share.

Direct Customer Feedback

To gain a deeper understanding of customer needs, you must collect feedback from every touch point in the journey.

Direct feedback is a simple form of VoC that relies on an ongoing conversation between customers and your company.

It can be a suggestion box, an email address or phone number, or even social media channels like Facebook Messenger or Twitter direct messages (DMs).

Establishing a process for collecting feedback is important, then using it as a conduit for continuous improvement. A successful feedback program allows for ongoing conversations about emerging themes and emerging trends. In the same way, be sure to regularly discuss successes, challenges, and lessons with team members.

Always note that feedback is a two-way conversation between you and your customers.

As you start out building your voice of customer analytics program, keep these tips in mind:

• Feedback should be an ongoing dialogue, not a one-time event
• The goal of collecting feedback is to improve products/services/processes continuously

Salesforce is a prime example of customer feedback done right.

Salesforce created IdeaExchange, a forum where they can collect feedback and review suggestions made by their customers.

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Their product development team monitored the forum and reviewed customer suggestions, implementing those that had widespread support, which was demonstrated by the number of votes the entry received.

After taking action on a suggestion, they thanked the original customer who made the entry.

Social Media Analytics

Most social media platforms offer analytics tools to help brands track mentions by geography, sentiment analysis (positive vs. negative), sentiment comparison over time or against competitors, and more.

These tools then help you understand what your followers say online about you.

You can also look at your website analytics. Pay attention to KPIs (key performance indicators) like social shares to figure out which web pages and blog posts your readers engage with the most and bounce rate to pinpoint which needs a better user experience.

Not only will your VoC strategy benefit from these insights, but also your SEO strategy.

Social media is a customer feedback goldmine for retail companies in particular. This is because unlike other industries like banking, your target audience likely already follows their favorite brands on social platforms.

According to DataReportal, 75% of people use social media to research products as of 2022.

Keep a close eye on your tags, mentions, and direct messages—these will be your prime sources for collecting feedback.

Why You Should Use Voice of Customer Analytics

Voice of Customer analytics can help you improve customer experience and make better business decisions by collecting a large amount of data on how customers use products or services.

It helps you understand how customers think, what they want and how to improve products, services, and processes.

It’s especially important as a telecommunications, retail, or banking brand, as you deal heavily with customer service.

The key is to identify trends, patterns, and relationships in your data that lead to actionable insights.

Insights like why customers are buying your product or service by helping you answer the following questions:

• How can I make my product better?
• How can I improve customer experience?
• How do I convert more leads into sales?

Or you could provide exceptional customer service as this company did….

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How to Build a Voice of Customer Strategy and Program

Understand the Problem/Question Before Solving it

One of the most common mistakes people make when they start a Voice of Customer program is assuming they know exactly which problems need solving and how they can be fixed.

Before you begin to solve a problem, it’s important to define what the problem is. Pinpoint the exact problem you hope to solve through VoC data.

You may be tempted to use other organizations’ programs as inspiration or guidance for yours, but don’t feel pressured into copying them wholesale.

Your unique circumstances require unique solutions and methods. One organization might have more resources, another might have different values, and another might have different cultural norms and expectations about how things should be done within their business environment.

As such, you must define what success looks like before you begin building out any part of your program.

Answer the following questions:

• What do you hope to accomplish?
• Which parts of your business/product need the most improvement?
• What do you want customers to start saying about you instead?

A prime example of this is the retail brand Timberland.

Their former Brand President revealed that in the first few years, the brand didn’t have a way for customers to share feedback or provide suggestions. On top of that, they had no real core values or mission statement, resulting in years of failed marketing campaigns.

They broke this cycle by asking for feedback from 18,000 customers. And after reviewing the results, they decided to add a review option on each page as well as a live chat feature.

In the end, these actions made tracking product performance astoundingly easier.

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Gather Data About the Problem/Question

You can gather data to help you understand the problem in various ways, the most common being the three we discussed earlier. Of course, the most direct method is to ask customers directly by conducting surveys and interviews.

You can also use indirect methods, such as analyzing social media conversations about your brand or customer service data (e.g., recording calls). For example, call center representatives who interact with customers may have the opportunity to record their interactions later.

Similarly, you might review customer support calls where the caller couldn’t resolve the issue without assistance from someone else within your organization (such as a supervisor or department head).

Finally, you can review feedback forms that customers fill out online or through physical mailings or email campaigns.

These forms often request specific information about what they liked and disliked about certain products/services you provided and any suggestions they might have for improvement.

If you are running an email campaign, you will need to invest in a good email marketing tool. Narrowing down on the right platform will depend heavily on what type of business you run. For example, Klaviyo is an email marketing service geared towards eCommerce brands. 

However, researching Klaviyo alternatives would make more sense if you run a service-based business.

If possible, it’s helpful if multiple data sources are being used simultaneously so that patterns emerge across different types of sources rather than just one. This helps ensure accuracy while guaranteeing all available information has been collected before moving on to step three, which involves creating hypotheses based on the results.

To summarize: the ways to gather data can be put into two main categories- indirect and direct methods. 

A direct method would be running an email campaign that asks for feedback from customers and an indirect method would be using data from company experience (such as social media conversions or customer service data).

Synthesize Voice of Customer Feedback Through Analytics and Insights

Analyze that data for insights regarding what, why, and how customers are experiencing your product or service in today’s marketplace.

Analytics and insights are the foundation of a successful VoC program. Analytics provide the raw data that shape the customer experience, while insights help you understand what is driving your customers’ behavior.

The first step in this process is to identify what metrics you should use to measure how your business is doing. You should then track these metrics and analyze them to identify trends that support or refute hypotheses about what drives customer satisfaction.

For example, if you hypothesize that better product design leads to higher customer satisfaction with your products, tracking and analyzing performance across multiple dimensions will help you find evidence for or against this hypothesis.

You may discover that improving one aspect of product design doesn’t lead customers to rate it more highly overall but does lead them to recommend purchasing it more often than other similar products on the market—which would be an indication that improving one dimension of product design could improve overall brand loyalty (and therefore profitability).

Create an Action Plan Based on Insights to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Next comes creating actionable insights from those analytics by asking “why” questions until there’s nothing left but answers. Which in turn, can be used directly as guides for decision-making within your organization:

• Why do our salespeople have trouble reaching their quotas?
• Why are certain features not being used?
• Why do only 20% of our customers respond positively when asked about our social media presence?

As you can identify and understand your customers’ key issues, concerns, and frustrations, you can begin to form strategies for how to solve them.

For example, suppose you were to learn that a common difficulty for your customers is finding information about how your company works.

In that case, it may be useful to create better internal communication tools or handouts that explain how you operate.

If many people mention the price of your products being too high or low quality compared with competitors’, then perhaps there’s an opportunity to improve both factors.

Letting this all sink in while drafting an action plan will help ensure that when you’re ready to start implementing changes based on what you’ve learned from VoC research, it will be as effective as possible, and more importantly, will lead to an increase in profits.

Share your action plan with the participating customers

To close the loop with your customers, regularly share findings from VoC analysis with them. They need to know that you value their feedback and are actively working to improve their experience.

Plus, it allows them to reflect on their own needs, values, and expectations by prompting questions like:

• What were their expectations when they first started using a product or service?
• How did those expectations match up against reality?
• What did they learn along the way that might help them in the future?

Conclusion

Voice of Customer data will make a powerful addition to your arsenal. There are many ways to get started with it, regardless of the business you run or the industry you work in. With this knowledge, you can make better decisions about what customers want and where your product needs improvement.

The post Voice of Customer Data Analytics: What, Why, and How to Do It appeared first on Lumoa.

Here’s the reality, gathering online feedback is not as easy as it may seem. In a perfect world maybe, but chances are, that user has already left the chat, closed the tab, or deleted the SMS sent asking for feedback that the user may receive. It is relatively easy to create a survey but convincing your audience to take more time to click through that feedback form can be tedious. Let alone knowing where it will drive value and engage your audience till the end.

So how do you do it? What can you do to trigger a response from your target audience without making them feel that they are forced to answer and still get valuable and actionable results?

To analyze and bring answers to how to collect feedback that drives powerful results, we interviewed Christian Lelo de Larrea Gaudiano, Customer Engagement Manager of giosg, to tell us about their practices. A partner of Lumoa, Giosg is a software solutions company that combines data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) with feature-rich technology, delivering intuitive, automated solutions that help organizations to become more effective.

Where should feedback be collected on the website in a non-intrusive way?

Not all website users are there for the same reason and because of this, it is important to define the goals to help you understand which customer journey to target. This way, certain feedback requests will be shown to the right user at the right time in a non-intrusive way.

For example, if the goal is to improve the service (or the chat service), then a good place to add the feedback request is in your chat and not during the checkout process as this is a different part of the customer’s journey. In many instances, getting feedback might imply that the user should go through the whole customer journey to be able to give valuable feedback, but this isn’t always the case. If the goal is to improve or identify bottlenecks, then these can be found anywhere in the customer journey. Knowing what kind of form will show at the right time and the right place will not only make the trigger more effective but will also save time in categorizing the data that is being collected.

What is the best way to do it?

Links to surveys can work in feedback collection but based on our experience, we found out that the best way to do it is to show a pop-up to the right user at the right time. Pop-up surveys have become the tool of choice nowadays for getting user feedback and these widgets we see on a website page are a special form of feedback surveys. It can “pop up” depending on which customer journey you want it to show.

From the previous example, with the same goal of wanting to improve service or the overall experience with the chat, a pop-up trigger will be activated at the end of the chat. Additionally, a good option is when operators add a “feedback process” where they ask the user to provide feedback at the end of the chat.

Meanwhile, using a link to a survey is a reactive method for users to provide feedback. We also noticed that triggering the feedback form automatically as part of the customer journey is left unanswered more often. With our service improvement example, the pop-up will trigger after the user closes the chat window.

While both methods can be used accordingly, the only way to know what will work is through testing. A/B test, try a link, or use a different method to show the feedback form aligned with your goals and which part of the customer journey you want to focus on. Furthermore, be open to changes that will give signs of whether your method is working. Make tweaks along the way and do another test to be sure. In the end, all this data will show you the most optimal place, time, and method that works best.

What type of questions should be asked?

Before we dive into this, take note of the following questions:

1. What is the goal?
2. What are we trying to improve?
3. Are we ready to take action based on the results of the data?

Once these are taken into consideration, we can now move forward with the feedback questions. There are 3 things we can measure within the different areas of a customer journey, and these are:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) – This tells us how satisfied or unsatisfied customers are with the product, service, etc.
• Customer Effort Score (CES) – This is about the ease of their experience
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – One kind of a Likert scale where we ask how likely you would recommend this to a friend or colleague.

Going back to our live chat improvement example, we can therefore ask:

1. Was the agent helpful?
2. Was the inquiry solved?
3. Did we exceed their expectations?
4. Any additional comments about the chat?

Note that keeping the feedback form short and straightforward will keep your audience’s interest in answering it. Furthermore, the data will yield more logical and powerful results that will help your company consider the actions needed to be taken later on.

What is the difference between feedback about the website and feedback about the product/service?

Remember that the main idea with the feedback is to align the goals/s with the customer’s journey. So, it is important to ask for feedback at the correct phase of a particular journey. Having a defined goal will help in understanding the purpose of the feedback.

Two key points that will help in analyzing which feedback is for:

1. If it’s about the website, it’s about the user experience (UX); the ease of their experience, was the user able to find what they’re looking for? How smooth was the overall process? Etc.
2. If it’s about the tangible or intangible product, questions such as their satisfaction level of the product, and in-depth questions like, was it what they needed? Was the service helpful? etc. that focuses more on the major topic of question or interest by the user.

How is the feedback used to drive powerful results?

During your planning stage where goals are defined, you need to take into consideration the benefits it will provide the other departments. It is wise to include them in the project to not only deliver powerful results but also to empower everyone’s opinion. This way, you can combine what is specifically needed to collect, and ensure actions are delivered for the improvement in different departments whenever necessary.

The purpose of getting the opinion of the users on your website is to better understand, connect, and communicate with them more humanly. By doing so, you’re giving the user the power to be involved in change management and feel that they are an important part of the company’s growth.

Keep in mind that before anything else, specific goals should be defined during the planning stage to keep track of what you need to do. There is no one-size-fits-all formula to get powerful results, so testing the feedback, trying different methods, and placing it at the right time and place while making necessary changes along the way will enhance the effectiveness and the results of the collected data.

Finally, it is important to keep the feedback short and simple while also considering the other departments in defining the right goals for feedback collection. Once the goals are defined, it is easier to trigger the feedback pop-up at the right time of the customer’s journey, so that it will engage users to answer and drive a powerful result that is measurable and actionable.

The post Collect feedback that drives powerful results – Interview with Christian Lelo de Larrea Gaudiano appeared first on Lumoa.

I mean, we get it. In order to maintain customer loyalty, businesses must engage customers until the very end and treat every customer journey equally. Nowadays, many businesses apply voice-of-customer programs to their operations and treat them as valuable sources of information since it shows that they value what customers have to say.

Furthermore, this makes it easier to close the loop with customers in the process. Many believe (and it makes sense) that customer experience can be any business’s unique value proposition against competitors. On the other hand, you need to consider that you’re not alone in wanting to have a positive customer experience.

Recently, I read a blog by Ron Miller (author at TechCrunch and former corporate blogger for Intronis) entitled “I’m so over customer surveys“. He talks about his annoyance with endless survey requests regarding company products and services.

In Miller’s view, a customer feedback survey is intended to enhance the customer experience, but in reality it compromises the customer experience itself. What makes it more difficult is the lack of understanding of how to take customer feedback.

Businesses sometimes don’t seem to be able to succeed with these kinds of initiatives. They didn’t realize that the business’ integrity was also being compromised as well as the customer experience. The question is, what can a business do to turn things around?

We already know voice-of-customer is important, but without further knowledge of how to use and analyze it, this can either make or break its effectiveness.

Here are three reasons why, and how you can prevent it.

Undefined goals that lead to nowhere

Are you asking the right questions? Many businesses are seeking answers. Knowing what makes your customers like or dislike your products/services is a game-changer. The problem is that some businesses tend to just start taking initiatives without prior knowledge of what they want to achieve in the first place.

Without a defined goal or objective, there will be no clear solutions. Before anything else, it is important to know what key performance indicators you plan to measure. This will give the data recording a logical result and will make the rest of the processing significantly easier.

Survey fatigue will often occur

Yes, there is a thing called survey fatigue and it is more common than you think. There are two kinds, survey response fatigue, and survey-taking fatigue.

In a survey response fatigue situation, a customer is asked for feedback, but because anyone can only do so much, at some point, motivation for anyone to participate (even employees) will drop and a ripple effect occurs.

Survey-taking fatigue, on the other hand, happens when customers leave halfway through the survey process, or when surveys are too long, the user starts to lose interest in answering properly which results in surveys getting poor and inaccurate results.

Email spamming or even popping surveys on a page every time a user interacts with something is not a way to solve it and will trigger survey fatigue. One way to avoid this happening to customers or even employees is to properly time when and where this should be delivered. Set it up so surveys are done regularly (not daily).

Remember! There are ways in which a business can adopt a style of sending out non-intrusive survey requests, using tools that can integrate rules when delivering requests (e.g. follow-up survey after 6 months).

Untailored customer journey mapping

Creating a good customer experience also means meeting the goals at every stage of the customer journey. Otherwise, a customer will just feel lost.

Miller’s blog makes a very valid point, but unfortunately, this is happening in the opposite direction. Asking customer feedback every step of the way for every stage of a customer journey is not how a business should be doing it. This will only cause survey fatigue.

The intent gets clouded when you suddenly notice the same questions are being asked every time you engage in an interaction. This makes you think, does this company care what you tell them?

Map the journey. This is one way to make sure that your business has a customer-centric mindset. Align your operational data with journey maps to discover opportunities and perhaps see through what is not working.

Often, businesses give consumers the opportunity to tell what they think without filling up a survey through product reviews and or ratings. This is where the public can openly share their experiences.

Businesses should be able to analyze and assign this information at a certain stage of the journey. By doing so, it will avoid asking customers questions that have already been answered. Another option to make this simpler for everybody is to ask one open-ended question. Open-ended feedback has an increased chance of an authentic response. This is because respondents freely state memorable events during their interaction with a business.

When a business says “we value your thoughts”, I would like to assume that they mean what they say because otherwise, what is the point of all this?

Customer feedback, when requested, should, in my opinion, be used for both the consumer and the company’s benefit. This is because I believe there is always room for improvement when it comes to creating a positive customer experience.

The post What is survey fatigue and how can you prevent it? appeared first on Lumoa.

As a CX leader, it’s possible to feel a little demotivated by that.

You might get feedback from your team about their perception of not being taken seriously across your organization. Maybe they don’t get included in product decisions or informed when new marketing campaigns are run. They might feel frustrated and unhappy because they see huge opportunities for your company that isn’t being capitalized on.

The only way to change this is by tackling it head-on. You need to learn (and teach) how to sell customer experience to your whole organization. While this isn’t something you can achieve completely by yourself, you can do a lot to influence the perception of CX throughout your company.

You can become a driver of change.

Increasing the standing of the CX team across the company is also the best way to increase investment in your team. The more your company invests in CX systems and teams, the more you’ll feel the positive impact on your customers (and your business metrics).

The research on customer experience value speaks for itself: 

• Research from Dimension Data reports that 84% of companies who invest in customer experience report seeing an increase in revenue and 92% of them see an increase in customer loyalty. 
• Forrester found that CX leaders outperform laggards both on stock price growth and total return, and that has been even more valid in the past two challenging years.

In your quest to achieve those types of goals, it might be a great first step to start asking some questions regularly in your team meetings. For example:

• What do we do to promote the customer experience?
• How do we talk about the value of what we do?
• When is the right time to raise a specific CX issue and how?

And while this is a great place to start, mastering how to sell customer experience is not a trivial task.

Why selling customer experience is challenging

There are a few common challenges when trying to make customer experience value visible across your company:

1. Lack of good data
2. Contact rate
3. Competing priorities

Each of these challenges makes it harder for you to prove the ROI of customer experience and to sell other leaders on the importance of investing in CX.

Lack of good data

Many customer experience and customer insights teams suffer from a lack of good data.

Categorizing, analyzing, and quantifying different parts of the customer experience can be very time-consuming. Every CX team needs to figure out a reliable way to collect data before they can start providing meaningful insights to the company.

Messy and unreliable data makes it more complicated for you and your team to find how to sell customer experience. But fortunately, this is a relatively small hurdle to overcome. It’s often best to start with what you have—even if it’s not perfect—and begin building momentum. Over time, you can work to make that data more comprehensive and trustworthy.

Contact rate

Many people assume that customer experience refers to support tickets. That’s a limited view because your customers have many different touchpoints with your product and brand over time.

Support interactions are an important part of the customer experience you’re creating, but making them the main thing can hurt you. It creates one main challenge: Are the insights you gain from tickets representative of your customer base?

Only a very small proportion of your overall customers likely end up contacting you in a given month or quarter.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t use those insights or that they aren’t valuable. You just need to address this barrier proactively. You can either use data that shows these insights are representative or include other sources of feedback in your CX program to paint a fuller picture of your customer experience across different stages of the customer journey.

Competing strategic priorities

Let’s say you’ve managed to handle the other two challenges. You have some data and you can back it up well enough that it’s validated and taken seriously by other leaders in your organization.

Translating that data into meaningful action is your last and biggest hurdle.

Every company has a huge list of competing priorities. In the famous words of Steve Jobs, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”

Every strategic decision comes down to deciding to focus on one thing over another. It’s on you to make the case that customer experience is one of the things that need to be prioritized.

How do you establish that customer experience brings a great return on investment? How can you even measure the impact of CX?

How to sell customer experience across your organization

There are three big things you can do to promote the customer experience across your company:

1. Measure the impact that CX has on financial or business metrics
2. Proactively advocate for CX across the company
3. Develop the CX team so that you can represent the voice of the customer

Measuring the impact of CX

It’s okay to start selling CX with generic stats about how valuable customer experience can be across industries. You can make a general case about how a great customer experience drives sales and loyalty. This will translate to financial and business metrics, which is the bottom-line impact you’re looking to have.

Moving from generic to company-specific arguments is much more powerful. 

That may sound like a huge and intimidating project. That’s why starting small is the best way to begin. This is much easier to do when you already have some buy-in. You can build a case for CX for your CEO first to justify an initial investment, then branch out from there. 

Another great approach is to prioritize projects within your team that will have the biggest impact on the company’s success. If your product is business-critical for some of your customers, maybe great incident detection and response is how the CX team contributes the most. If you run a B2B subscription model, maybe relationship-building and customer success are what you should focus on.

It’s easier to measure the impact of projects when you’re specific about what you’re prioritizing. Pick one area and make a change to the customer experience. Compare key metrics before and after the change to understand the impact. If possible, try segmenting your customer base and running A/B tests simultaneously to see the impact in real-time. 

Quantifying the business value and ROI of customer experience is tough, but it’s the foundation for mastering how to sell customer experience.

Advocating internally for the CX team

It’s easy to underestimate how much of an impact internal advocacy can have on changing the reputation of customer experience across your company. CX teams are often taken for granted and not given the attention of teams like Product or Sales.

As a CX leader, it’s your responsibility to figure out what to do to promote the customer experience and set the tone for how CX achievements and feedback are perceived across the company.

You can influence this in numerous ways:

1. Build relationships with leaders across your organization. Do you have a good understanding of how CX impacts Sales and Marketing? Does your Product team listen to your feedback? Do you understand other teams’ priorities and strategic goals? CX impacts every area of your company, which means you have a great opportunity to collaborate across the board.
2. Communicate your wins as a CX team. Find ways to track specific positive feedback from your customers. Are there situations where your team successfully retained a customer after a bad product experience? String together enough of these examples and you can make a much stronger case for customer experience value. 
3. Encourage others to shadow the CX team. Look for opportunities to enable senior management, QA testers, developers, and others to interact directly with customers. It’s easy for teams—especially senior leadership—to become separated from your customers. Every time you can draw them closer to your customers you’re building momentum for CX initiatives.

Internal advocacy is worth investing energy into across all parts of your organization. It’s tempting to get stuck on the leadership level. Get buy-in from the top and it will translate to results, right? 

Focusing your attention on one or two teams is great as a starting point, but customer insights can be valuable across all teams. Every team will need something slightly different from you, but tailoring your communication and data to each audience will make it far more impactful.

Representing the voice of the customer

Voice of the Customer (or VoC) is a methodology used to understand how your customers feel about and experience your business.

You can use every piece of feedback and interaction you have with a customer to build this understanding. The goal behind running a VoC program is to enable everyone across the company to know what your customers need and want.

The CX team is often uniquely positioned to collect and share this information. If you’re looking to master how to sell customer experience, getting your CX team involved in building a robust Voice of the Customer program is a great way to get started.

The outcome of our VoC program should be clear analytics and reports describing your customer experience. It will arm you with specific and actionable insights whenever someone in your organization needs them.

Your VoC program should also include regular opportunities to update your company on CX initiatives. How did your latest marketing effort or product change impact your customers? How is your price increase being received? 

Customer experience value lies in your ability to digest data and translate it into meaningful insights to share with other parts of your organization. 

Is The Organisation Sold on CX yet?

After all the effort you have done to learn (and to teach your team) how to sell customer experience across your organization, a final question is legit: how do you know if you’re being successful and all departments truly understand the value of CX? 

This is something you can probably figure out in the long term, but there are some early signs you should look out for. Those are:

• People across your organization proactively ask the CX team for input and feedback.
• More money and company investments are directed toward customer experience.
• Customer metrics and business KPIs, like customer loyalty and churn, see hand-in-hand improvements.

Remember that changing perception across an organization takes time and mastering how to sell customer experience is no trivial feat. And at the end of the day, the more people you get on your side and the more things they will do to promote the customer experience, the more empowered your CX team will be to help your company succeed.

The post How to Sell Customer Experience to Your Organisation appeared first on Lumoa.

According to our State of the Shopping Apps Report for 2022, technical variables have a huge impact on customer satisfaction levels – but the list of factors that users take into account doesn’t stop there. 

Our State of the Shopping Apps Report for 2022 breaks down the customer satisfaction performance of the top shopping apps in the Google Play Store as well as the Apple App Store. In addition to the overall performance analysis, we also detail the specific variables that have the biggest influence on customer satisfaction across three statistical categories.

What’s Inside Our State of the Shopping Apps Report

The digital revolution has brought a myriad of changes to the retail industry, including the birth of online shopping. While effective feedback collection mechanisms have been in place for some time, retailers of all sizes still encounter difficulties when analyzing this data. In many cases, this is due to the format of the feedback or the sheer volume of reviews that need to be assessed individually. 

Through our ecommerce apps ebook, we aim to establish a connection between factors that impact the customer experience and the influence that these variables have on satisfaction levels. 

However, we’re also tackling one of the industry’s biggest challenges to date: transforming tens of thousands of customer reviews into actionable data that can be used to make business decisions.

Our shopping apps performance report includes.

• An explanation as to why users have a better experience on Android mobile shopping apps than on iOS platforms.
• How usability elements and technical variables influence the shopping experience.
• What factors separate leading shopping apps from bottom performers.
• The different elements that are essential to a good mobile shopping experience.
• Insights about the top performing shopping app categories (spoiler: beauty and grocery apps).
• Textual examples of customer reviews that illustrate their pain points.
• Non-app related variables that impact customer experience.

The Impact of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

All ecommerce companies want customers that purchase products on a regular basis, are loyal to the brand, and share their experiences with their inner circles.

Ensuring high customer satisfaction levels can help you achieve these goals and place your retail business on a growth trajectory. Here are some of the benefits that, according to PWC, are associated with high customer satisfaction levels.

A Higher Price Premium

Customers are willing to pay up to a 16% price premium across all industries when subjected to a great experience, and this statistic doesn’t factor in higher loyalty rates. Loyal customers can result in more referral sales and a higher loyalty program subscription rate.

More Recurring Customers

Generating sales from existing customers is more affordable than attracting new clients. A great customer experience means that customers are more open to trying additional products and services from your brand. This is because consumers evaluate a company’s overall quality, in large part, from its customer service.

Better Resource Allocation

It’s estimated that 3 out of 5 consumers in the US are willing to share personal data with companies that make them feel valued. This data can be used to create detailed marketing campaigns and to allocate resources to the more profitable channels.

Download the 2022 State of the Shopping Apps Report

Do you want to learn the true impact of customer reviews and understand the elements that impact client satisfaction levels? Download our State of the Shopping Apps Report for 2022 today.

The post The State of the Shopping Apps Report for 2022 appeared first on Lumoa.

Nevertheless, learning how to use customer feedback to drive action poses a significant challenge, especially for organizations that leverage multiple channels to collect mass feedback.

At Lumoa, our goal is to look at customer feedback to tell companies what to do next to grow their organizations. In one of our latest webinars titled How to Use Customer Feedback to Drive Action, we pose a sustainable strategy to solve the challenge of transforming mass reviews into information that can be used while making key company decisions.

This webinar was organized in partnership with customer experience pundit and CXMania founder Matthieu Bonelli, so we’ll be including some of Matthieu’s most valuable insights in the form of quotes edited specifically for this piece.

Three Key Elements to Effective Customer Feedback Collection

It’s difficult to analyze feedback without a strategy, so the first thing that companies need to do is develop an assessment process that starts with effective customer feedback collection.

According to Matthieu Bonelli, the feedback collection process should be developed using three key concepts.

Focus on Sentiment Rather than Quantitative Ratings

“There’s no need to ask 50 questions and there’s no need for all of these to be quantitative. You know, asking customers to rate satisfaction on a scale from one through five,” says Matthieu.

“What is important is to use sentiment analysis in order to determine what customers have to say about the experience they just had. The goal is for them to show you the pain points they are experiencing right now, that they may not share later.”

Time Your Questions Properly

According to Mattieu, “it’s also important to ask the right questions at the right time and to have everything as open and unbiased as possible. We’re performing sentiment analysis and that means a lot of qualitative feedback.”

In other words, time your survey questions right in order to get feedback about a specific topic. Customers should have the ability to provide feedback after every key interaction so that they can express opinions about their individual experiences, rather than a general rating that holds less value.

Develop an Effective Analysis Process

“There will be a lot of comments coming into the system so you don’t want to have a free-response survey with ten thousand replies in an Excel sheet. You need to time questions properly and have a tool that allows you to categorize the feedback in order to perform a quick analysis,” says Matthieu.

The idea here is to find a mechanism that allows you to accurately parse and understand qualitative or free-response questions on a large scale. Manual reviews are not a sustainable strategy, even for large corporations. So, it’s necessary to look at your resources and the tools you have available to develop a tailored system to manage online reviews and understand the feedback you collect.

How to Use Customer Feedback to Drive Action

Once you’ve created a plan to collect and assess customer feedback properly, it’s time to transform this data into actionable information.

In short, Mattieu’s process is designed to drive action through feedback by understanding feedback, prioritizing the biggest pain points, and sharing the steps that need to take place with the team.

1. Get the Full Picture

“Customers will tell us what is important to them in their own words. The analysis tool should categorize the comments and help us understand what reviewers are saying in a more general sense. At this point, you can have positive as well as negative sentiments because users will want to speak their minds whenever they get a chance to be heard,” says Mattieu.

Matthieu continues by adding that “you need to figure out what feedback you want to hear first. This will reveal what you’ve done as well as the steps you should take to further focus on satisfaction and give customer importance throughout the entire journey.”

Implement Tools that Accurately Categorize Sentiment

Having a powerful feedback analysis tool is the only way to categorize sentiment property when assessing a large number of reviews. “This allows you to link what’s important to consumers and what they are satisfied with. We mentioned these two elements before, satisfaction and importance, so it’s crucial to guarantee both at every touchpoint,” continues Matthieu.

Consider Different Touchpoints

It’s necessary to gather reviews from all the touchpoints because it gives users the ability to rate experiences individually. Besides learning how users feel at each touchpoint, it also helps customers stay unbiased when evaluating each experience.

“When you send a survey to consumers you’re giving them the ability to speak. If they haven’t had another opportunity, they will take this chance and tell you about everything. This is why it’s very important to collect feedback from all the touchpoints. If you check in at different stages, you can create a voice of customer map that tells you how users feel at every touchpoint and use these as queues to figure out what areas need work.”

2. Find Out the Root Cause of the Problem

Collecting and categorizing feedback is a great step, but according to Matthieu, this is just the beginning.

“You need to go deeper because this will allow you to get to the root cause of the problems. The good news is that we are in 2022 so you don’t need to read every review to find out what’s wrong. Thanks to tools like Lumoa, you already have categories and filtering options as well as other features to help you,” continues Matthieu.

Here are a few steps that can help you zero in on the root cause of the negative feedback.

Remove Biases and Avoid Making Assumptions

“I ask clients ‘what do you think are the three main pain points you have within your company?’ you know, the pain points that customers are most vocal about?” says Matthieu.

“A lot of times I get answers like delivery times. But, after assessing the feedback, shipping is what customers are most satisfied with because they have the expectation that ecommerce takes a few days. We need to remove biased logic and take the picture for what it really is.”

Leverage the Most Valuable Feedback

“When the customer completes the buyer’s journey, we go from getting payments, to seeing a list of customer pain points and reading ensuing comments. This part, reading the comments, is key to everything we’re trying to do, in my opinion. By analyzing the most valuable feedback, you’ll motivate your team and connect the negative sentiments with the appropriate factors,” says Matthieu.

3. Prioritize the Most Important Obstacles

“If you do a great job collecting feedback, you may end up with 40 or 50 pain points. How do you prioritize these? That’s the goal after all,” says Matthieu.

Assess the Impact of Each Blocker and Create a List of Priorities

“The objective is to get specific actions from the entire customer experience. If a pain point is so big that it will break the user experience, it needs to be addressed. If it’s annoying, it needs to be worked on, but it can be prioritized later on after the major problems have been addressed.”

“In order to assess the impact of each negative variable, you should create a rating scheme. The simplest is the following: if a negative factor is big enough to break the experience and result in a lost customer, it needs to be prioritized right away. No questions asked,” continues Matthieu.

“More basic issues that hinder the experience, but are not big enough to completely disrupt the purchase process, are second priorities. For example, if you notice that customers complain about a slow payment page, but continue to purchase from you, it’s an issue you need to address but it doesn’t necessarily have to be right now. And that‘s how the prioritization process works.”

4. Share the Message with Your Team

“After completing the work, the last step is to tell the story to your team. In one project, we presented the analysis from customer feedback in a group meeting called international meeting day. It was basically designed for us to share specific pain points and show data around them,” says Matthieu.

Set the Right Goals and Expectations

According to Matthieu, “it’s fundamental for companies to set goals and expectations because these serve as a basic premise for their teams. As a business, it’s important for employees to know the areas that they should exceed in because it simply sets the right tone.”

Remember, to set the right expectations, you need to coordinate with other decision-makers and department heads and agree on the essential elements that will help you achieve success. Only then you’ll be able to set the right set of objectives for your team.

Create Best Practices

Creating best practices is essential and this process may be easier to assimilate if your team is involved in the development of these habits.

“During one of our meetings we showed the map highlighting the pain points and comments illustrating them. Most of the time there was no movement while feedback flashed. Until we got an email from an annoyed customer saying that some products were not available although they appeared in stock at the time of purchase. It said something like ‘in 2019 this is a rather poor and disappointing ecommerce experience, our issue is real amateur’ and a huge silence followed after I finished reading,” says Matthieu.

“The CEO was in attendance and he put his head up saying ‘I don’t care how long it takes, we have to drop everything and fix this’ and so next morning I had emails from team members asking for the responsibility or to get a project started to collaborate.”

Want to Drive Action Using Your Customer Feedback?

Transforming customer feedback into actionable steps requires an organized approach that allows you to get a full picture, find the root of the problem, identify key obstacles, and get your whole team on board.

We hope that the tips provided by Matthieu during our webinar help you on your quest to create a more effective system for using feedback to drive action.

If you want to learn more about implementing Lumoa as part of this mechanism, get in touch with us today and we’ll be glad to help.

The post How to Use Customer Feedback to Drive Action appeared first on Lumoa.

If this process isn’t tailored to your company, you’ll set inaccurate survey response rate benchmarks and compromise all future evaluations. To avoid this, you need to understand how these benchmarks work, research average survey response rates in your industry, and create an organized strategy.

In this article, we’ll define internal and external benchmarks. We’ll also share the areas of your CEM system you can record and provide general steps to help you benchmark your performance.

What Is Your Survey Response Benchmark?

In order to fully grasp this process, it’s important to understand the definitions of survey response rate and benchmarking separately.

Survey response rates refer to the percentage of customers that reply to your surveys versus the number of potential respondents. This statistic includes positive as well as negative interactions and creates an average rate that’s expressed as a percentage.

Benchmarking, in the general sense, is the process of documenting a company’s performance during any given period with the goal of comparing it to another period, often in the future. The concept of benchmarking can be as broad or as granular as required. This means that it can be applied to specific process flow or entire departments alike. 

As you may have deduced already, the survey response rate benchmarking process consists of documenting the performance of your CEM system. The idea is to record your current performance and the processes in place. Then, make improvements and assess the impact of these adjustments by measuring the future performance against the prior benchmark. 

While benchmarking can be applied to a wide range of activities, this process can either be categorized as internal or external.

Internal benchmarks

The internal benchmarking process allows you to see how your current performance measures up to the past as well as future production of your own company. This can help you determine how much your company has grown over specific periods of time.

Keep in mind that this process measures the same statistics as its external counterpart. The difference is that, as long as your benchmarking process is sound, the results you get should be exact. The reason for this is that you have all your performance metrics readily available, which allows you to perform specific calculations.

External Benchmarks

The main challenge with external benchmarks is that you need to collect data from the main competitors in your industry. 

Since most enterprises don’t disclose detailed reports on their internal statistics, collecting external data is often challenging. For this reason, the values collected need to be treated as estimates rather than concrete statistics. 

Nevertheless, the external benchmarking process provides insights and holds immense value, whether it’s performed by growing businesses or established enterprises.

Types of Customer Service and Experience Surveys

Creating an effective CEM system is crucial, but the first step is collecting enough survey responses to create a benchmark.

A corporate marketing and research teams have spent decades collecting information from consumers via surveys. 

However, customer experience surveys have evolved a lot since their verbal and print forms, which means that companies can now leverage a wide range of techniques to collect data. Here are the main types of customer service and experience surveys that you can benchmark.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score surveys first emerged in 2003 and they are a simple, yet effective way to assess your customers’ collective sentiment. It consists of asking customers one question: how likely are you to recommend this product/service to a peer or colleague?

NPS surveys can also include optional questions for customers to answer after providing the first response. If you want to know the typical survey response rate for NPS surveys for your type of company, industry-specific reports are always a great place to start.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

 Perhaps the most common type of survey in the customer service industry, CSAT evaluations ask customers to rate their satisfaction on a 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 scale, with the highest value meaning completely satisfied. 

Benchmarking CSAT surveys is simple, unless you switch your rating scale. In this case, you may have to adjust the previous values to maintain the data’s integrity.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer effort score or CES evaluations attempt to measure how much effort customers had to go through to complete a specific action. It’s usually used to measure the performance of customer service or customer success teams. That said, it can also be used for complex conversion flows and similar instances. 

As with CSAT, CES surveys can be difficult to benchmark if you change the questions being asked, so make sure to account for this discrepancy when creating your benchmarking process.

Visual rating

Visual rating surveys are another type of evaluation that can be recorded but can also change over time. If your CEM system employs this time of feedback collection, verify that it has remained standard or create a method to standardize feedback across all formats.

Custom or Free-Response Format

Custom or free-response formats ask customers open-ended questions. However, the unique process of learning how to create customer surveys and their unstandardized nature make them difficult to track. In these cases, you may need to leverage a next-generation customer insights platform that provides actionable data, like Lumoa. 

Note that free-response surveys include a wide range of evaluations, including:

• Product or service development 
• Post-purchase or point-of-conversion
• Usability questionnaires

If you want to learn more about customer experience metrics and KPIs, check out this article: 6 Most Popular Customer Experience Metrics and KPIs Explained Simply.

Customer Survey Response Benchmark Estimations

If you’re setting survey response benchmarks for your different customer survey channels, you’ll probably see a huge discrepancy between the values of each channel. 

Our observations show that the average response rate across all channels and industries stands between 17% and 20%.

However, remember that different target audiences have distinct behavioral patterns. This means that you have to set a benchmark for each channel and industry.

Survey Response Benchmarks for different types of surveys

Remember, the values above are estimates based on our internal and external research. This data may be used as general benchmark values, but you can also conduct industry-specific research to get more accurate results for your organization.

How to Set Your CEM Survey Response Benchmarks

Every organization is different, so there is no “one-size-fits-all” method to set benchmarks for your company. 

You’ll need to determine which feedback collection channels you currently have open, ensure that you have enough data available on each one, and create a plan to set individual benchmarks. You should also develop a method to grade the performance of your entire CEM system through a single metric that’s tailored specifically to your company. 

If you’re asking yourself “how many survey responses do I need?” the answer is not that simple. 

You’ll have to take context into consideration to ensure that you have a statistically-valid survey response rate. For example, call centers that receive thousands of daily interactions will need to collect more data than facilities that handle a much smaller volume. 

You can read our article on how to calculate sample size to determine how many interactions you’ll need. 

With the above in mind, here are general steps you can adapt and follow to benchmark your CEM system. 

Record Your Current Flows and Processes

Many organizations opt for simple benchmarking, where only the performance data is assessed. Instead, you should also document the flows and processes you currently have in place. This includes all documented flows as well as steps that individual agents take to cater to their different clients. This data will help you figure out the impact of the adjustments you implement.

Collect Analytical Data

Once you have described all processes in detail, you can turn your attention to the analytical data. Try to be as granular as possible in order to have a comprehensive view of your CEM system and don’t be afraid to include the exact ratings for each question in every survey format.

If you are performing an external benchmark, you also need to detail your main competitors’ performance. As we mentioned before, limited access to competitor data makes it difficult to have exact values. 

To overcome this challenge, most companies compile as much external data as possible and create a set of metrics that represent the entire competition. 

Ensure that You Have Comprehensive Performance Data Available

Whether you’re performing internal or external benchmarking, you need to have enough information about your company for the process to be successful. 

However, it’s impossible to get a comprehensive view of your performance if you’re not tracking the right metrics. 

Besides the number of interactions and potential interactions, you should also document additional details for each channel. For example, if you’re running surveys via email, you should also benchmark metrics like the:

• Amount of time receivers spent without opening an email
• Email click-through rates
• Number of monthly subscribers

Document Your Benchmarks

Now, it’s finally time to start documenting your benchmarks. You should avoid making major changes right before you start benchmarking because they may sway the data. The best alternative in these cases is to measure your current performance and use the benchmarking process to assess how the changes impact your performance. 

Benchmarking databases look different in every company. With this in mind, most firms and organizations condense them into reports that are easier to digest by executives. 

Organizations that are creating external benchmarks also need to document competitor/industry performance metrics and ensure that this data is included in the reports as well. 

Implement Changes and Collect New Performance Data

The last step is to make adjustments based on the benchmarks you already have. You should use these statistics to identify areas of improvement, determine what changes may have a positive effect, and implement these adjustments.

Additionally, you should also create a benchmark and evaluation schedule where you record your current performance and go through the process again. 

Looking to Improve Your CEM System? Leverage the Data Collected with Lumoa

Improving your CEM system is an ongoing process and having an accurate benchmarking mechanism will help ensure that you stay on the right track. The general tips above can help ensure that you benchmark the right types of surveys and zero in on metrics that provide actionable insights.

If you want to learn more about Lumoa and how it can help you assess the data you collect through all of your surveys, contact us today or start a free trial.

The post Average Survey Response Rate You Should Aim For appeared first on Lumoa.

Support tickets. Reviews. Feature requests. Social media mentions. Customer feedback can come at you a hundred different ways. But if you’re not putting that customer feedback to work in your marketing, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.  

Don’t make the mistake of simply patting yourself on the back when you get good feedback from customers. Incorporating customer feedback into your marketing strategy can level up your marketing efforts and help you drive even more growth for your business.

What is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback is what your customers are telling you about your product. That seems obvious, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking customer feedback is just a measurable score.   

Your customers aren’t numbers or data, they’re people. Paying attention to customer satisfaction is how you hear the voice of your customers. It’s how you listen in to hear what they’re thinking.  

So how can you hear the voice of your customer clearly and harness it in your marketing efforts? I’m glad you asked! 

Proven Methods for using Customer Feedback in Marketing

1. Create content addressing customer questions

Reviewing your customer feedback will help you understand the kinds of questions your customers are asking. Your marketing team can then create content to help answer these questions at scale.  

Imagine if a customer submitted a question about your product got a personalized response saying “Hey, we received your question and thought it was really insightful, so we answered it on our blog!” . 

Creating content to address customer questions is also a great way to close the customer feedback loop, which results in customers feeling appreciated. And an appreciated customer is a customer much more likely to stay with your brand. 

2. Share positive reviews on your website and social

Similar to the above point, sharing positive reviews on your website and social media is a great way to amplify your customers’ voices and make them feel appreciated.  

Survey results have shown that consumers read an average of 10 reviews before deciding they can trust a business. If this is something consumers are going to seek out on their own, why not take the initiative to get those reviews in front of them?

3. Better understand your customers and prospects  

As you analyze customer feedback, you’ll start to notice trends and patterns. These patterns can help you understand your target audience’s preferences. Ask questions like:

• What channels do they use for reviews and research?  
• On which media do they consume content?  
• What are their greatest concerns and desires?  
• What unique jargon do they use?  

It’s easy to make assumptions about your customers. Using customer feedback to answer these questions prevents you from assuming the wrong things and missing the mark with your marketing. 

4. Optimize how you communicate with different customers

The more you understand your customers, the better you’ll be able to personalize your approach to marketing. You’ll learn how to speak their language and where you need to tailor your communication to connect with them better. 

For instance, your customer feedback might show you that different customer segments use your product in different ways. These insights can be invaluable, as they enable you to build out more targeted ads and landing pages. If your most successful customers are using your product to accomplish one thing, the last thing you want to be doing is to try to sell something completely different.  

Understanding your customers also makes it easier for you to adjust your branding and messaging. You’ll be able to better tailor your brand so that prospects quickly connect with your message, making them far more likely to engage with your product.

5. Better understand your competitors

Negative reviews might not be fun, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful.  

For example, let’s say someone left a two-star review: “I was really disappointed with this product because it didn’t do what I needed it to do. I used product X instead and it was perfect for me because it ___.” ”  

Cringe! No one ever wants to hear that their product missed the mark. It’s never fun to hear you lost a customer—and maybe this isn’t a review you want to share on your social feed—but any opportunity to learn what’s perfect for a customer or what they loved about your competitor should be seen as a gold mine of information. 

6. Improving marketing campaigns and channels

Your customer feedback will help you understand the kinds of issues your customers face. Your marketing campaigns should address these pain points and demonstrate how your product solves those challenges.  

Another thing your customer feedback can uncover is where your ideal customers spend their time. Do they use Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? Tiktok?  Well, interestingly, 90% of Instagram users follow a business account, highlighting the significant presence and engagement potential for businesses on this platform.

While utilizing platforms like Instagram and TikTok for marketing, it’s crucial to understand the unique algorithms and user engagement patterns. For instance, on TikTok, getting views can sometimes be challenging. Therefore, it is always best to understand the platform’s algorithm, target audience & nature before investing your time into it.

Don’t gamble with your marketing budget. Let customer feedback tell you your prospect’s preferred channels, then focus your marketing efforts there. This is especially critical when it comes to paid advertising, because running ads on a channel that your audience doesn’t use is a huge waste of money.

7. Creating brand advocates

What’s better than a customer? A customer who is also a volunteer on your marketing team.  

A brand advocate is someone who elevates your brand through word of mouth marketing. Maybe they mention to a friend how positive their experience with your customer support team was. Maybe they share about your awesome product on Twitter. Brand advocacy can take a hundred different forms, but at its core it’s about leveraging your brand to attract other potential customers. 

By using your customer feedback to improve your marketing, you might just end up with these volunteer ambassadors on your team!

How to gather customer feedback for marketing

Customer feedback is powerful. You understand why you should use it in your marketing, but what are some good ways to collect more feedback?

Customer interviews

If you’re not familiar with the story of Procter & Gamble resurrecting their Febreze brand with the help of an insight from one ordinary customer, it’ll tell you everything you need to know about why you should be conducting customer interviews.  

While interviews aren’t an efficient way to collect large amounts of data, they often provide qualitative feedback that you can’t get anywhere else. Holding regular customer interviews should be a core part of any feedback gathering strategy.

Surveys

Customer surveys are one of the best ways to collect customer feedback, and products like Survey Monkey make conducting them a breeze. Here are some tips on how to make your surveys as effective as possible!  

Maybe your organization already collects a ton of survey data, but it’s inaccessible or siloed to certain teams. If that’s the case, tools like Lumoa can help you get more value from your existing feedback by automatically analyzing customer feedback and generating related insights. And you can try it out for free! 

Social media

Social media can be a great informal outlet for starting conversations with your customers. How many times have you seen a company publicly ask,“How has your experience with our product been?”  

That’s the kind of public transparency that shows customers your brand can be trusted. Use your social media feeds to engage with your customers on a relational level and you’ll get all kinds of valuable feedback.

Host customer meetings

Customer meetings may seem like a logistical nightmare with little payoff. But don’t underestimate their ability to create customer buy-in!  

Getting yourself in the room with a small group of your customers creates a space of intimacy and fosters connection. This helps your customers feel comfortable and allows them to be more honest (and honest feedback is always what you’re after).

Get started today

You’re going to get customer feedback. There’s no way around it. Hopefully most will be positive, but sometimes it will be negative. But that’s okay, because sometimes negative feedback is even more valuable for your business.  

Don’t make the mistake of sitting on a gold mine of customer feedback and never doing anything with it. Put it to work improving your product, your processes, and yes, your marketing efforts.  

When used in a thoughtful way, customer feedback can become a great tool to help you drive long-term revenue and growth in your business. 

Interested in learning more about how Lumoa can help your organization see the full picture of your VoC data? Start a free trial today!

The post 7 Ways to Use Customer Feedback in Marketing appeared first on Lumoa.

Terminology can be tricky when seeking ways to improve, no matter the industry or trade. And although it might seem like a debate in semantics, understanding the distinction is something to keep in mind when looking for ways to set yourself apart from competitors. 

What is digital experience?

So what is a digital experience anyway?

Digital experiences are the interactions between a user (customer, partner, or employee) and an organization that are only possible because of digital technologies. Essentially, they are the aspects of an experience that allow companies to go beyond simply digitizing processes to create services that use the full potential of online channels or other modern technologies alongside best web designers.

However, technology on its own doesn’t make something a digital experience. Reading a scanned document, for example, isn’t an example of a digital experience because it doesn’t offer anything experientially different from reading a physical copy.

An authentic digital experience utilizes specific features and components of digital platforms to deliver interactions besides providing communication. Therefore, a better example would be taking a static web page, which alone is not a digital experience, and turning it into a pdf that includes links to other relevant documents, right-click functionality, in-line comment threads, social media buttons, auto-translations, and so on. 

A good rule to remember is that digital experiences do what a physical process cannot. 

What is the difference between digital experience and digital customer experience?

Think of digital and digital customer experiences like the square and rectangle scenario posed in a geometry class.

All digital customer experiences are forms of a digital experience— but not all digital experiences are digital customer experiences.

 Basically, digital experiences encompass all activities like researching a product online or using a mobile app to find a store’s nearest location.

In contrast, a digital customer experience begins with an interaction directly with an organization or brand like placing an item in your basket then making the purchase. This distinction is important, but what’s more important is understanding that in most cases, there is no excellent customer experience without a great digital experience. You need a proper frame for that square to shine. 

Examples of digital experience

Apple’s FaceID

Sometimes all it takes to make a digital experience a better one is to make it a little easier to use than your competitors. As digital security has become a more profound concern for industries over the years, people have been looking for ways to make logging in a better experience.  When fingerprint scanning became a mobile option, it was revolutionary.

However, unless you touch it just right and don’t have a speck of literally anything on your hands or screen, it can be frustrating.  Especially if you’re like some unfortunate few and try to use mobile pay on buses, awkwardly trying to balance at the front of the bus as it moves until you give up and fish for cash. 

So— when Apple introduced FaceID, there was understandably some skepticism on how much it would actually work— despite the outstanding marketing campaigns. While it does have its flaws, and we don’t recommend having it as your only means of defense, the process has proven to be more consistently accurate than fingerprint ID. As of April 2020, the best face identification algorithm has an error rate of just 0.08%. 

Gmail’s predictive text

Predictive text is nothing new in email writing; Google incorporated the feature into its email service years ago. But there’s predictive text and then there is predictive text. In 2020 Google improved upon its function by taking its email AI from predicting two or three vague words after a user begins generally typing to being able to suggest four to five-word sentences that effectively capture and complete what the user is trying to say.

Not only is the accuracy of its speech patterns uncanny, but the level at which it conveys language that sounds like an actual human speaking makes the option more desirable. During the pandemic era, where we’re sending emails back and forth multiple times per day, and our brains may be working a little faster than our fingers, anything that makes the process quicker and allows communication to be more concise is incredibly appreciated.

Amazon’s Assistant Browser Extension

In 2020 Amazon launched a browser extension/add-on that allows users to compare product prices as they browse the internet.

Furthermore, this digital experience enables users to find personalized product recommendations, discover Amazon products while browsing, and includes product reviews, offers, and ratings. It’s a similar concept to something like Honey or Capital One’s coupon add-on, but Amazon’s differentiator is its natural redirection function back towards itself.  

What is the difference between digital customer experience and customer experience?

To break it down even further, the main difference between digital customer experience and “regular” customer experience (CX) is that the CX involves all the actions that can take place offline like in-branch, over the phone, on physical receipts, or any other face-to-face interactions.

Digital customer experiences focus on strictly digital mediums, like a computer, tablet, or smartphone. When businesses are speaking about improving digital customer experience, they’re usually also trying to put themselves into the customer’s shoes by trying to understand the impact and importance of digital channels from a consumer viewpoint.

Therefore, elements like using omnichannel tools and creating pleasing UI can be game-changers to both the digital and “regular” customer experience.. 

How can you improve the digital customer experience?

Much like any customer experience, to improve digital experiences (or DX), you need to capture customer feedback across the digital ecosystem constantly. Capturing customer feedback data helps you understand patterns and detect pain points that arise throughout the customer journey to initiate change effectively.

Understanding Digital Platforms and Transformations

Gartner defines a digital experience platform (DXP) as “an integrated and cohesive piece of technology designed to enable the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multipipeline customer journeys.”

Therefore, these platforms offer organizations an integrated suite of tools to foster meaningful relationships by speaking and listening to customers, prospects, partners, employees, and all other audiences. In addition to providing these integrated tools, digital experience platforms provide the technology that supports the organizational transformation needed.

For instance, you can start with tracking experiences across your site. Still, a true digital transformation requires a more communal shift — i.e., connecting silos, building out teams, creating feedback loops that continuously evaluate and respond to customer data cues, and so on. 

Digital experience platforms help with all of this by providing the necessary architecture and offering a centralized location to collaborate and develop experiences across the lifecycle journey.

Intuitive dashboards and machine-learning-driven insights and suggestions through DXPs allow companies to collect and connect data from multiple channels and access customer insight KPIs to track processes while staying aligned.

The Devil is in the Digital Details

We know that these concepts are similar, but we live in a time where some organizations exist primarily online, so knowing where to place your energy is vital.

Now that you’ve seen the square through the rectangle, you’ll be able to distinguish details to offer a better all-around experience, and that’s worth it, we promise. 

The post What is Digital Experience? appeared first on Lumoa.

What is Qualitative Data?

Qualitative data is data that describes qualities, patterns, and characteristics, usually in the form of descriptive words. 

Unlike quantitative data, which generally gives you numerical values that you can see at face value—qualitative data is a narrative. It allows you to create implications and recognize patterns based on in-depth responses to questions. 

Businesses need data to back up their decisions. From sales and marketing to customer experience, your business must collect feedback to recognize patterns and understand where you need to make improvements.

Qualitative data gives you a more complete picture of customer behavior. It shows you the perspective of the customer and the reasons for their decisions. If you can find out why your customers consistently behave the way they do, you can understand how to provide better service for them. 

Examples of Qualitative Data

To get qualitative data, you must conduct some form of meaningful qualitative research, such as collecting feedback with surveys where your customers have the option to freely express their thoughts. 

Researchers say, “Qualitative research can help researchers to assess the thoughts and feelings of research participants, which can enable the development of an understanding of the meaning that people ascribe to their experiences.” 

That means that if you collect qualitative data it will provide insight into the feelings and meaning behind the behavior of your customers.   

Examples of qualitative data include:

• Responses to interview questions 
• Written responses from customer questionnaires/surveys
• Notes from focus groups

These methods’ responses are written descriptions, narratives, and short answers that will tell you more about your customers.

What is the Difference Between Qualitative Data and Quantitative Data?

Both qualitative and quantitative data have pros and cons that will determine which one is best to use in a specific case to gather the information you need. 

Quantitative data

Quantitative data is usually in the form of a numerical value. 

When customers fill out a survey with a rating scale or ask your customers to answer a poll, both of these research methods will give you a numerical value or a percentage. 

This information is easy to graph, and you can use this information to predict customer behavior. 

Quantitative data is excellent for computing numerical information. It provides concrete evidence to test a hypothesis and prove specified conditions. 

Quantitative data lacks the ability for your respondents to elaborate on their answers. With numbers, you can’t tell why you’re seeing the behavior and decisions on the respondent’s part. 

Qualitative data

Qualitative data are narrative responses that tell you why customers do what they do.

It will tell you how customers feel so that you can understand their behavior and why they behave that way. Qualitative data gives you the customer’s point of view and allows you to identify strengths and weaknesses. 

Qualitative data provides a direct customer perspective with narrative answers, so you can understand how customers feel. It allows you to understand the customer’s perspective to develop customer empathy. 

Collecting qualitative data can take time. Since it does take time, it is usually more difficult to gather from a larger sample size. Also, since you make the conclusions from the qualitative research, there is more room for error when trying to understand customer behavior, due to the subjective nature of the data. 

Why collect Qualitative Data 

Qualitative data is useful when you want to track particular behaviors. The key to getting value from your qualitative data is using it to identify patterns, repeat responses, and commonalities between customers. 

By collecting qualitative data, you understand things like customer empathy, customer loyalty, and customer engagement. Responses to questionnaires or short interviews will tell you how the customers feel about your brand, why your customers stay with you, and overall, why they enjoy your products or services. 

You use qualitative data when you want to analyze your customers’ behavior or if you need insight into the motivations and feelings your customers have behind their decisions. Qualitative data is also useful when you want feedback about your performance. Your clients can give you direct reports about how business is going from their side. 

You can also use qualitative data to understand how customers are emotionally connected to your brand. You can use it to determine why they give you brand loyalty and how your brand stands compared to the competition. 

These are all forms of qualitative data that you can gather through a few research methods. 

How to Collect Qualitative Data 

The most common ways to collect qualitative data are through:

• Observations
• Interviews
• Surveys & Questionnaires

Observation

Observations are when you observe a particular behavior and identify factors that affect that behavior. You might observe a customer call where a customer is troubleshooting a problem with one of your employees. You can take note of customer responses and behavior. Notice how your employees tend to service different issues. This qualitative data will help you understand how to keep up the quality of customer service that you provide. 

Interviews

Interviews are another way of collecting qualitative data. The most important part of the interview is asking the right questions to get the answers that address the behavior in question. You want to ask a question that guides the customer to giving you an informative answer. Take notes on what customers say and keep in mind similar responses from different customers. 

Surveys & Questionnaires

Finally, there are surveys and questionnaires. Surveys help you ask a series of questions and get insightful answers quickly. If you’re taking a qualitative approach with surveys and questionnaires, make sure that the questions are open-ended questions that require the customers to explain or describe. Refrain from using multiple-choice answers designed to get a numerical value in your results. 

Questionnaires and surveys typically allow the respondents some space to type their answers in a few sentences. You can think of surveys and questionnaires as a way of asking the same interview questions to a larger sample size. It’s a great way to collect qualitative data at scale.  

Observations, interviews, and questionnaires will give you responses that are elaborate and that provide perspective. Take note of the patterns you notice in responses and use qualitative data and quantitative data to show customers that you value their business and want to serve them better. 

Have a mixed approach – collect both types of data

While qualitative data plays the role of showing you the emotions, motivations, and points of view of your customer, it’s crucial to also collect quantitative data when conducting research in a mixed methods approach. Experts define mixed methods as utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods of research to get more complete results. 

Your quantitative research will essentially tell you what your customers are doing and tell you how satisfied your customers might be. Your qualitative data will tell you why your customers are doing what they do and how they feel about it. 

Using this mixed methods approach allows you to make better marketing, sales, and customer service decisions in the future. Ultimately, both methods inform your customer empathy and help you bring more value to your clients. 

With NPS you collect both qualitative and quantitative data

For example, you send an NPS survey to your customers where they can motivate their answers. The written answer in this case would be qualified as qualitative data, and the number they picked would be equal to quantitative data. 

Collecting qualitative data is a great way to gain insight into why customers like certain products, your strengths, and weaknesses, which products need improvement, and ultimately how to make good decisions for better service in the future. 

Analyzing customer feedback that contains qualitative data

Analyzing qualitative data can be challenging and time-consuming. Qualitative data is almost always unstructured, which makes the analysis hard since there are no clear patterns or ways to group your data. 

However, nowadays there are tools like Lumoa that allow you to analyze customer feedback automatically for you. 

Lumoa Customer Experience Analytics will automatically find the most important insights and key drivers from your qualitative data, which means that you don’t have to manually analyze and search for insight patterns in your data. 

You can find out more about Lumoa here.

The post What is Qualitative Data and Why You Should Collect it appeared first on Lumoa.

For example, you probably have integrated your CRM with your helpdesk already to get a better view of your customers so you can be even more efficient when solving their issues. You can do the same type of integration with your customer experience platform, which will help your make your life easier.

One of many benefits of integrating one tool to another is that you and your team will become more efficient and save time not having to manually move data from one place to another. 

What is an Integration?

Essentially, an integration makes it possible to connect different tools, APIs, or systems to build more value out of your data. 

The main benefits of using integrations with your customer experience platform are: 

• Time savings/eliminating manual work 
  For example, automating data transfers to a tool like Lumoa from other survey providers such as Qualtrics, from online existing data points such as Trustpilot, or from public forums such as App Store reviews.
• Proactiveness triggering actions in real-time 
  Automatically creating tickets in Zendesk or Salesforce when you receive negative feedback.
• Increased insight actionability
  Fetching background data such as customer segment, value, or tenure from your CRM systems. 

The key benefit of an integration is that it creates an instant flow of information, meaning the actions from the integration will be triggered automagically!

Common examples of customer experience integrations

Integrations are a broad term, and there is an unlimited number of different use cases for customer experience integrations that can be done depending on what you want to accomplish. 

For example, Lumoa has very clear open APIs and you can easily integrate into any modern platform.

Below, we are going to cover some of the more common integrations our customers at Lumoa use to provide an example of how they work. 

1. Send customer feedback to Lumoa

You can easily send the feedback that you collect to Lumoa. For this, we will need to integrate into your platform of choice. Feedback can be collected by many different tools so, in practice, it means that you can connect to:

• Survey platforms that you use to collect feedback 
  Examples of such platforms are Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Survicate, or Surveyhero, etc.
• CRM Systems 
  For example Salesforce, Intercom, Microsoft Dynamics, or Zendesk. With the focus on customer advocacy and improving satisfaction, an increasing number of CRM platforms offer the possibility to collect customer feedback. These platforms usually have a rich set of APIs, so it is very easy to integrate them into Lumoa.
• Databases where you store customer responses
  In some cases, you may have a central database where you store and enrich customer responses. In most of these cases, feedback is also enriched with information from other systems and it represents the source of truth for the company. Think Snowflake, ElasticSearch, MySQL, MongoDB, etc. 

Lumoa can easily integrate with all of these systems – pull data as it flows into your system and automatically send it to Lumoa. 

How it works

If we think of a survey provider as an example, in general, the person that has created the survey would then (in most cases) give Lumoa a Survey ID, and an API Key. 

The Survey ID is a unique identifier that will tell Lumoa exactly which survey we are looking to target, and the API Key works as credentials that allow Lumoa to get the data securely. 

After, Lumoa will create an integration that will start listening to that Survey ID.

In this case, Lumoa would configure this integration so that whenever a response is submitted to your survey, the integration duplicates the response and fires the duplicate off to Lumoa. 

This integration can also be configured so that it sends over the entire customer response or just pieces of it. 

An example is if you ask end-users to leave contact information, and you don’t want those end-user emails and phone numbers to go to Lumoa. We can configure the integration so that it only targets the data you want us to collect.

Here is an example flow of sending data to Lumoa through the use of a Survey provider:

2. Send survey invites from your CRM and your responses to Lumoa

If you are using Lumoa to collect feedback, we recommend that you send survey invites through your CRM system, in this way, you have full control of to whom you want to send your survey too.

This is also increasingly important as privacy and security regulation becomes more relevant. Additionally, it takes just minutes to set up automated survey invites, so users can leave feedback after important interactions such as customer service call or after an onboarding process.

In practice, you will just need to set-up a trigger or an automated workflow in your CRM and insert the survey link in your email. You can even transfer background variables. 

The leading B2B technology company Outotec uses Microsoft Dynamic to collect customer feedback and use Lumoa to find customer insights from the responses.

3. Triggering actions in real-time when customers leave feedback

Many of our customers take advantage of Lumoa integration capabilities to become more proactive – automating tasks to close the loop in a very fast and efficient manner. 

Some use cases include generating Zendesk tickets after a customer leaves negative feedback, or automatically triggering CRM campaigns.

Imagine that you have a mobile application, and you get negative feedback around a performance bug that you have already solved in your latest update. 

With Lumoa, you can set a trigger so users that complain about performance and have an old version of your software get an automated email asking them to update to the newest version. 

This way you free up time from your customer service team and get the fastest possible solution directly to your customers.

The US challenger bank Simple Finance created a new case routing based on the new insights found in Lumoa so that new card request cases were prioritized in their customer support which resulted in a 90% decrease in case resolution time and a 20% increase in customer satisfaction. 

Read more about how Simple Finance improved their ticket routing system with Lumoa.

4. Export Enriched Feedback from Lumoa

With Lumoa you can also programmatically export feedback with all the analytics results. 

In practice, this means that you can get a file with all the responses that include the topics customers talk about and the sentiment for each of those topics. 

Typically, data scientists love this data as they can link it to internal data that cannot be sent to Lumoa (such as customer location, customer purchase history, etc) and create an ad-hoc internal analysis that will uncover insights that otherwise would be not available.

5. Collect public online reviews

Lumoa has the ability to crawl over the web and collect publicly hosted feedback. Web crawling helps to understand how your customers are talking about you online.

These can be things like App Store reviews, Amazon reviews, Trustpilot comments, etc. This data can then be delivered continuously into Lumoa so that you can capture additional touchpoints. 

Even more, you are not limited to fetching your own data.

Since this is publicly hosted feedback, Lumoa bots can also fetch data on your competitors. 

You could have the suite of Lumoa features like topics, sentiment, and overall analysis on competitor’s feedback to help identify areas where they might be struggling, and then capitalize on that. 

Customer Experience Integration – Endless possibilities

As mentioned above, the different types and uses of integrations are nearly limitless. 

You can do things like create tickets whenever certain types of feedback are summited. 

If your end-user submits a negative response, you can monitor that response, track when it arrives, and then create a ticket in your support software so that your team can resolve the issue with the end-user. 

Similar notifications can be sent to things like Slack, to notify teams of negative responses. 

If you want to read more about customer experience automation cases in: 5 Great customer experience automation cases.

The post Using Integrations In Customer Experience appeared first on Lumoa.

However, although widely used, multiple-choice questions alone are not always able to produce the helpful data you need to make smart business decisions. This is where employing a customer experience strategy template comes into play, aiding in the structured analysis of survey responses to distill actionable insights. By complementing these with methodologies for analyzing customer feedback, such as text analysis and leveraging AI for customer experience management, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiments and behaviors.

In this handy guide, we’ll share tips and best practices on how to use multiple-choice questions in surveys to get actionable customer insights. We’ll explore how integrating these with a customer experience strategy template can enhance the survey analysis process, ensuring that the insights gathered are aligned with broader business objectives. This strategic approach not only enhances the quality of data collected but also ensures that the insights generated are directly actionable, guiding strategic decisions to improve the customer experience effectively.

What are multiple-choice questions?

Multiple-choice questions are questions constructed in such a way that respondents are presented with several answer options to choose from. Most of the time, these types of survey questions allow users to select either a single answer or multiple answers. 

What are the advantages of posing multiple-choice questions in surveys?

Why are multiple-choice questions common to use in surveys? The reason why this particular form of questions is so popular is that they are straightforward, and it doesn’t require much effort from the respondent to answer the questions. Other advantages include:

1. Results that are simple to analyze

Multiple-choice questions allow you to organize and make sense of responses fairly quickly and efficiently. For certain problems and lines of inquiry, collecting quantitative data is a simple way to collect basic demographic information about customers. Dedicated customer experience analytics will make the process even smoother.

2. Easy to complete on mobile devices

According to recent estimates, around one in five people complete surveys on mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets. Such devices tend not to come with a traditional keyboard, meaning it is rather easy for respondents to answer multiple-choice questions using a touch screen.

What are the disadvantages of multiple-choice questions?

Although multiple-choice questions have their advantages, there are some significant limitations to be aware of. Disadvantages of using multiple choice questions include:

1. Manipulate the respondent to answer in a certain way

This is one of the most common problems with multiple-choice questions. When a question is presented with a defined set of answers, respondents may be forced to answer in a way they otherwise would not have.

The survey designer will provide options that he or she thinks are the most relevant ones for the question. However, in practice, those answers may not be the most obvious choice for the respondent. The respondent might have something else in mind. Since the respondent is limited to a set of predefined answers, the respondent may even skip the question or choose an answer that might not represent the truth. 

2. Focused on collecting quantitative data

Multiple-choice questions are designed to produce quantitative data. This can be limiting if you want to find out about a customer’s personal experiences with your company. Only collecting quantitative data will just give you an overview of how the responses are allocated, and you will not have any insights into why the result looks like it does. 

3. Time-consuming to design

Although multiple-choice questions are fast to process, they can take up your precious time. This is because coming up with effective questions is trickier than it sounds, and it can be difficult to ensure you have covered every possible corresponding answer.

How to use multiple choice questions in surveys

Multiple-choice questions are great to use in surveys if you use them in the right way. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Choose a type of multiple-choice question that works for you

The two main varieties of multiple-choice questions are multiple-answer and single-answer. The former allows respondents to select a few answers to one question, while the latter only allows them to select one. 

Multiple-answer questions can help find solutions to problems that could have several contributing factors. For example, if you want to find out demographic information and your customers could fit themselves under several categories related to their age or background, allowing for multiple answers will give you a better overall picture of the type of customers you attract. 

Single-answer questions, on the other hand, are suitable for binary answers (such as yes/no), nominal scales, or questions with ratings. Put simply, they are best used for questions with only one possible answer for each participant.

For example, if you want to evaluate the efficiency of a service or product, you could ask respondents to rank its efficiency on a scale of one to five. Alternatively, you could use NPS which asks respondents to rate how likely they are to recommend goods and services to a friend. Other typical examples of single-answer questions are, CSAT or CES. 

2. Always add an open-text question

If you are going to use multiple-choice questions in your survey, you should always add an open-text question. By including an open-text question option, you allow customers to comment and motivate their answers.

The open-text question will provide you with valuable qualitative data, that you can use to improve your product or services. This type of feedback is called open-ended feedback and is incredibly useful for gaining customer insight into issues you may not even have considered. This option will prove useful even if you think that the question can only be answered a few ways – you may not have thought of everything. 

How not to use multiple choice questions in surveys

It is very easy to make mistakes when designing surveys that include multiple-choice questions. Here are a few tips to prevent you from falling into common traps:

1. Do not make things too complicated

Respondents are more likely to answer your survey if the process is quick and simple. You should avoid making surveys with 10+ different questions just to make sure that you are getting feedback on everything you want to cover.

Instead, you should only use one multiple-choice question in your survey, such as NPS, CES, or CSAT, and complement it with an open-text question. By keeping the survey short and simple, the user experience will be better and you’re able to increase the response rates. 

2. Try not to offer ambiguous answers

Sometimes, multiple-choice questions can be unintentionally confusing. For example, if you ask the respondent to indicate which age range they fall into and you provide answers that overlap (e.g. 0-15; 15-30; 30+), people who fall into two of the categories will not know which answer to select. 

Start your survey journey today

As you can see, creating surveys that produce useful information is an art. It’s easy to get carried away by including more and more questions in a survey. It’s important to remember what the goal of the survey is as well as finding the right balance between questions and user-friendliness. Utilizing a customer experience platform can streamline this process by providing the tools necessary to design effective surveys that engage customers and provide actionable insights. Additionally, conducting a customer experience audit can help identify areas of improvement and ensure that the survey content is aligned with the overall customer experience strategy.

After all, it is vital that your customers can respond and have the option to include their thoughts and opinions. At Lumoa, a customer feedback analytics platform, we always recommend creating surveys that include:

• 1 multiple choice question
• 1 open-text question

It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that!

If you want to read more about surveying then check out the article: How to create better surveys: your business depends on it. 

The post Multiple Choice Survey Questions: Advantages and Disadvantages appeared first on Lumoa.

More and more companies are turning to customer-centric business strategies to differentiate themselves from the competition with customer experience. Customer-centric businesses are not only more relevant to customers, but 5x more likely to be a top competitor in their industry, and 4x more profitable than competing businesses that don’t focus on customer experience (Forrester, 2016). Every customer-centric business strategy centers around putting the customer at the core of the business, and that means closing the customer feedback loop.

While surveys like NPS, CSAT, CES, or market research can be helpful tools for understanding your customer base, they come with their own share of challenges. For one, they require the participant to opt in. For companies that have trouble achieving high enough response rates, this raises issues with statistical validation based on sample size, making any data collected less actionable. 

This is why more and more companies with successful CX and voice-of-customer programs have turned to the front lines, using text feedback from on-the-ground individuals who interact with your customers every day through support conversations or through responding to online reviews. That’s where the real informational goldmine is. To maximize information received from the customer-facing team members of your business, it’s important to establish the customer feedback loop.

What is the Customer Feedback Loop?

Mature CX programs have customer feedback coming at them from all directions: NPS surveys, CSAT ratings, CES (customer effort score), and even activity and behavior monitoring. But all companies, even companies with less mature programs, get tons of customer feedback thrown their way from another source: the customers themselves. 

Conversations with support team members and sales team members happen every day. The challenge is aggregating this feedback, tracking it to surface meaningful insights, using those insights to inspire action, and then most importantly, getting back to the customer to inform them change has taken place. 

This is what makes up the customer feedback loop: gathering insights from customers, circulating those insights across the company to inspire action, and then relaying that action to the customer so they can reap the benefits, and receive even more value from the products and services your business provides. 

Why is it important?

According to research from New Voice Media, the top reason customers switch brands is from feeling unappreciated. Customer relationships are relationships after all, and any relationship expert will tell you the importance of listening and positive reinforcement. The customer feedback loop is important because it shows the customer your business is listening. Not only is your business listening, but it’s responding. It’s letting the customer know their insights are valuable enough to drive change. 

The customer feedback loop actually works more like two loops that work together in tandem, the inner customer feedback loop, and the outer customer feedback loop.

An inner customer feedback loop is the organizational structure that allows for customer feedback to circulate throughout the business to any departments that impact the customer experience, like support, marketing, sales, product, and engineering – almost everyone! The inner loop is important as it prevents silos between departments and prevents a fragmented customer journey by unifying departments with a single source of truth. 

The outer customer feedback loop refers to the path from the customer’s expression of feedback, to the final answer from the business based on action taken from feedback. The outer loop is important because it shows your customer that you are listening, your business cares, and you’re dedicated to making changes on their behalf. The outer loop is important because closing the outer loop makes your customer feel appreciated. 

Closing the inner feedback loop

The inner customer feedback loop refers to the communication loop from surveys like NPS, or aggregated feedback from customer-facing teams like support and sales, to departments throughout the company to drive business decisions. 

Examples of the inner customer feedback loop:

The sales team receives information on pain points that prospective customers want to solve with the product, relaying that information to marketing teams to inform messaging and positioning. They also relay that information to the product team, which uses the insight to better solutions for those specific pain points in the product. 

The support team recognizes trends in a particular feature request as they notice customers get deeper and deeper in the product. That information is relayed to the product team, who adds that feature to the product roadmap. It’s also relayed to the marketing teams, who use real-life examples of customers asking for the feature to inform marketing materials.  

The product team conducts an NPS survey. Promoter sound bites get sent to marketing as potential case studies or candidates for reviews. Detractor feedback is sent to support and success teams to offer a personal touch to turn a frown upside down. The Product analyzes the passives for how they can improve the roadmap to make customer experiences a little less “meh.”

In all of these examples, we see customer feedback exchanged between teams and collaborative action take place based on the same source. We don’t see siloed departments making their own decisions based on their own research, fragmenting the customer experience. For any of this to be possible, it’s important to use tools that allow you to aggregate data into a single source of truth across departments. 

Closing the outer feedback loop

The outer customer feedback loop refers to the customer delivering that feedback (either to your frontline team or via survey and review), then receiving some sort of information from the company their feedback has been heard and the company has taken action. This is not simply saying “thanks for the feedback.” This is a genuine response that shows your customers that you care about what they have to say, and that you are willing to use that feedback to drive action within the company to provide greater business value for your customers. 

Examples of the outer customer feedback loop:

A customer leaves a positive review on a review site. The review results in increased traffic and business, that the company notices. The company recognizes the customer as a super fan, and sends them coupons and swag as a thank you for the positive recognition. 

Support hears back from product that a new product several customers requested will be released! While there will be a larger marketing blast and a feature in a product blog, support personally lets the requesting customers know so they can immediately derive value from the feature they wanted. 

An NPS survey reveals that customers who use the iPad app find it buggy, resulting in passive scores. Increased investment goes into QA and development for the iPad app, turning those passive customers into promoters. 

The inner loop serves to make the product or service better by disseminating customer feedback throughout the org, but the outer loop lets the customer know that the product or service is now actually better. Not only can customers enjoy the better product or service, but they also know your business is one that listens and takes action. Not only is the product better today, but your business has delivered on a promise that it will continue to get better day after day.

Closing the Customer Feedback Loop

Executing all of this at scale requires coordination from the entire organization. Fortunately tools like Lumoa help with every step of creating and executing on customer feedback loops, from aggregating the data to a single source of truth, to closing the outer loop with customers delivering feedback. 

Closing the inner feedback loop is all about making sure feedback is delivered and executed internally, that the right insights are delivered to the correct teams to make the best decisions for the customer within their respective departments. Closing the outer feedback loop is all about letting the customer know their feedback has been heard, and change has taken place as a result. Putting customer feedback loops in place not only drives your business forward with a customer-centric growth strategy but also keeps your customers happy by including them in a dialogue about positive change and action based on their needs. 

The post Customer Feedback Loop: What Is It and How to Close It appeared first on Lumoa.

This is a common pre-recorded message that I think we have all heard once or twice when calling a customer service department.

Some firms receive over 10 000 hours of calls per day and it would take several years for one person to listen to and transcribe those calls. Having a person listening to every call and transcribing them isn’t really an effective strategy. So how do you make the most out of your voice feedback?

With the modern technologies available today, such as speech-to-text and artificial intelligence (AI) it’s possible to automatically generate insights from calls, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) surveys, and post-call surveys.

In this article, we’ll explain what voice feedback is and how you can easily generate customer insights from your customer calls.

What is voice feedback?

Organizations often collect customer feedback from multiple sources such as social media, emails, chat, surveys or reviews. Usually when we refer to customer feedback, we think about feedback that someone has written down, e.g. answers to a survey. But feedback isn’t always given in a written format – you can also receive voice feedback from your calls with customers.

As mentioned earlier, some organizations receive huge volumes of calls every day. Although more modern ways of contacting support agents are available, such as chat and chatbots, calling is one of the most popular service channels, and is still widely used by customers.

Aircall.io tells us that the phone remains the most used (48%) and preferred (80%) method for reaching support agents. The benefits of reaching out to support agents via phone are that it’s immediate, direct and it gives customers the chance to ask and quickly get answers to any follow-up questions that they may have.

So the recent focus on having non-voice channels in place to help customers solve their problems doesn’t necessarily mean “the death” of regular phone calls, as for a lot of companies the ancient phone is still going strong.

As a consequence, many companies receive large volumes of customer data via phone calls. The data that they receive in these calls is generally just saved and never mined for customer insights, despite often containing a wealth of extremely valuable information.

The relationship between customer calls and customer loyalty

The customer experience is naturally affected by the performance of the customer service agents, although the customer experience is made up of all the interactions that the customer has with your brand, and not just from one specific interaction.

However, you can argue that some interactions have a bigger impact on the overall customer experience than others. If you as a customer compare a physical interaction with a service agent from a particular company, with seeing a billboard on the highway branded with that company’s name. Most likely it’s the interaction with the service agent that will leave the biggest mark, and consequently have a bigger impact on your experience as a customer.

Customer service staff have the important job of molding the relationship with customers and this plays a huge part in retaining customers and and generating loyalty. Loyal customers are the best customers as they will always come back to purchase and use your services. They are also the ones that promote your business to friends and colleagues through word-of-mouth.

95.7% of call center professionals believe that customer satisfaction is the most important metric to follow. This stresses the importance of being able to deliver a great customer experience to your customers. Organizations have to make sure to continuously improve their customer experience to keep their customers satisfied.

Making business decisions with voice feedback

So to sum it all up – organizations really shouldn’t ignore voice data as a source of customer insights, as compared to text feedback voice data often contains extremely detailed and useful feedback. This is because it requires less cognitive effort to tell someone your opinion than it does to write it down.

 How do you generate customer insights from voice data?

Voice-to-text technology is a technology that has risen to everyone’s lips lately. The most well-known examples are voice assistants like Alexa and Siri which are becoming more and more popular in households today. Voice-to-text has been found to be useful in a wide range of environments, such as in education and business.

In a business setting, it can be employed to transcribe calls automatically, reducing the need to have a person or a team doing this manually. If you receive several hours of calls every day, it could take a person several years (!) to manually transcribe, but with speech to text technology, this can take less than a minute.

By adopting this technology organizations can save money and allocate resources more efficiently. You can ensure that your employees focus on important tasks that actually require human intelligence – the type of work that they are better at and generally enjoy more.

When you want to generate insights from voice data the first thing you need to do is to transcribe the audio into text. This can be done using voice-to-text analytics, also known as speech-to-text analytics. This technology simply turns spoken words into written words. When the audio is transcribed you can treat the transcribed text as normal text feedback. The next step is to analyze using a text analysis software that provides actionable insights that will help you make business decisions.

Lumoa can do all of this for you, from transcribing voice data to analyzing the transcribed text. Lumoa’s intelligent CX platform uses AI, machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and makes it easy to generate customer insights from voice feedback. Feedback can be analyzed in over 60 different languages, meaning that it is possible for organizations to generate customer insights from every market that you operate in.

The post What is Voice Feedback and How can You Generate Customer Insights From it? appeared first on Lumoa.

About this episode

In this episode, we are joined by Merete Medle, Customer Experience Manager at ICE Norway. We talk about democratizing customer experience in organizations and the importance of being able to offer diverse experiences.

Our Guest

Merete Medle is an experienced CX practitioner with strong leadership and strategy skills. Long track record with gathering insights and operationalizing improvements based on voice of the customer, establishing customer insight programs, and working strategically and operative with CX and customer journey management.

Passionate about diversity and people in general, with a strong commercial, growth, and digital mindset. I truly believe that by focusing on people first- both the customer/user and the employee, fantastic results will present themselves!

Episode Transcript

Sofia: Hello and welcome, everyone.

I’m Sofia Ohlson. I’m the host of Inside CX by Lumoa. Thanks for watching. Today we’re going to talk about democratizing customer experience and diversity in customer experience. 

Joining me in this episode, I have Merete Medle experienced CX practitioner, founder of NCXN, operative share woman, writer, and podcast host, welcome, Merete

Merete: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Sofia: So well, you do like a lot of things. And besides all this, you’re also a customer experience manager at ICE. And just for you who don’t know what ICE, it’s a big telecommunications company in Norway.

Merete: Yes, the third biggest in Norway. So yeah, we’re practically the challenger on the Norwegian mobile market.

Sofia: So how did you end up working in cx? Where did your journey start? Your cx practitioner? I assume you’re passionate about cx. So where did it all come from?

Merete: I mean, I guess I suppose I’m just a people person. So being a part of creating good experiences for people, in general, is something that I suppose gives me a lot.

But it all started back in the actually the restaurant bar and hotel business, you know, where you are close to the customer. And you realise that if you, if you don’t have a customer centric mindset, you’re never going to be able to create good experiences and this line of business good experiences is what you live from. 

So imagine running a hotel and I’m not focusing on good experience, then nobody would visit your hotel. So, you know, in this in this branch, it becomes pretty clearly that you have to take care of the customer. So, I was 19-20 years, I moved to Spain, I started working in a hotel there. I was running up the poolside bar for the first six months. And then I joined reception eventually. And when I came back to Norway, after that, I was working quite a few years in TGI Fridays in Bergen.

And, you know, just the combination of loving to talk to people and getting to know people and understand how people work and what it is that make them happy, you know, combined with the, you know, being the provider of this experience that they come to you for, for instance, a restaurant visit or.

Yeah, so I suppose it started there. And then just along my career, it’s always been important to me to have the customer and focus and keep in mind that no matter where you work, no matter what it is you do, it’s the customer that pays your bill and pays your, your salary, and you have to have focus on that. Otherwise, you’re gonna lose. And on top of that, it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun working with customer-centricity because, you know, at the end of the day, you’re you’re creating something you’re adding value for people.

Sofia: Right, right, exactly. So okay, you have your background in the restaurant and service, or whatever it’s called. And yeah, it’s true, it comes like very naturally from there, like, I’ve been myself working in the restaurant before. And it’s very, like, customer-centric, or you notice that it’s, it’s a big part of it all. And then I’ve learned also myself quite a bit from that.

Merete: I think, you know, I’ve done so many things, like you say, and but it all ends-up, I can always track it back to the things that I learned back then. It’s, you know, it’s in your nerves eventually, because it’s, it becomes part of who you are. And you learn stuff the hard way as well. And, you know, if you if you trip and fall and you and you drop a Fanta over a kid, which I actually did, you know, you’re gonna learn from that. It’s not a customer, you know, on the other side of the phone or, or behind the screen, but it’s actually in your face, and you have to deal with it, which makes you very aware of what’s good customer experience and what’s not. Obviously, losing a cup of Fanta in a kid’s lap is not a good customer experience, at least not for the parents, but luckily, it all turned out well.

Sofia: That’s good. That’s good. Stuff like that happens. So as I briefly mentioned in the beginning, we’re going to talk about democratizing customer experience and diversity in customer experience. And many of you have probably heard about the term democratizing customer experience, which is a topic regarding like the responsibility of customer experience, should it be spread out within the organization? Should everybody care about customer experience? Or should it be more focused to a team or department or a specific person who is responsible for it and held accountable for it? 

What is your thoughts Merete on this? How should see CX management organisation? Is it something that everybody should care about? 

Merete: Yeah, I mean, it is a difficult question, because I think the answer varies regarding who you talk to, right. So obviously, a lot of people will probably recognize themselves as the person in the corner of the organization, maybe responsible for the NPS measurements, trying to have everyone else be customer-centric.

And this is where it starts. For a lot of companies, you know, when it’s a good start, you hire a person to be in charge of what you call customer experience, or customer loyalty or, or customer relations. But then at some point, you realise that you’re only getting thus far, by rigging yourself this way. So at some point, if you want to mature within customer experience, you need to widen your horizon. 

And I think in today’s companies and in 2021, with all the digitalization that’s going on and and technology is evolving, I think the sooner you can become customer-centric, from an overall perspective, the better and I truly believe that every company should actually have a customer operating and chief customer officer or at least the head of customer experience, or somebody in what either the top management group or one of the top management groups being responsible for it.

And it’s, it’s not only to, to put it on the paper so to say but you have to, you actually have to be the person willing to, without compromise, talk to customers case, wear the customer hat, to be the customers ally around the table when you discuss product development,strategy, cutting costs, you know. You always have to see what consequences the decisions you make from a customer’s perspective. 

So applying the outside in way of thinking, which I think is really, really central and the way of working with customer experience. Obviously, it takes time, but at somepoint, you should reach this level where you have this one person, you may not have to have customer experience in your title, you can might as well be the commercial director or the chief operating officer. But at somepoint, you need to make the decision that the customer is going to sit by the table where decisions are being made. 

So yeah, I think a combination, depending on your maturity, but definitely you should have somebody work with gathering insights.I think this is one of the crucial parts of customer-centricity. So you definitely need I would say, a team, where you divide, you know, the, the assignments of gaining the insight, understanding it, analysing it, and then somebody needs to operationalize it into improvements, right.

Because the insight is valueless if you don’t do anything about it. So. So that’s like the minimum, you should you should have this one, two or three people who actually, it’s their job to think about what’s the consequences of the stuff that we do with regards to customer and also collect insight and analyse and see how are we developing? How are the customers receiving us as a company? How are they? You know, what’s the perception of us as a company out there, you need to keep track on that. So you definitely need a team. But at some point, I think it’s really important as a part of the strategy as well, if you want to succeed, because if it’s not, the effect is going to be only this big. 

Sofia: Exactly.

Yeah, I really like the way you said, like having being an ally with your customers like, so you’re sort of there, right? Like if I had one that represents your customers in the board, or whatever, when you’re making strategies, or creating strategies and thinking about future that you have one that represent the customers and have their voice.

Merete: very often you will find this person and I see myself in this role quite a lot. And this happens on a daily basis, I suppose that you will find yourself being the devil’s advocacy, like, you know, the advocate. So when people are saying, Yeah, we should do this product, and then you’ll be like, but what about the customer, like, if we do this, then that’s going to affect and then you have to rethink it, right? 

And then Okay, so now this is the plan, and then you’ll be like, Well, excuse me, but you know, if we think about the customer, so you will, at some point, you will also be maybe the party pooper in the company. But at the same time, it’s a really important party pooper role, because this is this is the way to ensure customer-centricity. And I’m not saying that the customer should always get, you know, the best solution for them. 

Because, you know, as a company, you also have to think about growth, and you need to be you know, you have to do things in a sustainable way. But you know, it’s a good start to at least consider the effect this will have on the customer. And if you still decide that you’re not going to go with the best customer most customer-centric solution, at least you’ve made a conscious choice about it, and you know what to expect. Maybe you should prepare for a little higher churn or, you know, so it gives you the ability to be, you know, you can predict a little bit more how consequences are going to be by from the decisions that you make.

Sofia: Exactly, yeah. So, like you also said like, that, at some point, customer experience should be a part of the strategy, be something not necessarily only handled, managed by a person or team, it should be something that the whole organization works or strives against. So to be able to do that, I guess, the top management or people working on a company needs to have some knowledge about CX, what it is and how important it actually is. 

How should organisation develop the knowledge about cx?

Merete: Actually, I think and I don’t intend to be blunt, but I don’t think you need so much competency about cx in general, because this is common sense. If you treat somebody nicely, they’re going to come back. It’s as easy as that. 

And my experience is that the more operational the resources are and the people in an organisation are, the more customer-centric they want to work. Now the problem kind of the problem arises when you need to start prioritising, right, are we going to do the stuff that creates the most value on a short term basis? Or are we going to make the decisions that’s going to create long-term value but it’s going to be You know, you’re not going to be able to see the results. So fast. 

So I think actually, management is the ones that has to be trained in the in the value of working in a customer-centric way. And they don’t even have to be trained. But they have to be reminded, I think, I think, and also we need to my opinion is that we’ve turned things around a little bit when we work, especially in growth company. So we want to start initiatives to increase revenue to reduce churn. But instead of focusing too much on the initiatives, and this is supposed to work, the customer-centric way of thinking comes in. So instead of focusing too much on the initiatives and the and the goals you want to reach, then we start thinking about what kind of experiences is it that we want to create.

Because if we design a great experience, and we strive to reach that, then all of these:reduce churn, increased revenue, those things are going to come almost automaticall. Obviously, you have to work better, and you need to twist and turn. But I think it’s really important to turn the focus around and focus on where you want to be and what kind of experiences that you want to provide, and not just focusing on the initiatives themselves. 

So that’s probably one of the main things that I’ve learned from working with this, across the years. And also, for management groups, it’s hard to prioritise because there are so many decision decisions to make. So I think it’s really important that the customer experience parts of the organisation is really good at proving return on investment, we need to become so much better at you know, showing to the results that we achieve when working customer-centric, we need to track, we need to measure, we need to evaluate.

Because so many times we fight so hard to get the fundings to do a customer centric initiative. So then we do it, and then afterwards, nothing happens. And we never prove the value of the investment that we made. So this is where cx ambassadors and practitioners needs to become, I think way better, we need to start focusing on also reporting on the stuff that we do, because otherwise we’re not going to be able to prove our track record, right. 

So myself I’ve been, yeah, this is something we work really hard within ICE now that we need to evaluate and track and prove that we’ve actually we have returned the investments of these initiatives that we’ve started. 

Sofia: Yeah, yeah, this is a challenge for I guess, many companies that are working with customer experiences. Many times, it’s really hard to, or it’s a challenge to track that or prove the return on investment on that and to get like concrete numbers out of it.

Merete: Yeah, I mean, a guy, he’s in the insurance business in Norway, and he works with customer experience. He once said, at the gathering that, you know, we report customer experience in rainbows and unicorns, you know. And it’s, it’s a little true, you know, we say that, we think that if we do this, then that many customers may not churn. So it’s hard, you know, to define the outcome. But this is why it’s so important that when you do an initiative to improve, then you track and you kind of measure the effect that it’s had afterward, because then you can use this case, kind of opened the door for the next one. 

Sofia: Exactly. Yeah.Yeah, that’s really, really good. Good point. So following up on that, how do you, as an organization (ICE) work to improve the customer experience? How are you managing this? Do you have any good examples? or? 

Merete: Yeah I mean, early on in ICE, this was before my time, but they did a huge strategy project where, first of all, they saw that in the market, there was a position for a company, you know, Telecom, as telecom operators are, we don’t have the best rumor, you know.

It’s no interest products, everyone has it, and it’s basically based on price a lot of the times you know, where can you get the cheapest subscription. And, and, obviously, to a certain level, coverage is important as well. 

So, but ICE did a strategy project and they realised that the customers and the market was actually ready for an operator who, who wanted to be the customers friend, you know, who wanted to not write things in the, in the contracts with the little letters, but you know, being open about this is what you get, this is who we are. 

So, so from this, from the early beginning, I think ICE had, the they saw that there would be a value in being this, this operator. And so this was back in 2016. And then obviously, the journey has taken us on various journeys to where we are today. But I think what’s most important today is that we, we work cross functionally with customer experience. We spend quite a lot of money on gaining insight both from the market but also from The customers themselves.

And it’s not just standard surveys, but we try to talk to them, we try to involve them. And we truly try to understand what it is that the customer need and want. So the customer experience line organisation consists of only two people, which is me and our cx analyst. So she is responsible for basically understanding how the customers are and you know, across the customer journey, Where does it hurt to be ICE customer, and where does it not. 

And then, together with a core team and the customer, we call it the customer experience stream. So we are a core team of six people. Where customer lifecycle management is represented, we have customer services, we have technology, we have digital sales and digital business development. So this is a core team of six, and we evaluate all insight and we define where the pain points are.

And then we have an extended part to this team that we call the extended customer experience stream, where we basically have a representative from every single corner of the organisation. So whenever a pain point indicates that now today, we need to talk to product,to fix this, or to see or analyse this problem and see how we can fix it, then we do have a person in product that’s kind of aware of their responsibility, and they will be invited to the to the customer experience core meeting, and we will discuss this exact pain point. 

So you know, depending on the size of the pain point, and depending on how complex it is, and what kind of resources you would need to solve it, we establish a task force, and that could consist of one person or 10, people depending on the size, and you know how big it is. And then these people work with this, together with their line, obviously, their line functionality. But since we’re cross functional, a lot of stuff happens just just by being able to sit down in the same room, the same team’s channel this time. 

So and also, this creates a pretty good and broad understanding of so everyone knows a little bit about how the customer journey is in ICE. So product knows what customer services are about, and customer services know what technology it’s about. So, you know, it’s also experience sharing and and this, you know, we get to know the organisation pretty well and understand the complexity of the issues that the customers experience. So crossfunctionality, I think, is the key together with insights.

Sofia: Yeah, to get the whole, like, full picture and overview of what the customer is actually going through as a whole. And, and it’s what, customer experience is about, like the summary of the whole experience as it is so so that makes a lot of sense.

Merete: No, I just I wanted to add that, I think, obviously, it’s important that you have an owner. So in ICE, I own the customer journey, it’s my main responsibility. Now, I can’t feel the customer journey with all its content, the line organizations have to do that, but I can define the framework of this is what it should be like for our ICE customer, information should be coherent, you know, across channels, we should same, say the same things, things like that. We should have the framework and somebody should own that. 

And also, somebody should own the customer. You know, if you don’t know who owns the customer, then you don’t know who owns the customer pain. So in ICE, it’s the customer experience department that kind of together with the customer lifecycle management, and the customer journey team, which is the team that we are all located in. We own the customer at ICE. So I think, you know, just as a, just having this define, I think is important.

Sofia: Yeah, exactly. To have somebody that is responsible and have the main responsibility of that stuff actually happens and then improve, and so on. 

Have you seen any like, so you started with, like, heavy focus on improving the customer experience back in 2016? If i understood it right. So it’s like, for four plus years? Have you seen any concrete results from this your initiatives that you’re done? Can you tell us something about that?

Merete: Yeah, I mean, obviously, we’re increasing every quarter we grow. So I think that’s maybe one of the biggest indications that we’re doing something right, because we become bigger each day. New customers choose us every day, even if we’re the third biggest, you know, among the three operators in Norway, we’re the third one building our own network. So, you know, it’s only three of us have our own network and we’re the newest with, you know, with the ”latest start” so to say.

Our network is a lot newer than the two other operators. So, you know, being in this position and but still gaining more customers constantly. That’s an indication that you know, the way we work is correct. And this, I mean, it’s not only the customer experience department who, obviously we work with churn and retention. And we believe we truly believe that if you create a good customer experience, this is a part of working with churn. So churn is not something you do at the end of when the customer is notifying you that they might leave. 

We think it’s too late, then obviously, we do have attention activities as well. But we focus on, you know, being upfront and being more proactive. So we don’t always do things, right. But I think just having this mentality and wanting to work this way, helps us do that as much as possible, at least.

And also, you know, we see our customer service, when prices, we develop disruptive products, we were the first operator in Norway with a free subscription for children, for instance. We were the first company in Norway who allowed data rollover, so what you didn’t spend one month, you actually got to roll over to the next. Nobody did that. 

So two days after I think it was, the others copied it, but still, we were first. So you know, we’ve shown that we’re willing to be the company that puts the customers first, in quite a few examples. And then obviously, we have made decisions as well, that may have not been too popular amongst our customers, but at least you know, we try to learn from every mistake we do. And I think there isn’t a single part and the organisation and is now that doesn’t talk about or think about the customer when making decisions.

And like I said, there are cases where we can’t put the customer first there and then, but at least I think we’re very aware of what what consequences that will have. If we don’t so yeah, this is obviously we measure NPS, and we have a positive trend, you know that for the last two years that we’ve done it, you know, properly because these things take time to establish an NPS programme, it’s going to take time to have a stable measurement, but you know, the trend is positive. And we get feedback, we measure it, we use it, and we we try, you know, as best we can to share it with the whole organisation. And also, you know, let the organisation know what the CX stream is about, what is it? We do? How are we working? You know, we try to talk a lot about it.

And

so, slowly, slowly working progress. Yeah.

Sofia: it seems really like you have been able to create a real customer-centric culture that you have the culture in place, and you have that foundation, and then from there, you can like build up and improve your customer experience. And as you said, it’s something it’s a progress or process, it takes time. But most importantly is that you have the culture and the customer in mind.

Merete: And I think this is we need to do like a send, send a big, huge thank you to our, we have, other companies call it HR, we call it DNA and I so we have a DNA department and they are really conscious about us being the customer company as well. 

So in every recruitment process, and in every interview that you do with ICE, you’re going to hear one of the first things you’re going to hear when you get to know us is you know we value the customer. And it’s to a point where sometimes it can actually become a little like a comic because we talk so much about the customer. 

But I think you know, you can’t repeat this enough times. And this is I suppose we are very conscious about the customer and ICE is also full of very good people like we are great people, there is so many good people with so many good values, I think so. I think it’s also about being a value driven company wanting to create a difference.

Sofia: Exactly.

So moving on, let’s go to the other topic, diversity in customer experience. It’s something that is sort of trending right now or really hot. And it would be great. If you could explain what does it mean with diversity, customer experience? What is that? 

Merete: Yeah, so, um, I, my wife works with diversity. And she is in HR. And one of her main responsibilities is diversity and inclusion. So we talked about this a lot at home. And obviously, I’m affected by the discussions and I really, I really care about diversity, you know, in a general perspective.

And then I started thinking, why are we not working more with diversity within customer experience, because you know, we are creating these customer journeys, we’re defining these experiences that we want our customers to have. But at some point we forget that our customer isn’t just this one persona, with this one skin colour or you know, sexuality, religion or his type of lifestyle.

This is the whole shebang, you know, out there, and we cannot fool ourselves and think for a second that by communicating this way, everyone is gonna like us, you know? And then you can ask the question, is it? Is it. Are we supposed to be liked by everyone? I don’t think we should. But I think you know, wanting to be the customer company, you should at least be aware of, you know, what is that you say? When do you say it? Is there a holiday that you need to, you know, take into consideration? 

We have Easter coming up, you know, should we only communicate Easter and Christmas and the traditional Nordic holidays? Should you be aware of St. Patrick’s Day, that was yesterday? You know, there’s so many things to take into consideration. And, and it seems nobody, well, I’m not gonna say nobody thought about it, because I think probably a lot of people did. But how can we start being more diverse in our customer experience way of working working? 

And how far Should we take it? You know, should we should we make a statement in every single holiday there is just to make sure that we don’t offend anyone? Or, you know, I think we need to think about having a strategy around these things, and also have in mind, who are our customers? And can we personalise communication and customer journeys, based on who they are, and not just what they want, but what they actually need and prefer from us. 

We provide them with, you know, the most important gadget in our lives probably at the moment. So we should be aware of this. And I don’t know how yet, because I haven’t thought about it long enough. But you know, this is a process. And that’s, you know, been going on just maybe the last year, but I think there’s, again, you know, it’s a lot to gain for us, because we will be able to create a relationship to our customers and create value. So this is good for us. 

But also, we could help people, you know, in their everyday life by, you know, adjusting to their needs and their interests. So I don’t have all the answers. But I think it’s really interesting, because when you start thinking about it, we communicate so so it kind of non-diverse.

Sofia: Yeah, exactly. I think this is a really interesting topic. I said, I haven’t myself thought about this, too much, I until now, I did some research for this interview, reading some more about it, I think it’s in the in the current time we live in, it’s very, very important. As you said, we usually businesses or organizations, they have their buyer personas or personas that they have identified and after that they make their communications and whatever, but it’s not actually that easy. It’s not actually maybe how it looks like, as you said, your customer base is much wider and broader than that.

Merete: Yeah. So, you know, from, from a perspective, the perspective of communication as well. Should we, we have a lot, you know, we have a lot of immigrants in Norway. I mean, it’s we don’t have to go that far back when Norway was for Norwegians, you know, this is different, like we’re all New York by now. It’s, it’s so diverse out there. So should we start presenting our commercials in Polish and English and you know, all these different languages that we know are represented within our both local and national communities?

Why should it you know, should we need to think about these things? And language is one thing and then, you know, who are we using when we create commercials? Are we using like white, young, pale people with blonde hair the typical Nordic or are we actually presenting our diverse customer base in within our commercials as well? How do we talk? How do we, which references do we use all of these things? I think at some point, we need to start considering how do we want to approach this.

Now, in June month, everyone, it seems it’s become a pretty big hype, you know, to marksolidarity with the pride movement, right. So and this is also a really important question because you have the, you have the, the term pinkwashing which basically means company trying to profit on that pride movement. So by changing your logo to the rainbow colours, you know, a company with think probably that they’re providing support. 

But for the pride movement, it looks like you’re trying to, you know, capitalise on our case. But so should you, you know, if you want to be a diverse company, should you also not just think about your statements and what you do? But should you actually work for some of these things as well? Like, should you? Should you give, you know, support foundations that work for human rights? And some you know, so there are so many questions.

Sofia: there are. It’s big topic.

Merete: And I think it’s, yeah, it is.

And I think, you know, to start with, we just, we need to raise the questions, and then slowly, we can start figuring out, you know, how to approach it, and people are probably going to write books about how to do things, and people are going to start doing different initiatives and fail and learn and fail and learn again, and this is gonna evolve. 

But I think it’s really interesting. And since I am a, I consider myself a people’s person, and I really love people. And I really, I think it’s really interesting to see the differences in people, then I would really like to include this in my work and be able to, you know, create customer experiences for everyone, not just the typical customer that you target in your case. 

It’s complicated. Yeah.

Sofia: It’s really, it’s a big question that’s complicated. And not that black and white, so to say, what do you think be the benefits of having a more diverse customer experience?

Merete: Well, obviously, I think you would be able to attract way more customers. I think it would be much more fun for your employees to work in a company that focuses on diversity, both from the inside out and the outside in. There is, it is, proven that it’s, you know, you there, it’s the economics and the financials, and this is, is absolutely present, and there are so much value to gain from it. 

And, you know, from the, I suppose, also from the environment, environment, environmental perspective, you know, because diversity also includes, at least in my world, and includes, you know, taking care of our, the world we live in, and you know, making sure our children have a future and all those things. And I really think it’s going to become more and more important to stand for something and to do it, not just because you think it creates value, but to do it, because you actually mean it and live by it, you know.

Not start with the initiatives, but start with what is it that you want to be for people, and then the initiatives will come and create the results that you want. So I think there’s a whole lot to gain from this. But mostly, I think it’s going to empower your employees in a totally new way. And people are going to be more loyal to you as, as an employee and or as an employer. And also your customers are going to be way more emotional about the relationship to you, which is basically what loyalty is about, right? 

Sofia: Exactly. 

Merete: What your customer is not to like you only, but you want them to love you and this, this is a win-win for the customers.

Sofia: It really is.

So like, there are some very good like positive things, with having a diverse customer experience, loyal customers, employees, having a diverse set of employees, diverse teams, better employee experience, and so on. But how, how can you create a more diverse customer experience?

Merete: I think this starts from within. I think we need to be more aware of the diversity within our teams and our organization. And be willing to, you know, make some choices. Or at least be conscious about like, who do we hire and what, what is their background and where they come from and dare to be different. And also, I think, even in you know, in ICE, it’s really diverse, but I think diversity isn’t only like skin color or sexuality or religion or the typical things but you know, we’ve all lived lives even you and me are pretty similar in many ways. 

Right, but I’m pretty sure that if we start digging in my past in your past, we’re going to find some pretty opposite histories. So just by daring to share those and be a little bit more personal, being able to, you know, ”bjuda på”, as they say in Swedish. You know, I think starting there is it’s just going to be more meaningful, right? And this is what people are looking for in 2021. People want things to be meaningful.

Sofia: Yeah. Really good. Exactly.

Merete: And also remember that, you know, if you and me looking the, you know, so much the same as we do, we still are so different than, you know, you can only imagine what the customer base looks like. But take this in and understand that we need to be more diverse in the way we communicate, and we need to make some choices about how do we want to include as many as possible in our journey?

Sofia: Exactly. Yeah. yeah. It’s a really interesting topic. And it’s..

Merete: it’s exhausting actually.

Sofia: like where to start? 

So we’re at the final question, like final question, that I have for you. We’re now moving away from diversity, customer experience and go to a more like easy going question. 

What if, What is the most important, so we like feedback, we like the term feedback. So therefore, we say what is the most important feedback you would give to an organization who would like to become more customer-centric? Have you any tips and tricks?

Merete: Yes, you need, you need to spend money on insight. Market Insight, you know, have your analysis resources ready to understand what it is that your customers try to tell you invest in, you know, different tools that helps you understand what it is your customers need, and, and what they kind of want from you. Because you cannot improve if you don’t know which direction to go, and gut feeling is very often correct. But you need to confirm it, you know, you need to make sure that you, you’re not guessing.

So I suppose insight, this is something we learned only, you know, not long back, that the more money we invested in insight, the more we were actually able to say, you know, it’s not me saying this, this is our customers saying. Then you open doors, you know. So, so don’t, you know, if you have to save money, don’t save it on insight initiatives, because this is,this is your goal. This is where you get your kind of initiatives and where you get your drive from, and your direction.

And also make sure that the customer has a place around the table, somebody up there and management, top management needs to, you know, have this reflection that whenever you talk about initiative or some strategic direction, you need to stop and think how will this affect our customer? Will it be good or bad? And it both like how is it going away and try to analyse the situation.

So I suppose that number three, and then I, I’ve already said this before today, but you know, you need to evaluate and document the results of the stuff that you’ve done to prove that, you know, these things actually do create a better experience. And do you know, regression analysis and do you know, do your analysis, right and make sure that you understand the relationship between for instance, customer loyalty and churn. Find your drivers. Yeah. A little bit one or three things. But yeah, I suppose so.

Sofia: really, really good points. And thanks for that. Thank you for like, thank you for being here today. It was really fun to talk to you and there were some really interesting stuff you shared with us.

Merete: Thanks for having me. It’s you know, it’s really cool to be able to do this. And also I’m a huge fan of your work and yeah, it’s brilliant. I think this will probably in some ways create value as well for other people out there. I hope so.

Sofia: Yeah, I think we should have had like more time to do this. They could talk much longer I think. So we maybe have to like, meet again and have another interview or talk some more. Thank you for watching. Thank you, Merete! That was all for today.
 

The post EP 2: Inside CX by Lumoa – Democratization of CX and the importance of diversity appeared first on Lumoa.

So how do you make that happen? What should you do with negative customer feedback?

#1: Address the feedback quickly

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the more efficient your team is in solving the customer’s issue, the more satisfied the customer will be. Studies show that a faster response rate correlates with higher customer satisfaction. It is important to remember, that each customer is unique and their customer experience is unique too. Don’t underestimate the power of human connection and don’t be afraid to be proactive.

That’s exactly why TourRadar, an online marketplace for travelers to compare and book multi-day tours with ease, prefers calls to an online messaging system or email when talking to dissatisfied customers. ”When we know a customer is unhappy, we normally focus on responding to them as quickly and efficiently as possible so that we can find the best solution to their issue, – shares Carly Hulls, Head of Customer Support at TourRadar, – “When a customer is unhappy, we almost always get on the phone to give them a call as we find this is the best way to communicate through a problem. This is because conversations via email or online chat can often be viewed differently on the other side of the screen and being on the phone can clear up miscommunications easier.”

Now that it’s settled, that you have to address the negative feedback individually and efficiently, let’s move on to the strategic decisions to understand and eliminate negative feedback (check this article to get new tips on how to talk with your unhappy customers).

#2: Encourage the feedback

According to these statistics, for every customer who complains, there are 26 customers that don’t say anything (and 91% of them will simply leave your brand). That brings up the first thing you should pay attention to: check your response rates and find new ways to improve them.

Encourage leaving customer feedback both generally about your brand and also about a single important customer touchpoint. Simply asking “Based on your recent messaging with our customer service, how likely you are to recommend us to your friends and colleagues?” followed by the NPS why-question will help you a lot in getting specific and useful feedback.

As soon as you find the detractors, reach out. Eliminate the problem as soon as possible: your efficiency and speed play an important role here.

Understanding and addressing customer feedback, both negative and positive, is the cornerstone principle for Leadfeeder, a lead generation SaaS platform. “Our Customer Success Team is automatically notified if we get a low NPS score from a client, so they can reach out to investigate it further. Similarly, we learn from the users who give us a high NPS and try to improve our Customer Success functions. Recently, we did a series of 1-on-1 in-depth interviews with our customers from different markets to gain insights on the experiences of our customers, – shares Jesse Pärnänen, Director of Business Development at Leadfeeder, – You need to connect with your customers via multiple channels and understand their challenges and needs in order to improve the customer experience. It is important to ask for feedback, listen to your customers and have 1-on-1 calls and chats with your customers as often as possible. This will help the company in the long-term and help you to provide more value for your customers.”

Understanding why customers are unhappy about your product or service is even more important at scale than on the individual level.

Now, that doesn’t require cost-heavy data analysis, but a modern customer feedback analytics tool that can help you in digging deeper into the impact drivers of your detractors.

“For us, negative feedback is an essential part of growth and learning. We dig a bit deeper to understand the root cause of the negative feedback and of course, thank the customer for giving direct feedback to us. We want to maximize our learning and the feedback, both positive and negative, is important for growth and learning. If we fail, we normally have a retro meeting: what we did, why we failed and how can we prevent it from happening again.” – says Kalle Tiihonen, Head of Agencies, Nordics at smartly.io, one of the fastest-growing startups in Finland.

#4. Finally, do something about it!

Collecting customer feedback and doing nothing with it is the greatest sin of customer experience management. Bring the discussion to the table, encourage your company to work towards customer centricity, and improve the issues stated by unhappy customers. Leveraging this feedback effectively requires integrating it into a comprehensive knowledge base. This approach ensures that every piece of feedback is analyzed, understood, and used to make informed decisions that drive improvements in products, services, and overall customer satisfaction. A comprehensive knowledge base serves as a central repository for insights gathered from customer feedback, making it easier for teams across the organization to access, share, and act upon this valuable information.

Dave Dyson, Sr. Customer Service Evangelist at Zendesk, a help desk software with a global reputation, shares strategies to prioritize development areas across the organization: “Negative feedback can be about a lot of different things – the product failing to work as designed, the product missing some piece of desired functionality, or human service failures (from the support team or other customer-facing roles).

In the human-failure cases, it might be due to a structural/policy problem, a training deficiency that applies to that team as a whole, or an individual coaching issue. If it’s a product problem, then there’s the question of how many engineering resources would it take to correct the issue, how many customers are affected, and how great of a business impact the problem have. Is it worth potentially delaying other development work in order to fix this issue? Negative feedback helps in answering some of these questions.”

Companies very often forget that negative customer feedback is also a great asset if treated properly. It helps you to shape your strategy, enlighten the prioritization discussions, and will guide you in the right direction.

A complaint is not the end of your customer relationship It’s just the beginning.

The post 4 Ways to Deal with Negative Customer Feedback appeared first on Lumoa.

In this article, I won’t tell you how important it is to act on customer feedback (although if you’re interested, check this article on how to collect customer feedback). Instead I’ll share with you real instances where our customers improved their business KPIs, strategies and culture once they understood the voice of the customer.

Customer feedback in marketing automation

Do you have the resources to communicate directly with your customers on an individual basis? Our customer didn’t either, and that is why they use automation to help their customers overcome common problems.

To give you an example, the performance of one of their products was not meeting target expectations. Thanks to our service they were able to quickly figure out exactly why, and they released an urgent software update. Afterwards if a customer complained about performance, and our customer saw that they hadn’t completed the software update, they were able to send an automated notification telling them to complete this step so they could fix the problem.

Results?

Everyone’s happy and the sales of the new device went up.

Customer feedback in employee training

Another Lumoa customer, who operates in the healthcare industry, wanted to inject the Voice of Customer into its daily operations. They implemented a collection of customer feedback and filtered the feedback on an individual doctor basis.

Later the company encouraged the best-performing doctors to share their best practices and help the worst-performing doctors. They organized training together and even invited some customers. These measures influenced not only the customer experience, but also brand reputation, and as a result the revenues.

Customer feedback in shaping communication styles

Another customer collected feedback from its customers and after reviewing the drivers of customer experience, noticed that they had been receiving very negative feedback about the customer service attitude and messaging style. They took this on board and rewrote the email and letter templates that the customer service team used and provided coaching on creating a better customer experience.

The problem was successfully addressed and the feedback about their customer service noticeably improved afterward.

Customer feedback in adjusting services

How can customer feedback help SaaS startups? One company divided customers into segments after collecting feedback, and they found that customers who used CRM-integrations with their software were much more satisfied. They used this insight to help them make a critical decision: integrations, which had previously been an extra paid service, were to become free of charge. That increased the overall customer experience and satisfaction levels.

Customer feedback in determining pricing

A company released a product and followed the feedback in real time. Soon after the release, they noticed that although their customers liked the product, the feedback was pretty negative.

They drilled down into what drove the NPS score and it turned out that the customers complained a lot more about the pricing of the new product than the actual functionality or design. So the company adjusted the prices and… the volumes of negative feedback increased even more!

The reason for this was that the customers who had bought the product earlier with the higher price, complained when the price fell as they believed they had been overcharged. These issues were resolved by offering discounts, pricing was no longer an issue and customers’ happiness level increased and stabilized.

BONUS CASE: Can you use customer feedback in building new services?

The answer is- you not only can, but you should! Here’s what one of our customers did to achieve 3 times higher customer satisfaction and advocacy rates:

When developing new services, this company took all their learnings from analysis of their innovation processes, which allowed them to view the impact drivers of customer experience. Customer feedback was used as inspiration and a proof of concept. It was brought up at service design workshops as well as board meetings. With the keyword search feature on the Lumoa dashboard, the company was able to see what the customers were saying about any relevant topic, e.g. functionality of the mobile app.

Because the new services were inspired by or based on customer feedback, the resulting customer feedback was super positive.

Conclusion?

“The term ‘customer experience’ won’t exist in the organization of the future. It will be so deeply entrenched in a company’s product, process, and culture that it will be synonymous with the brand and represent the only way to do business” – Ann Lewnes, SVP and CMO, Adobe” 

Building a successful customer experience strategy is essential to the success and competitiveness of your business. Customer feedback can and should play the main role in designing your business strategy and operations.

The stakes are higher than ever, as more than 50% of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t anticipate their needs. Brands that satisfy their customers and deliver an impactful customer experience will rise to the top. Will you be one of them?

The post 5 Real Cases Where Customer Feedback Influenced Business KPIs appeared first on Lumoa.

Before now, collecting customer feedback involved manually filling out and analyzing surveys and questionnaires. However, more and more businesses are turning to advanced analytics tools, such as those offered by Lumoa, to gain deeper and more targeted actionable insights. In addition to boosting customer loyalty, advanced analytics uncover hidden patterns or trends that manual analysis processes might have overlooked.

So, how can you make the most of collecting customer feedback? Let’s find out.

Why Customer Feedback is Important

One happy customer will share their positive customer experience with 9 people. However,  unhappy customers are even more likely to share their experiences: on average, an unhappy customer shares their bad experience with 16 people.

Customer feedback holds significant value, with 83% of customers feeling loyal towards companies that listen to, respond to, and resolve their concerns and complaints. Moreover, 73% of customers now say that customer experience (CX) is the number one factor they consider when deciding whether to purchase from a company. This data underscores the importance of collecting customer feedback, not just for improving sales but also for safeguarding the organization’s reputation.

Traditional feedback methods regularly fail to provide businesses with the insight required to maintain customer satisfaction and grow. For example, common pitfalls include:

•         Asking closed questions
•         Poorly structured surveys that fail to capture the scope of customer sentiment
•         Manual analysis processes are time-consuming and at risk of human error

These issues hamper a business’s understanding of how customers feel about it. Either they fail to capture the full depth and scope of customer sentiment, resulting in flawed data that does not reflect customer opinion, or time-consuming and inefficient analysis methods fail to provide high-quality, actionable insights.

As it becomes apparent why customer feedback is crucial in maintaining customer loyalty and improving sales, it’s also essential to understand the substantial benefits on offer to complete the picture.

Integrating customer feedback into an overarching business strategy delivers a vision of what their customers want and need. There’s no better way to understand this than by getting it from the horse’s mouth rather than making assumptions and imposing ultimately useless solutions on them. This information helps identify common themes around what customers want and uncover potential issues. These insights can then be used to inform product development strategies, and when addressed proactively, businesses can troubleshoot problems before they escalate and mitigate any risk to the organization.

Modern Methods for Collecting Customer Feedback

Methods of collecting customer feedback have evolved enormously from the days of cold telephone calls or market surveys conducted using a clipboard and pen in a noisy shopping mall. Today, businesses increasingly use more agile, user-friendly, and intuitive methods to gain faster and more accurate insights.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) are two of the most popular metrics used to gauge customer satisfaction today. While both metrics provide organizations with a clear and concise view of customer loyalty, they offer different insights.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty and has grown since its design by Fred Reichheld in 2003 to become one of the most widely used metrics in measuring customer satisfaction.

Around 64% of organizations use NPS to measure their customer service performance. Customers are asked, “How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?” on a scale of 0 to 10. Depending on the result, respondents fall into one of three categories:

• Promoters (answer 9 or 10): Loyal customers who would recommend you
• Passives (answer 7 or 8): Satisfied customers but could switch to the competition
• Detractors (answer 0 to 6): Unhappy customers with a high churn rate

The score is calculated by finding the difference between the percentage of promoters and detractors. The higher the number, the better your NPS.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Meanwhile, customer satisfaction measures the specific customer experience with each transaction, making CSAT a more transactional metric than the relational NPS score.

CSAT is usually calculated through a short customer survey after a business interaction. Typically, customers are asked, “How would you rate your recent product experience?” with customers able to select 1 to 5 stars.

The CSAT score is taken as an average of all customer responses, with the highest score showing the best level of customer satisfaction.

Now we know the difference between NPS and CSAT, here are the best modern methods of collecting customer feedback:

Short Surveys

Your immediate reaction might be to create a survey and ask what your customers think about every single aspect of your service. Don’t. Short, snappy surveys are one of the most effective ways of collecting customer feedback. Both NPS and CSAT scores are calculated from short surveys containing a single question and provide a valuable snapshot of how businesses are viewed by their customers.

Short surveys are particularly effective as they do not take much customer time and effort. Thus, they’re likely to have high response rates while providing insight into areas an organization is doing well or needs to improve. Understanding how to design a feedback survey to gain the most significant insight is essential to an organization’s success.

QR Codes / Social Media

Meanwhile, more avenues are available to businesses to engage with their customers than ever before. QR codes on posters, a business website, or receipts can be scanned for a quick snapshot of their service.

In addition, social media is a valuable method for businesses to collect customer feedback, particularly after a product launch, to understand whether their customers feel the product meets their needs.

AI Sentiment Analysis and Chatbots

The emergence of AI technologies is revolutionizing the collection of manual customer feedback. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis can assess free text feedback gained through surveys, email, and social media.

In addition, more businesses are seeing the benefit of AI chatbots as a valuable tool in their customer feedback collection process, as they allow customers to provide real-time feedback. AI then uses machine learning, NLP, and sentiment analysis to extract data and provide in-depth, actionable insights.

Why Analytics Matter in Customer Feedback

So, you’ve collected reams of data. How on earth do you process the results to gain actionable insights? Analytics plays a considerable role by transforming raw data into insights that drive change. We’ve already looked at the advantages of AI in data collection. While AI provides huge benefits in collecting customer feedback, it’s important to be mindful of the limitations of purely relying on Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) tools such as Chat GPT.

A recent survey undertaken by Lumoa showed that almost 65% of 10,000 user reviews analyzed by GPT analytic tools alone were filed under ‘General’ rather than a more specific category. When the same 10,000 reviews were analyzed by GPT and Lumoa’s powerful analytics, more than three-quarters of reviews were accurately categorized. In addition, customers have raised concerns that businesses that use GPT tools to generate content feel less authentic.

These results show that AI has been a game-changer during the analytics process, but only when harnessed in the right way. Rather than relying on time-consuming manual processes with potential human error, AI-powered analytics can process and interpret data from structured and unstructured sources to deeply understand customer sentiment.

While metrics such as NPS and CSAT can be quickly generated to provide a useful strategic overview of customer satisfaction, these AI-driven analytics provide deeper insight that can be used to drive improvements and reduce risk.

Nutrition firm Huel saw a 10 percentage point increase in its NPS by using Lumoa’s analytics tool, which doesn’t simply enable businesses to ask questions but gain insights to answer them and effectively close the feedback loop.

Similarly, Fibrus, a UK broadband provider, had a TrustPilot score of just 1.7 and an NPS of -28, indicating severe customer dissatisfaction. Within eight months of using Lumoa’s analytics tools to gain valuable, actionable insights, the NPS rose to +56, and the Trustpilot score increased to 3.9

The value of using analytics to drive improvements in customer satisfaction is demonstrated in how US firm Johnson Outdoors uses Luoma’s customer analytics tool to better understand its customers’ needs. Whenever a score of 5 or below is received, a Customer Service team member proactively reaches out to the customer to ensure they feel heard and understand the specific issues.

In addition, when their NPS score fell below 50, Lumoa provided the context behind the overnight drop, helping them identify the exact issue related to a product update and inform the engineering team to take immediate action.

In each of these examples, improvement in customer satisfaction has been derived from understanding the importance of collecting customer feedback and gaining outstanding, targeted customer insights.

Conclusion

Leveraging analytics to collect customer feedback is growing in importance as businesses seek ways to remain at the head of their industries. Companies that neglect their customers will see a high churn, particularly with 78% of customers giving up on a transaction because of a negative customer experience.

Businesses that value their customers’ comments and make them feel heard benefit from improved customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). They are more likely to grow through word-of-mouth recommendations to new customers from existing ones who have had a positive experience.

As AI continues to revolutionize an organization’s ability to collect and analyze huge swathes of feedback and data without error while delivering outstanding actionable insights, businesses must adopt these technologies to stay at the forefront of their market sectors.

So, if you want to elevate your customer experience and gain actionable insights on how to grow your business, sign up for Lumoa’s free trial today and kick-start your customer feedback revolution.

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