In the fast-paced world of business and technology, how we listen to customer feedback has changed dramatically over the last decade. From call centres and traditional Voice of Customer surveys to social listening and online intercepts, modern businesses can struggle under the deluge of feedback and customer data they receive.
The good news is this deluge can be managed and turned into meaningful customer insights.
Volume is not the only hurdle
While sheer volume is a factor, it is not the only challenge that can make it difficult to get insights and useful feedback from customer listening initiatives. The other key issue is fragmentation.
The truth of the matter is while many organisations already listen and collect customer feedback, over two-thirds remain at low levels of CX maturity and the way in which this feedback is managed is often ununified. Whether it is different teams running different programmes or different programmes being used for different levels of the business, a siloed approach to customer listening is a sure way to leave valuable insights—and issues—largely invisible across the business.
The trick is setting up your customer listening in such a way that the data and insights are shared, delivered in a useable format (which may vary business to business), and managed in a way that doesn’t overwhelm one team or person.
With this in mind, here are three ways you can set up your customer listening to help you gather feedback at volume and extract deep and valuable insights to drive impactful change.
Related content: Test the maturity of your Voice of Customer programme with our free workbook.
1. Build one source of truth
When it comes to providing visibility to all your customer listening initiatives, integrating all your listening streams from across the business into one place is a game changer. This could take the form of a dashboard, an intranet page, or a company circulated report. The point is to make the feedback you’re gathering accessible to all teams and levels of the business and, ideally, in an intuitive and digestible format. In the case of dashboards, because they are online, interactive and contain visualised data, they allow different teams or roles within the business to delve deeper into the insights to extract the right level of detail they need for their operations.
Important note! Also take care to implement metrics that are both meaningful and relevant to your business. For example, a Customer Effort Score (CES) is a useful indicator of the amount of effort a customer must expend to go through a process or resolve an issue. It’s a great metric for tech and software businesses, or for customer service and troubleshooting teams. But for a service-based business, such as a corporate law firm, CES is less applicable and its presence on a customer listening dashboard can be a distraction at best or misleading at worst.
2. Leverage AI and automation
Like customer listening, AI and automation has also developed in leaps and bounds in recent years. With its help, you can quickly and easily consolidate all your listening data and surface insights faster.
It is especially valuable in helping businesses manage the volume challenge. For example, call centres generate huge amounts of data. Today, AI can help businesses analyse calls to identify common queries, issues, and complaints, and automatically feed these back to the business.
“AI can also help identify key themes in customer surveys through tools such as text analytics and sentiment analysis,” says Rachael Weaver, Operations Director at Perceptive. “It's a powerful way to surface insights quickly and turn them into action, but human thinking is still essential for context and prioritisation."
Which brings us to our next point.
3. Don’t forget the human layer
For all the dashboards and AI tools available, nothing knows your business better than the people in it. From providing context to prioritising what matters, the last piece of the puzzle is to apply human thinking to your insights.
For some businesses, this may be done at the executive level or in planning days. For others, this may involve bringing in third-party teams to work with them to use the insights to develop strategy, communications, processes or improvements for the organisation.
Shifting from reactive to proactive
By putting these solutions in place, you can build a customer listening framework that continually captures feedback. This “always on” approach means you can catch issues early, respond quickly, and ultimately drive proactive change and growth.
Customer listening doesn’t have to be hard. Get in touch with us to learn more about our framework and solutions—and how they can help your organisation stay better connected to your customers.
