How to “Passively” Access Customer Feedback Without Hassling Your Customers
How to “Passively” Access Customer Feedback Without Hassling Your Customers
When contacting consumers about their experience via phone, e-mail or social media, companies risk a change in perception about the experience of the brand. Dependence upon customer replies is the inherent flaw of traditional methods such as surveys and focus groups to gather vital customer input. For one, customer satisfaction surveys by phone or e-mail are inherently a point of friction. Survey requires brands to continually ask customers to participate in some sort of fashion at every touchpoint – whereas survey fatigue and rapidly declining response rates are the outcome. Worse, most responses are from very happy or very dissatisfied experiences. The resulting data becomes skewed to the extreme. Diminishing participation and extreme positions result in data collected which may statistically not represent the overall customer experience.
The traditional tools used to study customer opinions and behaviors have to battle several cognitive response biases that can skew reality. For example, customers may receive a survey and are asked first to rate the overall quality of the product and then rate their recent experience with the call center representative who took their call. The customer is more likely to give the representative a poor rating even if they handled the call well if they remain frustrated with the product; an insight which could lead companies to believe that its service delivery is a problem, when in truth the product was the source of customers’ frustration.
There is value inside surveys and focus groups, however companies have an opportunity to expand their aperture of customer feedback rather than pestering one’s own customers.
To get well-rounded customer insights, meet customers where they are. Customers already provide feedback without having to be asked for their opinions. Customer sentiments are present within every call, every email, and every chat session that your company has with its customers. Comments are made in every exchange beyond the central issue being discussed. This information is minable and, when aggregated across all contacts, forms additional views of the experience. This passive feedback is a wealth of information which is rarely mined.
During live customer interactions, customers describe exactly what they are thinking rather than trying to communicate through the medium of a survey instrument with canned responses. The natural language customers use in calls and digital interactions are a much richer form of data than survey scores. These insights from calls contain a selective, highly valuable, type of feedback. Buyers usually don’t contact companies just to tell them how great they are. They call because something has gone wrong or they need help.
Companies using passive feedback have the capability to analyze 100% of customers’ feedback in calls and other contacts that are often moments of truth in the customer journey. For example, if a customer calls reporting a problem with a software solution and describes their intended task, it is possible to both identify the issue and understand the customer’s desired solution. These multiple pathways inside conversations offer a large range of useful data ranging from emotion, sentiment as well as ideas and opinions that would not often been found in traditional feedback mechanisms.
Collecting passive feedback, not only improves the experience, but it also get 100% participation from every customer that ever contacts your company without the need to worry about typically single digit survey response rates.
The purpose of collecting customer feedback is to understand the drivers behind customer satisfaction, customer retention, and sales. Passive and unsolicited feedback offers direct access to the meaning behind customer feedback while keeping satisfaction high by simply by not pestering customers for feedback.
HOW TO CAPTURE AND ANALYZE CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
Even a decade ago it would have been almost impossible to collect and analyze all the passive customer feedback companies have available to them. Call monitoring is usually reserved for improving individual agent skills. So much of the conversation from the consumer is ignored beyond solving the problem at hand. Yet there is so much more available in every call or online exchange between consumer and brand.
Now, automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) use machine learning and artificial intelligence to transform audio of speech into structured data that’s ready for text analytics. Armed with this rich source of customer intelligence, companies can filter through the key words and phrases customers are using to describe their needs and problems, and pivot processes or marketing messages to reduce attrition and attract more sales. Aggregating all of the feedback collected regardless of source makes for a more complete view of the consumer’s view of a brand.
Mining passive customer feedback is quickly going from competitive differentiator to an imperative. Leveraging the massive untapped source of customer intelligence that comes from passive data collection, requires a platform such as LucidvueCX which can collect both structured and unstructured conversations utilizing automatic speech recognition technology, and transform all sources of information into actionable insights. Aggregating passive consumer feedback utilizing technology instead of relying on consumer responses allows brands to better know what marketing messaging is working and what to adjust. All while maintaining the best possible experience for your customers.
