When reviewing Voice of the Customer (VOC) functions, it is frequently the case that we find ourselves looking at a range of surveys. But only a range of surveys. Is the only way to listen to customers to proactively solicit their feedback? The simple answer is no.
If you get surveys right, – they are a great way of giving quick-and-easy access to feedback, in a structured and easier-to-analyse format. They can certainly help you understand the direction the wind is blowing and lead you to customer-led change.
However, it is important to know the context in which your surveys exist; what aspects of the customer experience are you surveying? What proportion of interactions are surveyed? What is the response rate for the survey? It’s also worth contemplating whether only certain segments are likely to be responding to your survey, such as age bands and satisfaction levels, because surveys are often negative-biased.
To the earlier point, when done well, customer surveys can be a valuable device in the VOC toolkit. But you may also have access to further data sources which can help enhance your customer-led view of their experiences. These can assist in the development and delivery of improvements to resolve identified frictions. Here are some examples:
Customer Complaints
Most businesses have a formal way for customers to register complaints. These tie into a process for handling that complaint. This is especially true for regulated and ombudsman-linked services, where complaints performance must be tracked and reported.
Commonly, businesses only see complaints through the lens of case management. Which is, of course, an important task to be completed. Looking through a VOC lens, what we also have is a population of unsolicited feedback from the customer base about critical frictions that they are facing. Whilst exclusively negative in nature, complaints remain a great opportunity to see where your customer base draws its red lines. It may be the case that a complainant will cease to use your services. But learning what got them to that point can help you prevent other customers from reaching this point of no return.
Analysis of this dataset works in the same way that you would approach the free text responses on a survey. If you currently struggle to perform these qualitative analysis techniques, make developing these skills a priority. By optimising these techniques, complaints can be structured. They identify key business challenges, elements driving failures, and critical details underpinning them.
Customer Emails
Similar to complaints, customer emails – and other forms of direct customer communications such as letters, text messages, etc. – can be analysed. They go beyond the simple case management processes. Treated as a combined dataset and using qualitative techniques to analyse, we can identify the business areas and journey elements. We can also identify the critical frictions driving these customer communications.
Customer Support Interactions
When customers directly interact with Support functions, this tends to be either verbally (phone) or via a live chat function (human or chatbot). We will consider both under the heading of Support interactions. As with emails and complaints, this is another great source of information for understanding the frictions and challenges customers face.
Often businesses can have their agents systemically log the demand driver during the call. But this rarely highlights the root cause of the issue. As an example, the system may enable us to see a spike in a subject like ‘refunds’, but there is no additional context to help us see why.
Speech Analytics has been a great development in the world of Contact Centre performance. It enables businesses to assess the performance of agents more efficiently and more accurately through the transcription of calls. These transcriptions, and the transcripts from live chat environments, can also be used to give a similarly effective view of the customer experience.
As with the other data sources listed above, qualitative analysis of these interactions can help take us beyond the simple demand driver level, through to the root cause. Using the earlier example where we may systemically know that ‘refunds’ have spiked, a deeper analytical dive into the data may flag something like ‘free trial’ as a common theme. Further review then helps us learn of a ‘problem cancelling at the end of a free trial resulting in payment taken’. Reaching this level of detail is critical when it comes to resolving the problem.
Ratings & Reviews
Often, the world of customer reviews overlaps with the world of customer surveys. Many companies now proactively request reviews. When done this way, commonly the customer will be asked to score some parts of the experience, alongside a free text explanation of their experience. This is a survey by any other name. Of course, there are other review sites where the customer is leaving a review purely of their own volition too. These also result in a free text discussion of the interaction and possibly some scoring.
The pathway through analysis here is also one of qualitative methods. As we would look to do with a regular survey if there is any scoring present (especially a rating score), we can perform quantitative analysis to help understand the success of the experience. But then we need to build some structure into the free text through qualitative analysis. This will help us identify the drivers of success and failure – as this source enables the customer to discuss both the good and bad – and dive deeper into the root causes.
Social Media
While social media is not a universally relevant feedback channel for all businesses, it can be an exceptionally powerful tool when it aligns with the nature of the organisation and its audience. Social platforms provide an opportunity for customers to share real-time, unsolicited opinions. These can reveal authentic sentiments about products of service, ranging from highly positive endorsements to complaints. Of course, the balance of this feedback often depends on the industry and type of customer engagement typical within that sector. For example, businesses in service-driven industries, such as telecommunications, may find social media is primarily used as a forum for complaints and issue resolution. However, brands in lifestyle, retail, or technology often experience a more dynamic mix of positive and negative discussion.
Regardless of the make-up of the sentiment in your social media engagement, it remains another potentially rich source of free text for analysis. As above, this requires expert qualitative analysis, potentially to a greater extent than for all the other sources. The challenges are created by the increased prevalence of linguistic tools such as slang, dialect and sarcasm. Despite this, if done well it can be a great source of learning about the tastes, appetites and frustrations of your customer base, and enable us to find the root cause of these motivators.
Summary
By leveraging other valuable forms and sources of customer voice outside of surveys, businesses can gain enhanced insight into the experiences of customers and the challenges they face when interacting with you. Several of these sources naturally occur within the walls of most businesses already. They are almost exclusively unsolicited sources of information. This does not make them any less powerful as customer voice sources. If anything, their customer-proactivity makes them more powerful.
By leveraging these perspectives, and developing on the skills required to analyse them, we can broaden our customer understanding whilst diving deeper into the specific drivers of experiences. From this we can generate more accurate and applicable customer-led actions to improve the end-to-end customer experience.
Want to find out more? Our Customer Experience team are experts in helping businesses revolutionise their CX strategies. Get in touch with us today to discover how we can help you.
