Customer Insights: The Driving Force Behind Exceptional Experiences

As customer experience grows as the key differentiator between businesses offering the same services or products, brands need to be listening to their customers. According to a study by Walker, by the year 2020, customer experience will be more important than even the price of a product. Meaning that customers won’t care that they have to pay more if they know they will receive exceptional treatment.

Customer insight should be guiding the user and customer experience within the business. If it’s not, there is a missed opportunity where businesses could be enhancing their service offering in line with what their customers want and appreciate.

Using a variety of market research tactics centred on Voice Of The Customer (VoC), businesses can collect this insight fairly easily, and they are winning at this as more options become available for different business models. Creating a repository of customer information and insight is the next step in this journey, but the real work starts with transforming what you learn into something actionable.

What good is all this valuable insight if you don’t turn it into something your customer needs? Here are a few tips that can help your business take all of that “gold” and turn it into something tangible.

Ensure All Insight Is Gathered And Recorded Effectively

Some actionable customer insight from social channels, LiveChat streams and support calls might not be finding its way into your repository, which is a total waste of having access to that information. Businesses need to have a process in place for collecting this data and putting it into a format that records the source, date, time of feedback as well as what aspect of business it relates to and which team members need to act on it.

Working from a complete system will make it easier for employees to follow through with taking that information and turning it into positive change for the business.

Lead And Others Will Follow

The business needs to have a leading figure within the business who will champion all customer experience activity and also guide subordinates on how to follow suit. Depending on the size of your business, this could be an executive or team manager, but this person needs to live and breathe the ethos surrounding your CX activity. This includes driving the vision home for all to be inspired by, ensuring all the relevant team members and stakeholders are in place and aware of their responsibilities with regards to execution, and most importantly ensuring that metrics are transformed into strategy, which is then transformed into action.

Create A Planned Approach To Making Data Work For You

With the right kind of leadership, you can delegate the appropriate responsibilities within your organisation to effect change using VoC insights. The following roles and responsibilities exist, but you might find more as you put these into practice:

1. The data collected needs to be checked and analysed to ensure it’s been captured correctly and that it actually has appropriate value for the business to learn from.
2. The “actionable” element of the data needs to be identified and extracted and these all need to be prioritised in order of what is more critical and will provide the most benefit.
3. Key team players need to be brought into the mix to execute on what needs to be implemented. This could also involve getting other teams involved, which might require complete project management to ensure the job gets done effectively.
4. Upon successful implementation of the specified actionable item, it needs to be determined if the action has actually solved the customer’s problem or not. Has the gap been closed and has it improved the experience for the customer in doing so? This is the most important aspect as it will ensure that every item actioned has actually provided benefit for the customer.

Still Battling Within Your VoC Data Collection?

Learn from other people’s mistakes. Here are a few common problems that businesses encounter when trying to extrapolate the information from their customers. A few small tweaks can make all the difference in capturing the right data in the right ways.

1. Always respect your customers and their time. If you’re trying to sap too much information from them at any given time, they might become resentful and this will show in their feedback. Keep your questions to below five and make them really count. Also refrain from asking their feedback too often. For example, sending out a questionnaire every month will also become tiresome and you won’t get the honest, detailed feedback you’re hoping for.
2. Keep questions short and to the point. Asking multiple questions in one go will get you watered down answers and maybe even no answer at all. Be direct and don’t leave the interpretation of what you’re asking to chance.
3. Don’t make your answers a requirement. If you’re asking a range of questions, don’t make each and every one required. Some people won’t have all the answers or won’t want to give them to you. If they have to choose between not answering any at all or answering them all begrudgingly, they will more than likely choose to delete your questionnaire, which leaves you with nothing.
4. Don’t lead customers with your questions. Saying something along the lines of “We love the reporting function on our software, don’t you?” will not lead to a fair and free answer. Keep questions straightforward and unbiased.
5. Avoid speaking above your customer’s typical language. Using industry jargon could be confusing and result in less customers offering their time to give their feedback.

As involved as the process might be, investing in your customer experience can only pay off in the long run. Need more help?

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