Getting Customer Feedback for Enhancing CX: 3 Key Insights

Customer experience (CX) is the emerging competitive differentiator for brands. According to Dimension Data’s ‘2017 Global Customer Experience (CX) Benchmarking Report’,¹ 70.9% of boardrooms recognize CX as their most important strategic performance measure. CX can broadly be defined as how customers perceive their interactions with your brand.

The Importance of Customer Feedback in CX

In 2016, 48 CX leaders were posed a question by NGData: “What’s the single most effective way to improve CX?”² 28 of them said that interacting directly with customers to gather feedback was key, while another 10 or so emphasized using technologies and organizational systems to do so.

HuffPost contributor Vala Afshara³ cites an important survey finding reported by customer strategy consultant thinkJar’s Esteban Kolsky: For approximately every 26 dissatisfied customers who churn away from a company, only one actually registers a complaint. The rest, says Afshar, simply leave. Imagine what’s just happened: You’ve lost customers. You don’t know why. Now you have to fix the problem. But you don’t know what the problem is. CX effectively slips when you don’t have customer feedback.

“CX slips when you don’t take customer feedback.”

What happens when you do? Forbes writer Tim Jahna4 lists three fundamental improvements that kick in when you get customer feedback:

You get to know what your customers like and dislike
Your customers feel valued because they’re being asked for help
You get a chance to implement their suggestions, making their experience better
Key insights to getting customer feedback

Be Goal-Driven

Be clear what aspect of the CX you want feedback on. Generic questions on CX rarely yield data that can be acted upon. For example, you might want to get feedback from your customers on the self-service features of your product. As help desk software maker Help Scout’s Gregory Ciotti points out,5 you must first drill down to the specific CX aspects you plan to address and have an action plan in place for analyzing and deriving insights from the data you collect. Otherwise, seeking customer feedback will prove counterproductive. It would not only waste your time and money, but, far worse, disappoint your customer. You’d end up achieving the very opposite of what you set out to do.

Focus on the Customer Journey

In one of the episodes of the McKinsey podcast,6 Fanderl et al. make a strong case for treating customer journeys – rather than individual touchpoints – as being the true indicators of CX. In the same vein, gathering customer feedback should not be restricted to a few touchpoints, but should be extended to all relevant touchpoints throughout the customer journey . Combining feedback from multiple touchpoints will provide you with more in-depth data and could reveal insights that you may have missed by only looking at one touchpoint.

“Customer feedback should be gathered from all relevant touchpoints of the customer journey.”

Tap into Every Opportunity

Set up systems that enable you to listen to customers and, better still, to have conversations with them. To make sure that your communication with the customer is effective, use automation and personalization and leave yourself the option of switching between online and face-to-face interactions with your customer when you need to.

Here are some ways you can collect feedback from your customers:

Use surveys and polls online, in person, on social media and via email. Try and keep them short and to the point. SurveyMonkey.com, Typeform.com, GetFeedback.com and other sites with online survey tools are handy options.
Place feedback boxes, comment boxes and customer contact forms right on web pages, as appropriate. (Check out the short survey tools at FreeFeedbackForm.com and Qualaroo.com; Qualaroo is persona-based.)
Embed widgets like Help Scout’s Beacon (see: https://www.helpscout.net/live-chat/) in your website, preferably those that provide the option to live-chat, when necessary.
Deploy virtual assistants, especially the artificial intelligence (AI)-based ones, which are becoming easy to install and affordable.
Videoconference with easy-to-use platforms such as Zoom.us and Appear.in.
Monitor customer reviews and engage on social channels, forums, and communities.
Track customers’ online behavior, using customer analytics and AI tools, i.e., OpinionLab.com, to gain real-time insights.
Asking for customer feedback is great for improving CX. Moreover, it’s probably the most reliable way of knowing how your customers feel about your product or service.