Are You Thankful for Your Customer Feedback Tool?

A Sponsored Article by OpenText

With the Thanksgiving holiday around the corner and other holidays approaching, I expect retailers, product and other service providers to solicit consumer feedback via surveys.

According to an ICMI infographic that we collaborated on titled, “The 4 Phases to Achieving Customer Delight,” the four phases are:

1. Chaos—e.g., 1 out of 5 contact centers are overwhelmed by data
   
2. Content—e.g., 39% of contact centers use data to ID customers trends
   
3. Clarity—e.g., 1 in every 3 contact centers has a formal voice of the customer program; 65% have increased their focus on the customer experience in the past year
   
4. Competitive Advantage—e.g., 71% believe organizations have to work harder to provide a good customer experience; 77% think they need to be more consistent with their customer experience
   

I have been involved in many facets of the discussion on designing, delivering and taking action on customer surveys. Designing surveys in itself is a separate article, workshop and even a job profession. My point is that the insights from customer surveys must be connected with other data that you are capturing to understand whether or not you are moving the needle on customer experience. There are an abundance of customer feedback tools to use to generate surveys but they are not all created equal.

Below are my considerations to review as you determine if you are thankful or wish for a robust customer feedback tool:

• How does your existing survey tool enable your voice of the customer program?
  
• Is your survey interaction-driven?
  
• Is your targeted survey in the customer’s preferred mode?
  
• Are you using speech analytics to listen for customer feedback alongside of asking for feedback via surveys?
  
• Is the survey tool integrated bidirectionally with your customer relationship management application (CRM)?
  

Organizations continue to use customer feedback tools to solve a variety of needs. Those range from listening to specific questions in specific channels, to listening to unsolicited information in public channels. They then interpret the information and use it to improve the business and improve employee behavior. And on an ongoing basis, they monitor customer perceptions. Organizations must strive to ask, listen and connect the feedback holistically in order to move the needle on customer experience.

To learn more about a holistic approach to approaching surveys, check out the Webinar On-Demand titled, Stop Sending Bad Surveys.

Until next time…

About the Author

Roger Lee, aka Dr. WFO, is the Solutions Marketing Director of Customer Experience Management (CEM) Growth Initiatives at OpenText. He has over 20 years of experience in contact center operations, information management systems and quality. Roger believes that finding ways to improve the customer experience is essential—and that the responsibility for improvement spans the entire enterprise.