Your CX team is struggling to get the right customer feedback. What are you doing wrong?

Struggling to gather the right customer feedback in your CX team? 🤔 It might be time to rethink your approach. Are you asking the right questions? Ensure they are clear, relevant, and open-ended. Is your feedback mechanism user-friendly? Complex surveys can deter responses. Timing matters. Are you reaching out at the most convenient time for customers? Diverse channels. Utilize multiple platforms to increase response rates. Incentivize feedback. Sometimes, a small incentive can encourage participation. Let's turn feedback challenges into opportunities for growth! 💡 #CustomerExperience #FeedbackStrategies #BusinessGrowth #CXInsights"

The starting point should not be about the question you ask, but the answer you want to get. And be 100% confident that the answer you get can be acted upon, rather than be part of a vanity metric. Know where this customer feedback fits in to the wider listening programme. And appreciate what has gone before, and what will come next for the customer, so the feedback initiative is a logical and aligned step in the customer's journey. Knowing what you want to know and where the customer is in the journey, provides the brief you need to start the conversation. And that is what you want some dialogue from the customer. You can do alot with verbatim, but little with a score, so preferably (very few) questions which encourage an open response

I often see surveys that are overwhelming. They try to answer everything under the sun, instead of focusing on the few things that really matter for them to understand. Start by defining the decisions you are trying to make, and design your questions to get at the insight that will inform your decision making.

Be it a customer or your own self, asking the right question at the right time is key when it comes to gathering insights and turn them into valuable actions! When questions are too generic or irrelevant to the actual customer experience, the feedback you receive might either be unhelpful or misleading. To solve this, it's crucial to design questions that are specific, open-ended and directly related to the aspects of customer journey that you're aiming to improve. Tailor questions to the specific touchpoints or interactions they relate to ensuring that they are relatable and understandable to the customer.

Even though we try, we hardly ever manage to create non-biased questions. We tend to create questions meant to support our own beliefs. What is critical though, is to have a clear purpose for each question: don't ask questions for the sake of asking, ask with a clear purpose in mind, something you want to either confirm or reject. There needs to be a plan in place on how to use such data. Also, you should first look at quantitative questions, to identify pain points, then add qualitative questions to make sense of the trends you observe.

Preguntar en el momento equivocado o abrumar al cliente con demasiadas preguntas en cada etapa del journey es un gran error. Es fundamental recopilar información en los "momentos de la verdad" para el cliente o en aquellos que queremos profundizar y mejorar. Y, por supuesto, hacerlo en el momento idóneo. Imagina preguntarle a alguien que acaba de comprar un frigorífico sobre su satisfacción con la compra antes de siquiera haberlo probado. Sería como preguntarle a un comensal cómo le pareció la cena mientras está pensando qué pedir.

We all today receive so many feedback, NPS and other surveys from lots of organisations and there is a real risk of survey overload. Sadly too often with many of these surveys (particularly on the B2C side) you as the customer never hear anything back. Getting the timing right (and the audience right) is critical and you need to be conscious of what other things are impacting the customers right now, so they provide the feedback, rather than ignore the survey!

Timing is everything when it comes to soliciting customer feedback. If you reach out too soon, the customer might not have had the full experience with your product or service. If you wait too long, the details might no longer be fresh in their mind. The key is to find the optimal moment when the experience is still vivid but complete. For example, shortly after a product has been delivered or a service has been rendered is often a good time.

A typical customer journey is made of multiple "key moments". For example, the exploration is a key moment. The purchase is a key moment. Engaging with customer service, is a key moment. Asking for feedback in the middle of a key moment is almost always a mistake. Make sure the moment is over to ask about it. For example, don't ask how satisfied a customer is with the resolution of his problem if he is still waiting for an answer - the feedback will definitely be dramatic.

The best channel is usually the one the customer is most comfortable with. If your customer engaged with you on messaging channels, this is where you should ask for feedback. If he did via email, email it is. Using the same channels shows you care. Using different channels is a clear sign that your processes are more important than your customer's preferences.

Provavelmente estão aplicando pesquisa no canal errado. Geralmente o melhor canal é aquele que o cliente está acostumado ou aquele que acabou de executar uma ação, por exemplo, o melhor canal para aplicar pesquisas com clientes que acabaram de concluir uma compra no site, é no próprio site por meio de um link.

Using the wrong channels to collect feedback can greatly reduce the response rate and quality of insights you gather. In my view, it's important to meet your customers where they are. This means identifying and utiilizing the communication platforms they prefer and use regularly, whether it's EMail, Social Media, SMS or in-app notifications. The choice of channel should also reflect the nature of the feedback you're seeking. For more in-depth insights, a personalized message via the customer's preferred channel might work best. Another way to gather the same would be via quick polls conducted via social media or in-app.

A escolha inadequada dos canais de feedback pode ser um obstáculo significativo para obter insights valiosos dos clientes. Depender de apenas alguns canais pode resultar em uma amostra não representativa, deixando de capturar as diversas perspectivas dos clientes. É essencial diversificar os canais, utilizando aqueles que são mais convenientes, acessíveis e preferidos pelos clientes. Explorar opções como e-mail, SMS, telefone, web, mídia social e ferramentas de feedback no aplicativo permite uma abordagem mais abrangente.

Ensuring that customers know how and where to provide the feedback is important. This could include online surveys, email, or dedicated feedback forms.

The best incentive is to make your survey about them and what matters to them. Not about you, your processes, metrics or plans.

The best incentive that will not bias the feedback is closing the loop. Sure, you can offer a gift card or a chance to win a lovely trip on an island, but if you don't close the loop, customers won't do it again and you will have failed building a habit. Closing the loop (meaning taking concrete actions based on the results of the survey AND informing customers of such actions as a result) is the most valuable type of incentive. If you can couple it with a nice gift, all the better.

Stay away from incentives! It's a nasty tactic to gain feedback which can backfire if not implemented properly. Customers in order to get their desired incentives always ends up taking the surveys / responses, however, it might not be the right feedback you are looking for as the mindset of the customer would be to give a positive feedback in order to get the incentive that they are looking for. Therefore, avoid incentives!

Offering any kind of incentive which has some monetary value is the wrong way to approach this. Customers will be more open to provide their feedback if they feel they are truly being heard. So the best incentive is not one that gives them discounts but instead give them value. If they see first hand that there feedback is somehow being incorporated into the product, even if in the smallest degree, that can motivate them to participate in the next survey. Focus the surveys on improving their success, not on your own internal metrics or processes.

Make sure your customers know what will happen with their feedback. Mostly companies give a monetary prize. This can lead to biased results and customers are not always waiting for this. They want your product to improve so make sure you give the right incentives and make your customers feel heard.

Analyzing customer feedback inaccurately can lead to misguided conclusions and decisions. It's crucial to approach feedback analysis with a clear, unbiased mind and a structured methodology. Quantitative data should be statistically analyzed to identify trends and patterns, while qualitative feedback should be carefully categorized and thematically analyzed to extract meaningful insights. Employing tools like sentiment analysis and text analytics can also uncover nuances in customer sentiments that might not be immediately apparent.

We always look at data through our own personal lens, made of biases and beliefs. Analysing the data is a tough exercise because you can tell any story from a dataset. A great approach would be to analyze the data, draw early conclusions, then verify such conclusions with a qualitative data analysis, engaging with a small pool of representative customers that could confirms your assumptions.

Even the best gathered feedback is absolutely useless if it doesn't lead to actionable improvements. A common pitfall is either overreacting to individual pieces of feedback or conversely, failing to act on clear trends due to intertia or resistance to change. To avoid this, it's important to prioritize feedback based on its potential impact on the customer experience and the feasibility of implementing changes. This requires a cross-functional effort to ensure that insights are translated into concrete actions that are tracked and measured for effectivness. Engaging customers by communicating the changes made in response to their feedback can also help to close the loop and enhance the overall customer experience.

My experience isn't that teams are taking the WRONG action. It is more often the case they are taking NO action. If you want to build a successful Voice of the Customer Program, start by ensuring you have built a strong feedback loop, where customer insights are not just delivered to product teams but are acted upon. Build in the right processes to hold teams accountable to making improvements based on customer feedback. And if no actions can be taken, it is a good sign that the survey instrument being used is asking the wrong set of questions.

Desde Customer Experience transformamos negocios a través de las personas. ¡Vamos, somos personas! No basta con simplemente recopilar información. Hay varios puntos a tener en cuenta: 1. No quedarte en la capa superficial, tratando de profundizar en el feedback recibido. 2. Tomar decisiones en base al feedback recopilado y analizado. De lo contrario, no habrá servido para nada el trabajo previo. 3. Debes demostrar a tu cliente que te importa, respondiendo a su feedback y haciéndole saber qué medidas se están tomando para mejorar su experiencia.

La experiencia del cliente debe tener el foco siempre en las personas. Si tras obtener feedback no haces nada con él o lo que haces deriva en proyectos que únicamente favorecen a la compañía ¿en dónde tienes puesto el foco, en ti como compañía o en el cliente, en entender sus retos y problemas y darles solución?

They are not considering a double-blind data source, which is unbiased. If your team hasn’t used a double-blind competitive benchmark to understand the truth, perhaps now is the right time.

Closing the feedback loop will give the customer the perception that he is important to the organization and is listened to. This positive experience increases the likelihood that they will be inclined to provide feedback again in the future. Feedback should be considered an integral experience and should be delivered as a service to the customer.

Surely the premise of the question is wrong, "Your CX team is struggling to get the right customer feedback. What are you doing wrong?". What is the "wrong" customer feedback? Feedback you don't like? Feedback on something that's important to them but something you find to hard to deal with so you wish they would give feedback on something else? Customer feedback is always "right", at least from the customer's perspective and that's the perspective that matters - how you deal with it, how/where/when/format you collect it is what is going to be wrong.

You need to ask yourself if it's actually the wrong feedback that you're getting or simply not the feedback that you expected or wanted. There's a big difference. The "wrong" feedback can often be a very big eye opener and something that is much needed to help get unexpected and very useful insights from customers.

If you work in a large organisation there is a good chance marketing research have a heavy input into the relationship customer feedback activity. Research teams (market or customer) are not customer experience teams. They think about the insights they need to gather and how to go about it efficiently, and get that insight used. They are purist and we have several in our business. But they do not think about the feedback interaction with the customer as a customer experience, which it is. This is an opportunity for the customer to experience the organisation in a supportive caring way, one which says we listen because you are valuable. To achieve this the interaction should be designed and delivered as a critical customer experience.

- Audience understanding is a must. You need to know you customers you are surveying. - What would work best is talking to your customers. Try finding “why” such a response. You’d know the reason, could be a lengthy survey, too many questions, the timing not right, not a valid survey, or maybe they hate you as a brand. - Do take your frontline people's thoughts, and encourage them to speak to customers digging in or reason “empowering with guidance and training”. In a nutshell, have conversations with people and uncover the truth, plan and work towards getting those resolved, and watch and track the improvement!!