MC: 0:00

Experience Action. Let's stop just talking about customer experience, employee experience and the experience of leaders. Let's turn ideas into action. Your host, Jeannie Walters, is an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker and founder of Experience Investigators, a strategic consulting firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. Ready set action.

Jeannie Walters: 0:31

You all know what we do here at the Experience Action Podcast. You ask questions about customer experience and I do my best to answer. Let's listen to the latest and greatest question.

Listener Question: 0:45

Hi Jeannie, I'm fairly new to CX. How can I know what my customers think?

Jeannie Walters: 0:49

First of all, congratulations. You're new to CX. That means that you have entered this world of customer experience, where you get to explore and investigate, as I like to say, to really understand what our customer is expecting. What are they trying to tell us and how can we better respond to them? How can we better proactively and intentionally design their journey to give them exactly what they need in the moment that they need it, and in doing so, that drives winning business results. So welcome, we're so glad you're here.

Jeannie Walters: 1:25

So when I hear this question, what I think about immediately is the need for a feedback strategy. A lot of times, what I see organizations do is say we need to listen to customers and they just start doing it. They just start having so many questions on their surveys, they start having polls, they are asking on social media, they're adding feedback everywhere they can, without really a cohesive and centralized strategy about not just how to do it and not just what to ask, but why they're doing it in the first place. So the first thing I want you to do is think about what is it you want to know? What is it that you can impact? If we are just asking questions of hey, what do you want customer, and we can't really make those changes, then we're wasting everybody's time. It's super important to really think about customer experience as this holistic approach to understanding how can we meet and exceed our customer expectations while delivering on behalf of our organization. That means sometimes we have to make choices. Customers might complain about certain technology or certain processes, but we might not be in a situation where we can change those very quickly. So what that means is we're going to have to make some decisions. What do we really want to know? What can we change?

Jeannie Walters: 2:55

So, of course, there are several ways to collect feedback from our customers. Now, feedback is a little bit of a misnomer because of course, it's what they're telling us. That's feedback. But feedback is also found in how they behave. What actions are they taking? What are they telling us with their dollars spent or not with us? What are they telling us with their next purchase? What are they telling us through their behavior and actions? What are they telling us through their behavior and actions? So here are a few ideas to get you started. Number one figure out where are those places in the journey that you might already have operational data or behavioral analytics that tell you a little bit about what customers want from the jump.

Jeannie Walters: 3:40

If you have a contact center or a customer service organization and you can tap into what are people calling about? Where are they getting stuck? What are they complaining about? What can your frontline people tell you? They hear a lot directly from customers. Talk to them. And then, of course, if you want to gather feedback directly from customers, go ahead and look into.

Jeannie Walters: 4:02

Can you start some survey programs? Can you offer a few questionnaires? Can you even do what we call intercept interviews, where in the moment of the actual experience, you can say hey, I'd love to know what you think about this. There are several ways to approach this. I also love one-on-one interviews, following up, saying what did you like, what did you not like, how can we learn more? How can we better serve you? Then there's social media monitoring. This is when they're talking publicly, either about your organization or simply about the product, the service, the industry that you are serving. That can give you a lot of insights on what are they saying when you're not there.

Jeannie Walters: 4:46

There are so many tools that can do some of these or all of these for you. You can start small. You can use some of the free options out there and pilot a smaller group and see if they're going to respond and if you're getting the information that you expect. You can lean into some of the education out there about how to develop a great survey, how to incorporate this in a larger CX strategy. We, of course, have tons of resources for you at our learning center at experienceinvestigatorscom.

Jeannie Walters: 5:18

And then I would also look at kind of what analytics and data are already available to you. Do you have website analytics? Can you track what are they doing in the site? Are they taking the next logical step or are they getting stuck? What about purchase histories? Or understanding how people are making those decisions around purchase and around how much they're spending with your organization and around how much they're spending with your organization? All of those can be really helpful in understanding what customers are not necessarily even trying to tell you. They're just living their lives. They're just trying to get things done, but through their behavior, action and feedback they are telling their story. We have to tap into that. So we always think of this in a more strategic way.

Jeannie Walters: 6:06

I want you to think about a feedback strategy before you jump in too far, because if you're only doing these ad hoc ways of listening and if you don't have a connective strategy to really help people understand what to do with this information, then you might get stuck in the role of what I call being a number narrator. This is when you're reporting out on metrics, week after week, month after month. You're saying this number is going up, this number is going down. People are telling us they like this, they don't like this. But if nothing is done with that information, there's really no point in collecting it and reporting out on it and, in fact, the fate of the CX professional: sometimes the messenger is blamed for the message. Be very, very careful about that. Make sure that you have a clear point of view on what we need to do with the insights, the learnings that we get from collecting this feedback and not just saying here it is.

Jeannie Walters: 7:10

Here's how I think of the feedback strategy. We need to incorporate it in the larger customer experience strategy. What is our intention with our customer experience. What is the proactive way that we're designing the journey so that they will not only feel supported and valued in all the things we want customers to feel, but also how can we help them take that next step with our organization in a confident way? We want them to renew the contract, we want them to refer to their friends, we want them to feel good about their purchases and make another one with our organizations. At the end of the day, we are all in business, so we have to stop only talking about what's in it for the customers and make sure that we understand that connection of if we do this well, that is a gain for our organization.

Jeannie Walters: 7:54

Are you getting a lot of complaints? Are you getting a lot of service calls? Do you have to make a lot of refunds? Those are metrics as well that you can look at as feedback, and are there things you can do to prevent those things? Are there things you can do to make that so that everybody in the organization understands what to do so we don't have so many requests for refunds? That's a win for your organization as well. So think big about what you're trying to do and then start drilling down into okay, how can we put this feedback together in a way that makes sense?

Jeannie Walters: 8:31

First, I want you to think about meeting customers where they are. We sometimes expect people to drop everything and when they get a survey emailed to them, think oh good, I get to tell this company everything that they want to know. We are all survey fatigued at this point. We have overdone it folks and customers feel that we feel that as customers, some customers will never give you that feedback. Some customers will always give you that feedback, and those spectrums are the ones who sometimes get a lot of the attention. In the middle there is this bell curve of customer who sometimes will tell you how they feel, because they either are really upset about something or really delighted. And then there are people who are really in the middle and they're telling you things that maybe aren't so useful. What are we supposed to do with all those neutral responses? So this is why it's so important to think about what is the actual feedback that you want and that you can use.

Jeannie Walters: 9:33

So, for example, if you're piloting a new technology or a new digital experience, you might want to specifically get transactional feedback in that moment. Offer it in the moment and say you know what? Here's an in-app prompt and we just want to know how did you feel about this experience? Was it easy or not? There are so many different ways to do this, so look into what metrics will serve you the best and what mechanism will also serve you and the customer the best. So think about where you can meet them, where they are to make it as easy as possible for them, but also really zeroing in on the feedback that you want, then I want you to prioritize those real-time insights.

Jeannie Walters: 10:20

If you start seeing a pattern, if you start seeing a lot of customers are giving you feedback at a certain point in the journey, then make some urgency around that. Report that out in a way that people can connect with. Why does this matter to us? Well, if we don't fix this, they might not continue on the journey. Our customer lifetime value will go down. They will go to our competitors. Create that sense of urgency around building that business case for whatever improvement you want to make there and make sure that people understand the impact of that once it's made. Just like we want with our customers to close the loop, we also want to close the loop with our colleagues and the different teams who work on these improvements. So closing the loop has to be part of your strategy.

Jeannie Walters: 11:09

When customers give us feedback, we need to give them some reassurance right away that we heard them and then, if we use that feedback, we want them to know this is how we're addressing that. If we don't take those steps, they feel like they're yelling into a void. They will not trust the next time we ask them for feedback, because they're not getting feedback on the fact that this is important and valued and we're using it on their behalf. We also want to look for patterns, not just responses. This is where tools like AI can really really help. AI is very good at understanding and looking at patterns faster than we can as humans, so let's take advantage of that. Let's look for those patterns around.

Jeannie Walters: 11:55

Okay, it seems like people are starting to get frustrated earlier in the journey than they used to. What's going on, and then you can start reverse engineering, looking for those root causes that you can correct so that you can prevent the frustration to begin with. At the end of the day, this is really about understanding why you are asking for feedback, understanding what you're going to do with it before you even ask for it, and taking those very important steps once you have the feedback. You want to turn the insights into action. You want to make sure that you're closing the loop, both inside and externally with your customers and, ultimately, you want to make sure you are continuously improving the customer journey, and that's how you get the business results that you are looking for. So again, I want to welcome you to the customer experience community.

Jeannie Walters: 12:48

You will find CX professionals on the whole are pretty generous with understanding that we're all in this together. We're all advocating for our customers and there's no one perfect way to do this. So lean into that, look for different communities and resources, because we are all in this together and, as I like to say about the mission of my organization, we're doing this to create fewer ruined days for customers, and that's no small thing. So congratulations, and if you or anyone out there want to learn more about where you might be on your customer experience strategy journey, check out our CXI Compass.

Jeannie Walters: 13:32

This is a tool, takes a few minutes, it's free, you can fill out a few questions and then we'll give you a little bit of a report on where to prioritize, based on our CXI Navigator Framework. There are four sections that are equally important and sometimes we're really good at one of them and we might need some attention to another. So check that out at cxicompasscom, or you can visit it through our site at experienceinvestigatorscom. Thank you for this question. Thank you for all you do out there and keep them coming. Don't forget you can leave me a question at askjeannievip and you might just hear answered on the Experience Action Podcast. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next time. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigatorscom, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our Year of CX program and more. And please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.