Jeannie Walters: 0:00

Are you finding that surveys are still useful, but not necessarily giving you the full story? Then listen in to this episode of Experience Action.

Listener Question: 0:10

Hi, Jeannie. Uh quick question for you. Surveys don't really work for us. Our clients rarely respond, and when they do, it's often vague or too late to act on. What are some better ways we can listen to what our customers are really going through? Thank you.

Jeannie Walters: 0:30

All right, this is such a rich question and something that I know a lot of customer experience leaders are dealing with. So let's dive in. Here's what I want you to think about. First of all, instead of thinking about a survey program, I want you to think about building a true feedback strategy. Now you hear me talk about strategy a lot because in customer experience, for some reason, we skip it sometimes. We go straight to the tactics, we go straight to measurement. What I want you to do is first of all understand what your feedback strategy is. We want a listening map. We want to really understand where those conversations are happening and go there instead of totally relying on the feedback that customers are being asked for specifically to provide to us. So this means we want to dive into things like interviews, observational work, social channels, service channels, forums, all the places that customers are actually sharing feedback based on their true experience. And now we can optimize this by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to surface the silent customer issues and scale theme detection so we know where to prioritize our efforts around improving the customer experience, innovating that experience, and making sure that we are delivering those business results that are incredibly important to our organization. So we want to make sure we are the humans who are guiding the AI throughout this. Let's talk about a few specifics. First of all, consider doing some quick customer interviews. Now, I will say this does not have to be scientifically significant all the time because sometimes, and I know my data people, I know you're hearing me going, wait, stop. But sometimes a few interviews are enough to really surface those emotional responses to help us pull some really powerful quotes from customers. That's what moves things, that's what moves our leaders to actually want to invest in the resources we need. So instead of just looking at survey results, we are actually sharing with them. I saw this in the face of the person I was interviewing, and they shared this incredible quote. Now, if you do several of these, AI can be really helpful in helping you pull from the transcript those quotes, those themes, and even recommended follow-ups so that you can both close the loop, as that's so important to do with customers, but also we want to get emotional context at scale. So that's the first thing I would consider. The next thing we want to observe, we want to make sure that we are going where the customer goes, how they actually use our products and services. Things like follow me studies or mystery shopping can reveal behavior and uh even emotion that customers are not necessarily going to share on a survey. So we can validate some of this by just observing customers. We do a lot of this work at Experience Investigators. Whenever we do journey mapping with our clients, we also include observational work where we go and actually see how is this working for customers today? What are they doing? Timing how long it takes for people to stand in line, watching how they use the app, all of those things. Now, observation can also be used with analytics. So the way people are behaving through your digital channels can tell you a lot about how they're actually experiencing your products and services and their customer journey. Another thing to do is really mind that unstructured feedback that we get. We often have in surveys open-ended text. We have verbatim directly from customers. So we might already have some high-level sentiment analysis. I would say if you can, take this one step further with uh natural language processing, NLP, and speech analytics. A lot of the tools out there available today have resources like this. So think about things like what does voice to text calls, what are they telling us? What are the chats telling us? What are the service tickets telling us and reviews to find those recurring pain points and early warning signals that we can use to prioritize the improvements we want to make. And of course, we want to listen on social. Customers often will share with one another or with their peer groups before they share directly with the brand. So social listening is incredibly important. We want to make sure that we are tapping into what they are saying about us out in the marketplace when they don't necessarily think that they're talking directly to us. Again, AI tools can help us spot those spikes and unmet needs through social and really looking for what could be viral complaints and competitor comparisons are also incredibly helpful here. So if they're talking about your competitor, you want to pay attention to that as well because they're either saying, wow, this is great, something that maybe you don't offer yet, or they're telling you things to watch out for by their complaints about your competitors, too. We also want to empower our frontline staff so that they have a way to share feedback with the right channels in the right moment. And what I mean by this is a lot of times we have folks like cashiers and customer service people and salespeople, and they don't have a way to share the feedback that they're hearing directly from customers. We want to we want to really empower them to do that. And of course, we want to make sure that we are bringing the quiet customers into view. These are the people who are never going to respond to a survey. They might never complain. That's just not who they are or what they do. They're just going to quietly walk away. So this is where we want to think about things like can we look at things like churn risk? What are those behaviors that happen or don't happen that tell us somebody's not going to renew this contract? Somebody is quietly, you know, competitively looking around, shopping, comparison shopping. Somebody is really talking to our competitors already, but they're not telling us that. They're all smiles and rainbows when they talk to us. So we want to look for signals specifically that indicate churn risk and then use that to really make sure we get proactive there and improve the experience to help them move through it. This is really where when we are listening to customers in the right way, we can not only have a bunch of quick wins, but we can also really see the long-term future. We can say if we do these things and improve in this way, we think customers will respond in this way based on all of these signals that we've gathered, not just from surveys, but from all these other listening points. You want to make sure you have a true feedback strategy. And so there are five essentials to this. One, you have to have your goals tied to your customer experience mission. You've heard me say this for almost everything. It makes everything else easier. So ask yourself, what will this feedback inform? What will it do for us? Don't just ask questions because you're curious. Make sure you're asking the right questions that you have the power to act on. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and your customers' time. We want to think about who and when, which customers and which touch points. Where are the most critical places to listen to customers and how will we do it in that critical moment? Sometimes it is something like a transactional survey. How is this very specific moment in the journey for you? Sometimes it's more about behavior. If we do X, are they doing Y? And if not, we have to find out. We have to dig in through observation and other things to really learn about why they're acting the way they are. We want a listening map of multiple posts, and some of these will be AI driven now. So really think about where we can gather this. Are you going to do all those things I mentioned? Maybe, maybe not. Think about what you can do. Can you do interviews? Can you have a robust social listening program? Ask yourself things about where you can really tap into the customer and their emotions, their behaviors, their actions, their feedback, even if it's not really explicit feedback that they're giving directly to you. We also want to align inquiries to outcomes and actions. So measure what matters. And this means that we want to look at not only can we do this, but think about could we actually do this in a small way? Could we run a pilot program? Could we learn something from insights and say, hey, let's test something over here to see if we get different feedback? You want to run those small tests because that will help you not only gain the resources and the buy-in that you need, but it will also tell you, is that the right thing to do based on how customers respond to those small tests? And then we want to close the loop and govern the AI usage, especially. This is why we need humans. This is why we need to really make sure that we are being transparent and visible about our use. And we are ensuring that we are, of course, always checking with our cybersecurity teams and with our legal teams and with our AI governance teams about how we're using this technology. But then we also want to be very transparent about that with our customers as well. So we want to close the loop both internally and externally through a feedback strategy as well. So a couple things you might want to try. You could do something like running a small survey pilot. This is where you pick a moment in the journey where you know something's going on and you think about where we could enhance what we're getting from this survey? What information and data do we have access to that would inform the answers we're trying to get, the insights we're trying to gather. So doing that in a small way first can help you feel a little more confident about rolling this out throughout the customer journey and then creating a true feedback strategy around that. Your feedback strategy has to be tied to your overall customer experience strategy. This is why we use that tool called the Customer Experience Success Blueprint, which helps us weave this in. There are a couple resources on our site at experienceinvestigators.com. And then if you join CXI membership, we have an entire course all about feedback strategy and voice of the customer programs. So if you want to really level up, that's what I would recommend you do. You go to experienceinvestigators.com for our Learning Center as well as for the membership. I hope that's super helpful. It's so important to listen to our customers in all the ways that they're talking to us, whether sometimes they know it or not. So I hope this was helpful to you. I love your questions. Don't forget, you can always leave me a question at askjeannie.vip. Thanks for being here. See you next week. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigators.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our year of CX program, and more. And please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.