Seven strategies to help translate Customer Feedback into measurable CX improvements
Sabio Group, one of Europe’s leading independent customer experience and contact centre innovators, has identified seven strategies to help CX teams transform Customer Feedback data intelligence into actions to drive measurable improvements.
Research suggests that despite continued growth of customer feedback initiatives, around eight out of ten Voice of the Customer (VoC) projects still fail. While organisations clearly recognise the need to understand customer feedback when shaping their customer experience strategies, unfortunately very few actually demonstrate real business value.
“Even though there are plenty of ways to capture the Voice of the Customer, whether it’s surveys, speech analytics or social media analysis, it’s imperative that organisations commit to acting on this intelligence,” said Simon Thorpe, Sabio’s Head of Customer Insight Solutions. “That’s why closing the feedback loop is so important – indeed it’s estimated that around 11% of customer churn can be prevented by simple outreach. And the more that organisations can do to build engagement into their feedback processes, the quicker they will see their NPS and CSAT scores improve.”
Sabio’s seven strategies for transforming customer feedback initiatives:
- Work through the fragility of enthusiasm – Executive interest in Customer Feedback initiatives tends to peak early. This often co-incides with a realisation that change can be hard and takes time, or when people start actively challenging the data being presented. CX teams always need to be looking for insights or tactics that can keep stakeholders across the business engaged
- Combat spreadsheet fatigue – organisations typically spend significant time and resources completing and distributing Excel tabular insight tables with little to no engagement. If insight updates are failing to command attention, organisations should start to use different techniques
- Understand the art of good storytelling – if CX teams are struggling to build engagements it’s essential to find effective ways to turn Voice of the Customer insight into actions. That means translating feedback into clear stories that directly address stakeholder concerns, and that enable actions that lead directly to transformation
- Identify key stakeholders – Any CX improvement strategy require leadership sponsorship, however it also requires support from stakeholder groups across the business such as Digital, Billing, Services or Logistics. Feedback needs to be timely and reliable, and compelling enough to convince stakeholders that it can help them deliver against their own objectives
- Establish common interests with stakeholder groups – It’s common sense, but it’s important to speak the right language to different stakeholders. Exec teams will be concerned about operating margins, EBITDA and competitive difference, Operational areas will focus on productivity drivers and cost efficiency, and Contact Centre Management and Frontline staff will have their own concerns. Apply the right lens to ensure your feedback appeals to the right personal and business drivers here.
- Recognise the importance of the frontline in the insight loop – CX feedback shouldn’t be owned solely by the marketing department. Instead, by providing contact centre agents with real-time access to feedback, there’s a real opportunity to not only unlock development improvements but also to directly tie agent results to improvements in overall CX performance
- And make sure you close the loop – failing to reach out to customers and close the loop on the feedback they provide is still perhaps the biggest missed opportunity evident in many of today’s Voice of the Customer programmes. Regular Sabio Insight research suggests that only 6% of organisations proactively reach out to customers to respond to their feedback
As one of Europe’s longest-established and most successful customer experience solutions specialists, Sabio is particularly well placed to help organisations optimise and drive their voice of the customer programmes. Sabio’s Voice of the Customer approach is a combination of its web-based Sabio Navigator software and an expert support team that helps CX teams interpret the data, identify problems and make changes.
