Decoupling acting on feedback from analyzing it
Editor’s note: Jeannie Zaemes is director of growth marketing at Alchemer.
"If you don't close the loop, they don't give feedback the next time," said the project manager heading up an internal customer experience (CX) program at a large pharmaceutical company. This team has decoupled acting on feedback from analyzing it so they can act on the feedback and close the loop while the data is being analyzed as part of the overall satisfaction rating.
Closing the loop before analysis for this internal services team has helped increase response rates by 30% and improved satisfaction by 21%.
How most companies handle customer feedback
Most companies collect feedback the way you probably have experienced – you give a score or a thumbs up, the company asks you for more detail and then you never hear from them again. The data they collect is aggregated, anonymized and fed into a data lake or BI tool for analysis. This data is used to report trends in customer satisfaction ratings, buyer trends or voice of the customer (VOC) and CX programs.
But the implied contract between respondent and researcher was always that the respondent would get something for their time. Often that came as compensation, occasionally acknowledgment and sometimes a response.
Lately, the marketing research industry has broken that contract. People are rarely compensated for their responses, and even more rare is when a person is acknowledged or responded to for giving feedback. This is because most companies collect, analyze and then act. By the time companies act on the feedback, most people have forgotten that they gave feedback in the first place. Additionally, because the data is aggregated and anonymized, there is often no way of responding to the person anymore.
Restoring the contract by closing the loop
Restoring the contract is not as difficult as it feels; it simply involves rethinking the collect-analyze-act order. This involves making analyze and act a nonlinear process by having feedback trigger immediate actions while the data is aggregated for reporting. Simply adding an action, such as sending a Slack or e-mail message at the end of the survey, is enough.
Actions can be as simple as sending the results to sales or customer support for action or as complex as contacting specific people responsible for an account. One European gaming company has feedback directly populate each player's profile instantly and automatically while still collecting scores for reporting. This allows support managers to see if a player is using trigger words such as "addicted" or "broke," in which case the support manager can decide the best course of action.
This approach can dramatically improve how team members feel when dealing with customers. One software company responded to feedback and solved the customer's problem over the weekend. When the customer got in on Monday, they called the support line and remarked that they thought nobody was listening. The customer never expected a response, let alone a solution to their problem. They changed their Net Promoter Score (NPS) from poor to great just because somebody responded.
Acting does not stop reporting
Even if you respond fast and keep your customers happy, almost everybody also has to report aggregated results to show trends and overall performance. The European gaming company still compiles ongoing NPS scores while updating player profiles instantly. The process is not interrupted by sharing data for action. In fact, the team was also able to move to an ongoing NPS process, rather than a quarterly one, with reports generated as needed.
This company decoupled act from analyze so their process is no longer linear. The data is sent to the support team for action and is almost immediately available for reporting and analysis. A large business-to-business enterprise software company does the same. Feedback creates action items for account managers while data is collected and analyzed both across each customer's enterprise and across all customers.
Improving CX: Why the paradigm needs to shift
"You need to make sure that your customers know that their feedback directly impacts the people who own that relationship," explains the head of global voice of the customer at one large enterprise. "It doesn't matter how customer-centric you believe you are; what matters is how your customers feel."
Research by Forrester Consulting, "Smoke And Mirrors: Why Customer Experience Programs Miss Their Mark," found that less than 25% of respondents report that their organizations effectively address customer feedback, and only 19% report that the voice of the customer is well-embedded in how their organization runs. At the same time, 53% of respondents claim that their data collection process hurts their strategy, and only 29% say they can meaningfully act on their data.
Adding a component to improve CX
The problem isn't that everything needs to be ripped out and replaced, but rather augmented. Simply adding a component that enables immediate notification and action – yet still integrates with existing systems – can make a huge difference. According to the Forrester report, only 6% of companies have fully automated communication to appropriate internal teams to act on feedback, while another 11% have some automation.
Making changes, such as rethinking the order of operations or adding some automation to a current customer feedback process, can enable companies to address challenges and turn a dissatisfied customer into one who feels heard and appreciated. It also restores the feedback contract, compelling more people to provide honest feedback, knowing that they will be heard.
The addition of such a solution enabled one head of global voice of the customer programs to say, "We were able to help automate some steps in the VOC process." This gives the company the ability to connect robust VOC data with other enterprise data to create a complete picture of each customer. "It's more important to look across all the data sets you have to truly understand how your customers are experiencing your services and products. It doesn't take much to make people feel heard, liked and part of your brand."