The greater the distance between a business and it’s customers, the greater the risk of becoming disconnected from customer needs, and in turn, stalled or negative growth. Fortunately, there are a number of methods to monitor customer feedback to help maintain a pulse on how customers are feeling about your business. To understand whether your business is ready to collect customer feedback, read this earlier post on the key considerations.
1. Feedback by Phone
Investment: Low
Measurement: Low
Expertise: Low
What it is
With the availability and pricing of phone calls today, this can be an easy and inexpensive way to collect anecdotal customer feedback. For smaller companies especially, this is a practical way to “touch” customers to gather their input. Day-to-day operations are reliant on voice communications and will remain so into the foreseeable future.
What it’s not
As companies grow beyond a handful of customers, calling every customer in a structured fashion becomes unsustainable and inefficient. Conversations are subjective at best, making them unreliable to track over time. Sampling a portion of customers is a common next step, but often focuses only on the most lucrative customers. In addition, it can be difficult to understand the whole truth from customers without using a third-party.
2. Relationship Survey
Investment: Low
Measurement: Medium
Expertise: Medium
Relationship surveys evaluate the overall health of a customer relationship, rather than individual interactions, as laid out in transactional surveys below. Common customer satisfaction or customer loyalty surveys fall in this category. These surveys can be administered in many forms including: email, in-app, by phone, snail mail or in-person.
What it is
A holistic view of how customers are feeling about your business can aid in strategic decisions, budgeting prioritization and continuous improvement efforts. These surveys can easily track feedback themes across a business and raise red flags before fires get out of control. They can be a low investment and require few questions for customers to answer.
What it’s not
Questions about specific customer interactions are not asked, and therefore limit detailed root-cause analysis. Additional research or integration of transactional surveys can provide a deeper dive. Also, as surveys become prominent in society, it is ever more important to make the survey experience easy and enjoyable, while being responsive to the feedback itself.
Related Products/Services
getSayDo
Gallup
3. Face-to-face Feedback
Investment: High
Measurement: Low
Expertise: High
Whether wining and dining a customer, sitting down for a formal review or studying customers in their environment, there’s no substitute for face-to-face interaction.
What it is
Face-to-face interactions provide a high degree of personal touch and enable additional feedback that other methods lack – body language, office environment, culture, etc. Research has shown face-to-face meetings build more trusted relationships, particularly in situations where behavior speaks louder than words. Typical market and observational research companies can help bring structure to this type of feedback.
What it’s not
While face-to-face interactions can be great for digging into the details of a situation, it is not optimal for broad scale adoption. Just as with phone calls, face-to-face conversations are difficult to measure, unless there is a formal script to follow – not very conversational. And while most people don’t outright lie about their current situation, human nature tells us that they may not share the whole truth. How many sales people have been told in person that “Everything is going great!”, only to miss out on business to a competitor.
Related Products/Services
Brandtrust
Ipsos
4. Transactional Surveys
Investment: Medium
Measurement: High
Expertise: Medium
A transaction occurs every time a customer interacts with a company – i.e. buying a product, calling a help line, etc. Depending on the business, these transactions, and the corresponding communications, can take many forms and require different methods to monitor. Products best for focusing on transactional surveys mostly fall into two buckets: custom survey tools and customer service platforms.
What it is
Transactional surveys ask questions specific to one or a single set of interactions, and can provide great value when paired with other data points. For instance, when a business makes an e-commerce sale, the amount of the sale, the elapsed time, and the path the customer takes to complete the purchase, all provide great context for why a customer may or may not be happy with this specific experience. The data is highly measureable and can divulge patterns that lead to operational efficiencies and growth opportunities.
What it’s not
Transactional surveys are complex and cumulate a lot of data. The time, investment and expertise needed to set up and analyze the data fast enough to be responsive to customers is often only viable for larger businesses. Prioritizing which interactions and how many to monitor can also be an internal challenge. The higher touch the industry, the more these surveys are necessary. However, beware of letting individual customer fires distract from the bigger picture.
Related Products/Services
SurveyGizmo
Qualtrics
Surveymonkey
Salesforce Desk
Zendesk
Formstack
5. Social Media
Investment: Medium
Measurement: Medium
Expertise: Medium
Customers can share their thoughts on a whim, on any number of social media channels. This complex and unstructured environment can no longer be ignored. While social media can be used for many purposes, we will speak solely to monitoring feedback.
What it is
Think about social media as a real-time communication tool. When customers have a question or comment, they not only expect you to be listening, but to respond. With a few free tools, companies of any size can read these communications and respond to them. And for organizations with a lot of online chatter,feature-rich tools can provide a deeper view of what matters to you.
What it’s not
Social media has been compared to the wild west for a number of reasons: identities are not always known or verified, the loudest voices are often the only ones heard, and conversations can spread like wildfire. This dynamic can be very beneficial, when managed well. However, the unstructured nature of social media is often associated with a place for disgruntled customers to vent – providing a misrepresented view of the company as a whole.
Related Products/Services
Hubspot
Hootsuite
Marketo
Buffer
Shoutlet
5. Integrated Monitoring Program
Investment: High
Measurement: High
Expertise: High
Depending on the use(s), these integrated programs can be called many names – like Voice of the Customer (VOC) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – but they are all a part of Customer Experience Management.
What it is
Although it can easily become a 6-to-7-figure investment, businesses can use multiple methods to monitor and integrate customer feedback into their continuous improvement and management efforts. A monitoring system can pull in many sources of customer data (i.e.: phone, email, surveys, social media, etc.) and present uniquely relevant dashboards for each employee or function in real-time. Customer journey mapping is often the first step to understanding what an integrated program would require. Once a map is created, businesses can prioritize which customer interactions to start monitoring and what resources are necessary to optimize the customer’s end-to-end experience.
What it’s not
Even at the large investment, these programs require sizable staff and continuous investment to setup and maintain. And while the wealth of data may show a clear opportunity for change, this method doesn’t ease the process of getting the rest of the organization onboard. The level of comprehensive measurement that systems can now provide to once fragmented or subjective functions is bringing a new level of accountability that can drastically change how business is conducted. Not that this is bad, but it can ruffle some feathers upon implementation.
Related Products/Services
Medallia
Walker Information
Forrester
Satmetrix
Oracle
Foresee
MaritzCX
Clarabridge
6. Customer Exit Interview
Investment: High
Measurement: Low
Expertise: Low
Customers make vendor changes when they are not happy or a better alternative exists. Often businesses never get the opportunity to ask why, and are left wondering “What happened?!”.
What it is
An exit interview is obviously the worst case scenario, puts a business into a completely reactive state, and should be avoided at all costs. When a business listens to and predicts customer desires, they can minimize the need for an exit interview at all.
What it’s not
This is not a strategy, nor a good method for monitoring customer feedback. Even if you are able to speak with the customer after they have left, you aren’t likely to get the whole story anyway. Aim to collect candid feedback from customers during the business relationship, and avoid this reactive situation altogether.
Written by Michael Manross, CXO of getSayDo, @mmanross
