Embrace the Pull and Right-Size the Push in the Evolving Landscape of Customer Feedback
by Jason Kapel & Aaron Wuollet
Like the village criers of olden times, Customer Experience (CX) professionals have spent years begging colleagues and leaders to listen to what our customers have to say, to care about the customer voice, and to incorporate customer perception into the design of processes, products, and experiences.
At Prudential, the Voice of the Customer (VOC) team pushes out reports of customer insights with hopes employees read them. Push reporting is often the first step toward embracing a customer-obsessed culture. But it’s only the first step. The top-down approach of push reporting doesn’t go very far unless employees embrace a culture of customer obsession and ask themselves, “what do our customers say?”
The allure of push reporting is its relative ease of implementation and maintenance. And asking the VOC team to generate yet another report is simple enough. But if a report isn’t used or read or doesn’t contain enough detail to inform a meaningful decision, it’s useless.
Fortunately, employees want to learn more about our customers (here at Prudential, thousands of employees have attended our VOC quarterly update calls). They want to use customer feedback to improve their output. They ask for training on how to access and interpret customer feedback. They hunger for the data and insights the VOC team provides. They’ve come to see the benefits in improved services and processes. But even more, they’ve come to see that truly understanding the customer is an asset to their own professional development.
It’s hard to evolve beyond a push mindset. The VOC team is constantly trying to find new ways to share data and insights. Employees feel overwhelmed, overworked, overfocused. They resist more meetings and reports. And it’s hard to dig through the data themselves. Nevertheless, a “pull” mindset, where employees are empowered and encouraged to self-service customer feedback, is key to continuous improvement. How can we encourage this shift? How can we provide the tools needed to unlock the mysteries contained in the mountains of customer data?
First, here’s an example that illustrates the difference between push and pull for a website designer:
Push: Bullet point from quarterly report
“The Ease of Doing Business score for the Website X survey dropped three points last quarter, customers cited frustration around the login process, site performance, and difficulty with navigation.”
Designer response: Good to know, but how can I improve the navigation on the pages I am responsible for? Where do I start?
Pull: Steps for self-service in survey platform for a web designer who creates/updates forms found online
· Several customers mentioned that it was difficult to find a certain form on the website, and that it was confusing to fill out.
· I see about ten people a week mention difficulty finding the form.
· I added a link on the homepage that goes right to the form.
· Since the link was added I only see about one comment per week.
· I found several comments that indicated difficulty with question seven, and that it was unclear what information was needed.
· We re-worded question seven and uploaded the new form.
· Since then, we have not seen a comment specific to question seven.
Though not limited to a single site or form, the site survey indicates that the percentage of customers who said they accomplished their task has improved since my team implemented the navigation and form changes.
Tools — Accessible, User-Friendly, Actionable
Getting to the data is not difficult but does take some time and effort and know how of the systems involved. Fortunately, it doesn’t need an analyst to derive valuable insights. It takes some effort, but any average designer can do it.
First, though, they need the right tools for self-service research: tools that are easy to use, fit the way people want to work, are easily assessable, and reliable. At Prudential, our survey platform includes dashboards that show score trending, comment review, keyword search, text analytics, and more. It also has mobile apps, including one that shows a simple view of several customer comments every day, which can be filtered to show feedback on a specific area/journey/business.
We need to make people aware that these tools exist. We need to provide access to as many people as possible and get them excited about what they can do with it. “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply to VOC tools. We need to promote these tools, share them with associates and teams. At Prudential, every VOC team member has seen coworkers’ eyes light up as they realize the information that is available to them and how it can improve their work.
Therefore, we need to train them to properly use the tools. This includes how to avoid some of the data traps. We do this through weekly open hour sessions, team meeting presentations, and more. Like everyone, our team is busy, but we know the value of sharing and teaching the use of the survey platform.
An AI-Enabled Future
Today’s tools are good, intuitive, and effective. But while living in the present, we are preparing for the future. And that future is exciting. Today’s tools continue to evolve and could look very different very soon (2024, fingers crossed). AI promises to be a game changer, especially for analyzing free-form customer comments to derive themes and trends.
What if our customer survey platform were replaced by a simple search bar on an Intranet site, powered by AI, available to all our partners? Then searching for insights becomes conversational, asking questions and follow-up questions of the data, providing insights, sample comments, and visuals upon request, and of course removes almost any barriers partners would have from self-servicing their own insights.
It’s an exciting prospect for the near future, and the one we hope to help build for Prudential. Until then, the more employees are willing to dive into the data, find relevant insights, and act on those findings, the better things will be. It takes all of us to improve Customer Experience. Some might say it takes a village.
