This year for the first time Chattermill, a unified customer intelligence platform, surveyed 339 customer-focused business leaders from the US, Oceania, South America and Europe with the intention to better understand key trends in customer experience (CX) for the upcoming year.
Our Report reveals that leaders know how important data analysis can be for painting a much more accurate picture of what customers want and need. Yet the majority feel held back by the technology they perceive as complex and complicated to integrate. Let’s take a look at some of the Report’s key findings.
98.2% of leaders believe customer support is a key factor of customer loyalty
Customer support is now and has always been, strategically important to business success. Almost every leader agrees on making it a strategic business priority.
According to our findings, 98.2% of leaders believe that good customer support is now a key driving factor of customer advocacy and loyalty, while 99.1% of leaders think customers have higher expectations when it comes to service and experience compared to previous years.
The majority (96.2%) also say customers are more likely to share positive or negative experiences on social media. Online reviews and ratings play a key role in consumer decision-making with social media platforms empowering consumers to share their experiences with others.
Enrich customer surveys with new data resources
Leaders are aligned in the way they measure their operations overall, and the impact that their support teams had on the customer’s experience. These metrics are related to revenue far more than one might expect
Customer support operations are measured in three key areas:
● Customer retention (49.9%),
● Customer satisfaction (28.4%),
● And return on investment (20.3%).
Most leaders (98.2%) also feel that feedback surveys and online reviews need to be complemented with more data sources. While the most common metric for measuring customer teams is repeat purchases or upgrades (21.7%), followed by speed of resolution (18.1%) and customer satisfaction (17.8%).
What’s hampering customer data analysis
According to our research, 88% believe that their current tech stack holds them back from achieving their goals, while 88.1% feel slowed down daily or weekly by tools that are siloed, making it hard to see all their data from multiple sources at once. Moreover, 63.1% also say manually tagging tickets takes too long and doesn’t provide meaningful insights.
The biggest challenges for customer support agents include general organization and processes (28.4%). This is closely followed by not having enough time in the day to attend to customers (23.7%). As well as an inability to understand the reason behind negative customer feedback (22.5%).
Problems with ‘outdated or limited tools and methods to prioritize the most problematic support tickets’ (33.6%) are also causing headaches. As well as the issue of ‘too much-unstructured data to analyse at scale’ (25.1%).
How to get ahead in 2022
Companies need to employ the right technology to analyze, understand, and enact the changes to their customer support operations.
Effective tools should let you:
1) Integrate all your existing sources of customer data – every chat, conversation, survey feedback and social mention in multiple languages – to build a single, unified and unique view of your customer.
2) Analyse aspects or topics that are driving the KPIs and metrics that matter most to you. After all, every business has a metric that matters most to them and from text data, you can find out the impact each topic has on the overall score.
3) View analytics on customer feedback and customer support from the entire customer journey in one single source of customer truth. Doing this will help you to spot emerging trends within your customer experience.
4) Process comments and opinions as inputs (as in the number) that the business can work on. When aggregated at scale, you’ll have huge power at your fingertips, and will be able to slice and dice the data to find real, actionable insights.
5) Easily and quickly access the information you need, and produce relevant reports – because no one wants to spend their day inside a clunky and slow user interface that makes sourcing insights a painful experience.