According to Forrester Research, customers are in a space of survey overload. “We are now sending customers so many surveys that it hurts our CX performance.” Understanding customer feedback is essential if businesses want to improve customer experiences and boost retention.
For many organisations, surveys have long been the primary, and often only, source of customer feedback. While surveys – or solicited feedback – provide valuable insights, they’re not without challenges. Surveys historically have low response rates, and many customers who take them often fall on the extreme ends of the emotion spectrum. It’s no surprise that most customers who respond to surveys are either extremely satisfied or extremely dissatisfied.
It’s time organisations view surveys as only one customer feedback channel – not the only channel. Businesses must begin to diversify their feedback collection methods. Unsolicited feedback provides the ideal solution. Businesses can obtain a comprehensive view of customer sentiment without burdening customers with survey requests. Unsolicited feedback is mined directly from the interactions your business is already having with customers, such as through the contact centre. These conversations represent a rich source of data with invaluable insights hidden within.
The role of conversation intelligence
Without analysing every interaction, it is impossible to understand the complete customer journey. It’s also more difficult to spot possible problems, or opportunities, or pick up on trends without data-driven evidence. What makes conversation intelligence effective for driving improved CX is that it’s not simply transcription delivering a “blizzard of words”.
“Categories” are applied to define intent, sentiment, and focus attention from the big data of contact centre interactions. For example, there are many ways to express dissatisfaction. It’s not just the words you say, but the way that you say them. Capable analytics captures this meaning with contextual value, acoustics for sentiment and scoring for attention. That’s why unsolicited feedback is the rocket fuel for your CX engine.
3 ways unsolicited feedback can strengthen surveys and drive better customer experiences
- Enhancing surveys with conversational data: What if you could make a survey more meaningful and engaging with additional personalisation? Conversation intelligence uncovers insights that can be used to “personalise” survey questions. You can search for customers that are exhibiting a predictive behaviour and then issue a survey with questions that target that behaviour. For example, you could search for interactions where customers were emotionally frustrated with a reference to a particular product or service. Resulting customers could then be issued a survey with questions tailored to target needs of the customer linked with the product or service they are involved with.
- Send every customer away happy: Conversation intelligence can identify words, phrases and acoustic qualities that demonstrate when a customer is unhappy. They can also identify what triggers positive and negative reactions and outcomes on a call. Armed with this insight, agents can adjust what they say, and how they say it, according to the behaviour of the customer. By providing supervisors and agents access to post-call analysis of this unstructured and unsolicited feedback, it is possible to identify best practice and reinforce positive behaviour.
- Understand your customer journey across every channel: If you solicit feedback at one touchpoint, you may feel that the customer is happy. But unsolicited feedback at another point on the journey may tell a very different story. If your analytics software doesn’t cover all the methods a customer uses to communicate with you, vital pieces of information will be missing – leading to an incomplete picture of the customer journey – and their overall satisfaction. Using conversation intelligence to monitor, analyse and score 100% of customer interactions across all the channels they use to interact with you will enable you to create a full end-to-end picture of your customers’ interaction journey.
To learn more on how to leverage 100% of feedback — solicited and unsolicited — to drive real business value, download CallMiner’s Whitepaper: Beyond Surveys Volume 2: The Power of Unsolicited Customer Feedback.