Swiftly Impact the Customer Experience: Using Survey Comments as Quantitative Data
With today’s customers becoming more discerning than ever before, providing exceptional customer service has never been more important. Research, in fact, shows that customer experience is a high priority for consumers, with 60% often or always paying more for a better experience.
I am a firm believer in quantifying the impact of customer experience efforts. Have you ever considered how you can take your qualitative input (i.e., comments from customer surveys) and make them quantitative data? You can and it can be more impactful in truly changing the customer experience than knowing you moved your Net Promoter Score (NPS) by half a point.
Why are open-ended customer comments important? Because they reflect the true “voice of the customer” and offer companies the opportunity to “listen” to customer opinions about everything from the quality of their products to the helpfulness of their website. Just as important, customer comments drive organizational understanding of the customers, allowing companies to walk in their shoes, feel their pain and delight, and truly understand issues that are keeping them from delighting their customers.
Here are a few ways to use open-ended comments to strengthen the customer experience:
Celebrate success: Individuals named in the comments are delighted to be recognized. Are you sharing these comments with your customer service and management teams.
Quickly assess issues and take action: While bucketing comments into organizational impact areas sounds time consuming, it’s worth the effort. I block hours on the calendar to read every comment and then put comments into common themes or buckets. Armed with that knowledge, I share the comments with functional teams. They don’t have to read all the comments, but I do ask them to read the comments related to their function or role. They may baulk the first time you ask them to devote time to read customer comments, but I guarantee they will welcome the opportunity from that point forward. It’s like opening a whole new world.
Go deep with your analysis of comments: Why? What would drive that? Is that really the driver? What are possible solutions? The obvious isn’t always the best or right answer.
Deploy cross-functional teams: Delivering consistently excellent customer experiences involves deploying cross-functional teams to determine the best way to address a concern.
Act quickly: Take steps to dramatically eliminate a negative comment. Fueled by the voice of the customer, empower teams to take proactive steps to address the concern.
Measure quickly: Monthly or quarterly, count the comments (for example, “From June 30, 2013 to December 31, 2013, we heard this comment 72 times”). Is the number of times the comment was stated going down, up, or staying the same? Are there associated questions on the survey that are improving?
Refine, act, measure: Depending on what you’re hearing, try another approach, close the issue, or make further improvements.
The Results: Improved Customer Experience
Transforming the customer experience from adequate to outstanding requires deliberate, consistent action across the organization. Open-ended customer comments are important because they offer an effective approach to connecting with customers, responding to both individual needs, identifying trends in the marketplace and developing quick action to improve your customer experience. In particular, this approach can deliver the following results:
Create more customer advocates by eliminating negative issues and creating exemplary, delightful experiences
Drive better quantitative scores in the form of NPS or customer satisfaction
Help teams feel closely connected to the customer and better able to understand how what they do, or don’t do, impacts the customer experience
A great resource for all things “customer experience” is the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.) Our upcoming CXPA Insight Exchange is being held in Atlanta in May, where I’ll be leading a round table discussion on this topic.
For more information, take a look at our strategies, process, and resources associated with Customer Engagement Programs.