A Complete View of Your Customers Requires Both Their Words AND Actions

Most customer experience (#CX) experts advise that you need a 360-degree view of your customers and that this is gleaned through the "Voice of Customer", aka customer feedback.

In fact, this excellent article from CMSWire entitled "Is Your Voice of the Customer Program Silent?" states that "Customers share feedback via surveys, polls, interviews and more. But they also share feedback indirectly through social media and user reviews."

The Trouble with Reliance on Feedback Alone

However, feedback alone can be misleading or limiting when trying to assemble a complete picture of what your customers are feeling, perceiving, and experiencing with your brand. This is particularly true in government services, especially for compliance activities or monopolistic services where citizens or businesses can't choose to opt out or go somewhere else (like paying taxes, providing mandatory reporting, getting a passport, and such). In these types of services, government customer experience practitioners who are trying to improve the customers' experience have to separate out feedback where the customer is complaining about the policy, regulation or law itself, vs. specific complaints about the implementation of it and the subsequent process steps and touch points the agency is making the customer go through in order to comply.

Words AND Deeds

I learned from my retail, consumer goods, and Direct Marketing days that a complete view of your customers must include both their words AND deeds. In other words, you have to analyze what customers SAY in your various feedback channels vs. what they actually DO. This is because intent and feelings in the moment do not always match with their actions.

During grocery store audits for consumer brands, for example, you can interview customers going into the store to ask what they plan to buy, and often customers tell you they plan to buy only the healthy items and basics on their grocery list. When you interview them coming out of the store, however, their shopping cart typically has some junk food and other impulse items in it, not just the items on their original list.

Furthermore, many brands ignore valuable feedback channels already available to them from which customer insights can be gleaned.

What Additional Sources of Feedback Should You Look At?

If you have a CRM (customer relationship management) system, and your folks who interact with customers are very thorough in inputting data to it, you're lucky. You're even luckier if you have a text analytics model that organizes and pre-identifies some insights for you. If you have these, be sure to analyze customer interactions and trends.

However, many organizations don't have either a CRM or a CRM where your staff have faithfully input meaningful, accurate data into it for those customer interactions with personnel. If you fall in this category, I recommend regularly meeting with customer proxies, i.e., your front-line customer support and account management personnel. Your top contact center agents and field personnel, listen to customers praise and complain all day, and should have a good idea of where many of the most bothersome "pain points" really exist along the customers' journeys and which are really the "moments that matter" where customers decide to bail on you or not. There could be email messages, text chat, chatbot interactions, or other digital customer interactions to "listen" to as well. In some retail organizations, I was lucky enough to have some controlled quality control phone lines where some leaders and a few key CX personnel could listen in to live calls which really helped shape our understanding of who our customers were.

Search Listening is Key

One of the best sources of indirect feedback within your organization is mining the search words customers use on your website or that they use on third party search engines to find you. This is called "search listening." Check your website's site search reports to see what keywords people are using, which are resulting in clickthroughs to the appropriate information and eventually completion of a task, and which are either "null" searches (return no results) or give bad results that cause your customer to click away or "bounce" from your website. For null searches, this could highlight phrasing you should have, but don't, or even point out products or services you should add.

If you have a Google Analytics account, look at Google Search Console to see the top keywords and top web pages that searchers on Google are using to find your site. It doesn't show you what keywords were entered in Google that didn't connect with your site because the content wasn't search optimized (your own site search may provide clues to this), but at least you know what did work and what pages and content are attracting customers from Google. For most government agencies, and many commercial businesses, Google is the primary driver of new customers, so knowing what words and actions prospective and current customers are taking there to get to you is important.

Social Listening- To You and About You

Not all feedback is shared with your organization or any of your channels. Customers often post publicly on social media about their experience with your organization to the world at large. So in addition to looking at comments TO you on your own organization's social media channels, also look at public posts and questions raised ABOUT your brand, products, services or people on other channels. Monitor other posts mentioning your brand on public social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn as well as forums like Reddit and Quora. I also recommend looking at reviews posted for your organization, products and services on public review sites like Google, Yelp, Bing, and keeping an eye on the People Also Ask questions displayed on Google when users type your most popular keyword phrases.

You will particularly want to monitor misinformation (mistakenly false information) and disinformation (deliberate false information) that is being shared with and influencing your customers' behaviors and perception of you.

If you are large enough, you can explore social listening tools to aid in this. Otherwise, you need to set aside time for some manual searches every week or month to check on the Voice of your Customer that is being shared outside of your organization.

What Actions Should You Measure?

As I said at the beginning, what the customer says-- to you or about you-- is not sufficient to form a complete picture. I recommend you also look at your engagement metrics, particularly clickpaths and your conversion funnels in your digital channels. Did people complain about a step in your process but complete it anyway? Or worse, did they NOT complain or give any feedback yet dropped out of your conversion funnel? How many people started a process and dropped out before completing it? Do most drop out on the same step?

How much time did customers take to get through certain steps or your whole process. Sometimes the sheer length of time it takes to complete ALL the steps or the number of steps wear down the user and they abandon the process.

What time of day or day of week do your customers engage on different tasks? Is there a seasonality or periodicity to certain activities? Are customers using multiple channels to accomplish what they need to do with you?

Were certain web pages or resources viewed more? Shared more?

Did customers engage differently from different geographies, demographic groups, or other distinguishing difference?

You should slice and dice the data you already have to see if the actions match up with what the feedback is telling you. Where there are disconnects, that may be a good place to do further research.

Conclusion

By looking at what your customers are doing, as well as listening to what they are saying, whether it's to you directly or indirectly, are critical in constructing a complete view of what customers are experiencing. Once you have these baseline analytics, it is much easier to narrow down any gaps in knowledge you may have and identify what original research you still have to do and problem statements you need to explore.

KEYWORDS: #CX, #customerexperience, #customerinsights, #search, #searchlistening, #sociallistening, #socialmedia