Customer Feedback: Listen, Understand, and Act

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The following article contains the first level from the CX maturity playbook: Listen, understand, and act, a guide with actionable insight to uplevel how you listen to customers, understand their needs, and take action to improve the customer experience, written in partnership between GetFeedback and Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of Experience Investigators.

Listen, understand, and act

A Voice of the Customer (VoC) program collects, analyzes, and acts on all customer feedback—expectations, likes, and dislikes—associated with your company. 

The VoC is the heartbeat of any customer experience (CX) program. In fact, at GetFeedback, we believe that brands can’t meet or exceed expectations without having an established Voice of the Customer program in place. Think about it—without customer feedback, you won’t know where to begin to improve your customer experience.

A successful Voice of the Customer program will help you identify and fix the pain points across the customer journey, increase customer satisfaction, and boost retention.

Let’s break down each of the three elements. 

Listen  

Only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain; the rest simply churn. Can you imagine the revenue growth if you had a plan in place to capture that missing feedback?

Listening to your customers starts with collecting their feedback across all channels. Mature CX programs collect both structured and unstructured feedback from all touchpoints across the customer journey. In doing so, one can get the real-time feedback they need to actually optimize the customer experience. 

Structured feedback includes metrics such as Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES), all of which can be collected via a survey form. Unstructured feedback includes behavioral analytics, social media, forums, in-person and digital events, phone calls, etc. 

Once you collect feedback, you must analyze it for insights and trends.  

Understand

To understand your customers, you have to take the time to review and analyze their feedback, looking for trends and key insights.

Customer data must be aggregated in one common location that all employees in your organization can access. Furthermore, by integrating your customer feedback with operational data, you’ll enable teams to really understand their customers’ needs through a holistic view of their journey. 

Customers’ perceptions and expectations are always evolving, so identifying key trends and insight in real-time is critical to empower teams to take action. 

Act 

Once you’ve listened to your customers and understood their needs, you must take action, fast. Closing the loop on critical feedback as it happens is vital if you want to avoid churn. 

In fact, 67% of customer churn could be avoided if the organization resolved the customer’s issue during their first interaction. Acting quickly on feedback requires processes that range from setting up automatic triggers that notify support agents of a disgruntled customer, to providing new tools for scalability, and establishing employee training programs.  

Such states for listen, understand, and act is achievable through strategic action, which you can start taking today with the help of this playbook. 

The five levels below are defined based on general processes, rules, and expectations of each of the three elements. We recommend you start with the level that our assessment scored you as.

ACTIONABLE STEPS

Level 1   

What it looks like 

At this stage, the motivations for collecting feedback might not be based on the desire to listen to and understand the customer. Instead, feedback is used to justify internal goals and projects. 

Meaning, customer feedback is collected only when necessary and with no alignment across teams: in an ad hoc way, only addressing individual touchpoints, without a universal strategy or framework. And the existing methods to collect feedback are not designed for long-term results. 

Employees and leaders often make the decision to collect feedback on their own, without the necessary survey design skills, multi-channel strategy, or proper structure to gain actionable feedback. And customers are asked for feedback randomly along their journey in inconsistent ways. 

You might hear employees make statements such as: 

I’ve heard it’s important to listen to customers, so I’ve asked my team to send a survey after our new product feature rollout. We’re asking a yes or no question to keep it simple, which is: Are you satisfied with the product? And I know customers will say yes. — Product Leader

Priorities to advance to the next level   

Moving from Level 1 to Level 2 is about transitioning from ad hoc listening to a somewhat more targeted feedback collection approach that’ll drive internal teams’ goals. Since you’re just getting started, it’s best to do this only for select customer-facing teams like Customer Support and Customer Success. 

To move forward, you’ll focus on:

• Goals for collecting feedback
• Specific touchpoints

How to take action

Step 1: Explore existing collection of feedback and establish clear strategic goals for specific teams 

Leaders and teams are already listening to customers in ad hoc ways. Now is the time to audit what feedback is collected via siloed operations and establish more clearly defined goals for a better feedback collection strategy.

Focus on the customer-facing teams most likely to be asking for feedback directly from customers. This should include Customer Success and Customer Support. But it could also expand to Marketing, Product Delivery, Retail Managers, etc.

We recommend starting with the obvious—Customer Success and Customer Support—before expanding. Ask leaders from these teams how they’ve listened to customer feedback, and track the metrics, methodologies and various outcomes they’ve had. This will help organize and provide structure for a feedback collection strategy.

Eventually, the feedback collection strategy will guide where, how, and when customers are asked for feedback. 

Step 2: Identify specific touchpoints where feedback can be consistently collected to improve the experience 

Look for particular touchpoints (for the specific teams you are choosing to focus on at this stage) where listening to customers could improve that event, activity, or interaction with your brand. 

These are typically well-defined, finite interactions, and not focused on long-term, relational outcomes. For example, asking customers about how much effort it took to download a tool, is specific to that touchpoint along their journey. You can measure this by consistently using the Customer Effort Score (CES) metric, which will provide valuable insight when measured on a regular basis. 

It can be difficult to identify all these touchpoints throughout the overall customer journey, especially without a customer journey map. For now, focus on what collection points you can introduce for major milestones: quality over quantity. 

For example, if you offer marketing events like webinars for customer education, ask for post-event feedback with a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) survey. This will provide insights to improve events in the future. 

Your Customer Support team can also use CSAT surveys to measure the success of their agents’ interactions. And Customer Success teams can start establishing baseline customer loyalty metrics using Net Promoter Score (NPS).

You should start small with just one or two touchpoints to help gain traction and understanding around how to listen to customers. This will help prioritize what tools you need for the future, as well.

For Levels 2 - 5, visit the full playbook here.

If you have yet to evaluate your CX maturity, we suggest you take GetFeedback's assessment now to identify your current level for employee experience.

This article contains the first level from the CX maturity playbook: Listen, understand, and act, a guide with actionable insight to uplevel how you listen to customers, understand their needs, and take action to improve the customer experience, written in partnership between GetFeedback and Jeannie Walters, CCXP, CEO of Experience Investigators.

Read the full playbook here.