Customer Feedback & VoC Should be at the Center of All Decision Making

Organisations that prioritise customer feedback as a key input to make their critical business decisions are the ones that will survive and thrive. Why?

There are actually several reasons - by taking their customer’s needs, desires and challenges into account, organisations are showing customers:

1. They recognise their customers as the lifeblood of their success. As such, they consider customer satisfaction a key success metric, and invest effort into understanding customer needs, preferences, and pain points to better design their products, services, and delivery to meet and exceed expectations.

2. They believe in continuous improvement, and see customer feedback as an insightful way to find areas and opportunities for product, service, and process improvement. Any weaknesses or pain points surfaced by customer feedback are regarded and respected as guidance on the path of innovation.

3. They’re striving for a relationship, beyond just a sale. By collecting and responding to customer feedback, organisations show customers they’re interested in fostering long-term relationships that bring value to both parties.

One of the most common challenges in collecting and making decisions based on customer feedback is knowing the contextual situation that the feedback is based on; that is - what are the circumstances that led to a specific piece of feedback? Providing frontline teams with a way to track and provide additional details around their customer interactions is one way to make sure this feedback is rich and actionable.

Why feedback from the frontline improves frontline agent performance

Delivering relevant customer feedback to frontline staff in real time has been shown to significantly drive employee engagement. It provides an opportunity for more meaningful individual reflection and improvement.

Reviewing both customer feedback and engaging in in depth self-reflection enables more genuine engagement between an organisation’s frontline team members and their managers. This makes coaching more effective and helps to drive continuous improvement, which in turn improves the quality of agent performance for the customer.

Combining real time feedback from customers and employees

To facilitate this powerful combination of customer feedback and the ability for frontline teams to contextualise it, Cyara's voice-of-the-customer (VOC) solution incorporates what we call the 'Tribal Analytics' machine learning (ML) engine, which rapidly analyzes and combines the data with the relevant contextual information. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ML then use this to determine which employees should receive specific pieces of customer feedback.

Additionally, the employees who receive the customer feedback are empowered and able to add their own comments and identify potential opportunities for personal growth, as well as broader suggestions for improvements across the entire organisation.

A company’s frontline staff are typically best positioned to interpret feedback from customers, especially in the ways that are most relevant to the business. Tribal Analytics empowers the employees to supplement the insights with internally understood language and the names of specific systems, processes, and products, which makes the feedback more meaningful to the individual, the team and the organisation as a whole.

Automatic alerts to the relevant stakeholders across the business

As employees add more details, comments and hashtags to this customer feedback, Tribal Analytics’ ML reviews the activities, and alerts any stakeholders who should be kept informed. By including stakeholders from across the business, it helps give those who are not in direct contact with the customer a better understanding of how the systems, processes and even products they work on can be improved to help customers.

Closed loops and engaged employees

Cyara’s Tribal Analytics is a technology enabled process that puts the Voice of the Customer (VoC) at the center of an organisation’s decision making. Through combining human insights and AI, it creates a closed loop feedback system at the individual, team and business wide levels. Tribal Analytics delivers an end-to-end process for driving real and valuable continual improvement and change across all areas of a business, informed by the most powerful insight - the word of the customer.

Tribal Analytics drives employee engagement by giving frontline employees a voice that’s heard and subsequently acted on by the entire business. Tribal Analytics uses the power of the customer’s voice and feedback to improve the quality of the employee, customer and organisational experience. To find out more about CentraCX’s capabilities, click here.

Source: Cyara

Next: 7 Mistakes To Avoid When Mapping Customer Journeys