Best Practices

You’ve probably heard some version of Benjamin Franklin’s famous words, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” I propose an addendum to this list: negative customer feedback.

As much as we’d like to please every customer all of the time, it’s just not a realistic expectation. Negative feedback is inevitable. And that’s a good thing.

Every time a customer leaves negative feedback, they’re providing your brand with an opportunity to improve the customer experience and potentially earn their business for life. Brands that adopt this positive outlook on customer feedback will find success. Brands that do not will likely find themselves in a costly uphill battle with customer loyalty.

Cultivating lasting relationships with your customers can be a daunting proposition, but it’s a practice that your brand would be remiss not to do. Here are four tips for converting brand detractors into brand advocates:

1. Listen & Respond Publicly

Take time to listen to and understand negative customer reviews. Once you have a grasp of the issue at hand, respond publicly so the customer—and other customers—know that you are taking the issue seriously and making an effort to right the wrong. Customers value transparency.

2. Address Negative Comments Quickly

Time really is money when it comes to customer retention. Don’t let a customer issue fester. Resolve the problem as quickly as possible, “wow” the customer, and create a potential brand advocate for life.

3. Rectify the Situation (Even if It’s Not Your Fault)

Identify the type of customer you’re dealing with and interact with them accordingly. The customer is not always right, but by offering a sincere apology and reaching an amicable solution to the problem, your brand can win back at-risk customers.

4. Follow Up

See the resolution of the customer’s negative experience all the way to completion. Thank the customer for their feedback and ensure that they leave—and return—completely satisfied with your brand.

As much as it can feel like negative feedback is all your customers leave, the situation is not that bleak. In reality, customers are mostly positive in their brand sentiment. One study found that customers share positive brand experiences eight times more often than they do negative experiences.

Negative feedback can be a valuable resource for brands working toward delivering a greater customer experience. It’s less fatal than death, and it’s generally cheaper than taxes.

Developing and launching a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is no small feat. In fact, it’s a massive undertaking requiring a lot of thought. To do it, you and your team will have to figure out how to help your entire organization adopt and execute fundamental changes to improve the customer experience at every touchpoint, increase return visits, and create active brand advocates. This means investing serious time, money, and people in the right places.

Launching a program doesn’t guarantee much. To ensure you and your program see success, I recommend following the four key elements below:

1. Get full executive sponsorship
2. Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection
3. Make customer feedback data actionable at the location level
4. Use research and analysis to adapt to evolving program needs

I’ll cover the first key in this article, and the next three will follow in upcoming blog posts. So stay tuned.

Key to Success #1: Get Full Executive Sponsorship

With any organization-wide VoC program rollout, the most important aspect to its success is having committed executive sponsorship behind it. The rollout typically happens at the employee level, and ground-level employee engagement is much more likely when staff can see the excitement and benefit reinforced at the top of the organization.

What Executives Must Do to Effectively Sponsor and Support Your VoC Program

Create the VoC Program Vision

VoC programs have a lot of moving parts, and as the pace of the project speeds up, it’s easy for things to go astray. To keep people and departments synchronized in their efforts, the executive sponsor must clearly and regularly articulate (1) the reasons your organization is implementing the program, (2) what the end state will look like, and (3) the ways success will be defined.
If everyone has the same answers to these three questions, you will be able to more easily resolve inter-team conflicts, enable project activities prioritization, and ensure that everyone is working toward the same objective. If the executive sponsor doesn’t create a shared vision, each person will create their own—leading to program inconsistency and potential for failure.

Be a Vocal and Visible Champion

An executive VoC program sponsor who isn’t regularly seen or heard from is not really a sponsor at all. Sending the occasional email from the office or on the road is simply not enough; your program’s executive sponsor needs to be present for all levels of the organization and be seen as the number one supporter of the initiative.
On top of explaining benefits of the program to employees, your key executive must continuously reminding fellow executives why it is important to dedicate budget and people to the VoC program’s rollout and continued maintenance.

Remove Roadblocks

No matter how well-planned the project or how dedicated the team members, roadblocks will arise. It’s the sponsor’s job to spot and remove the roadblocks the team can’t remove for themselves. This can include freeing up time from an essential subject matter expert, working to resolve issues with a vendor, or helping to ensure the project team has the resources it needs. By removing roadblocks, the sponsor allows the project team to stay focused on their day-to-day project activities and deliver a successful VoC program.

Empower Decision Making

When launching and maintaining your VoC program, every team member should be empowered to make the decisions they regularly face. Enabling frontline decisions to be made at the appropriate employee level frees up time for ascending levels of the organization to focus on their strategic activities. Filtering every decision through the executive sponsor will quickly consume his or her day, cause distraction from supporting the project’s success, and will ultimately create a backlog and slow down the program rollout.

In the end, if your VoC program is supported from the top down and employees can see it, they will embrace it, which is the best insurance against program failure.

Watch for Part 2 in this four-part blog series where I discuss the second key to success: Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection.

Now that customers have the ability to shop when and where they want online, the need to ever enter a store is rapidly declining. Brick-and-mortar retailers are all working to figure out their strategies for the fairly new phenomenon of “showrooming,” where consumers browse in-store and buy their products online, often from a competitor.

This new shopping landscape gives consumers access to more merchandise choices than ever before and presents brick-and-mortar retailers with a series of new challenges. In the Age of the Connected Consumer, people are now being provided with an end-to-end shopping experience that includes the traditional brick-and-mortar store as well as an immersive online or digital experience.

Even in this new landscape, the physical store can continue to be a strong asset for retailers, delivering valuable things e-commerce services can’t:

1. Immediate Gratification

Our society enjoys and desires instant gratification. We want what we want and we typically want it now. The beauty of a brick-and-mortar store is that we purchase the items we want—from the latest in fashion to the newest gadget—and have the luxury of taking them home at that moment in time for immediate enjoyment.

2. The Sensory Experience

Unlike online retailers, brick-and-mortar stores have the ability to engage all of the customer’s five senses. They can fully express how the brand looks, sounds, smells, feels, and even tastes. The online world only appeals to the visual, and sometimes auditory, senses. As evidence continues to reflect that a multi-sensory experience leads to increased in-store spending, more and more retailers are beginning to embrace a sensory engagement process that triggers a “shopper’s high” and creates an emotional and memorable interaction. In turn, customers stay in the store longer, have positive emotions about their time spent in the store, and walk away with increased brand value perceptions.

3. The Human Connection

Another advantage brick-and-mortar retailers have over those that operate online is the ability to forge the in-person (or human) connection. Despite the average person’s desire to email, text and shop online, we are still very human and enjoy contact with others. Being able to discuss product differences with knowledgeable sales staff or receive guidance to find merchandise is no longer an expected service of retailers but a valuable differentiator and touchpoint in the customer experience. Just remember that you can only capitalize on and promote the value of the human connection if you have the appropriate staff levels and have provided them with the necessary training for success.

4. Personal Service

With the Internet, smartphones, and tablets in tow, consumers are more empowered than ever to do research on the products they are looking to buy, pre-empting what a salesperson can tell them. This rise in consumer self-sufficiency, as well as in-store self-service, has sparked a lot of discussion around the value that in-store sales associates offer. Some retailers have taken this trend as an opportunity to downsize their staffing requirements, while others have innovated with the introduction of personal service to create a new, heightened, and differentiated brand experience. One example is Wegman’s, who has introduced produce experts in their stores who chop fresh vegetables and fruits in the aisle so shoppers can take home customized mixes for salads and stir-fry dishes.

Brick-and-mortar retailers need not dismay. Focusing on these four natural advantages over online retailers is the path to maintaining in-store traffic.

I’ve written a few blog posts recently surrounding open review sites and their well-known pitfalls published in the media and verified by some of Mindshare’s own independent research. This is a topic that I am very passionate about.

Why? Because I believe that brands deserve to get credit for their customer service efforts. I believe they deserve to get the word out about the great experiences they provide to thousands of customers, through honest, authentic, timely and accurate ratings and reviews. I believe that consumers have the right to access this information in order to make an informed purchase decision about the brands, products, and services they research and select.

Open review sites today simply don’t allow this to happen and it’s because they are missing the following three essential elements that a review site requires in order to be reliable and effective:

1. Accurate, quality feedback

Typically, people only go to an open review site when they are extremely satisfied or dissatisfied with their brand experience. However, open review sites have no mechanism to validate that reviews came from actual customers, which makes fraudulent reviews a heavily scrutinized topic in the media today.

Brands have no true way of identifying who is really leaving a review for their locations – it could be a competitor looking to sabotage with negative reviews or the brand itself could be posting positive fake reviews to reinforce a weak reputation. Either way, brands or the customer experiences they deliver are not being accurately portrayed, making it difficult for anyone to truly trust what is said on an open review site today.

Putting the proper mechanism in place to ensure that reviews are authentic and validated will eliminate the nagging question of whether the review is fake or real.

2. High review volume

When it comes to customer reviews, the “less is more” approach just doesn’t jive. Why? Because they are the lifeblood of review sites and having a substantial volume of reviews is the foundation to a relevant and representative destination.The trouble is, consumers need to be enticed to voluntarily leave a review. With people typically compelled to visit a review site when they have either a horrible or a great experience, the average experience is often not reflected, which is what consumers are looking for in a review because it is likely what they can expect.

Offering an incentive to leave a review will entice consumers to offer their feedback, whether positive, negative or neutral.

3. Review recency

Review recency is as important as review quality and quantity. The timing of when feedback is submitted on a review site is extremely important as consumers need to understand what a hotel, restaurant, or store is like now. With review sites not getting enough new reviews, old reviews are kept on these sites for long periods of time, often several years. In return, there is a veritable plague of stale data circulating. The more recent the review data, the more accurately it will reflect what the current state of the customer experience is really like.

How do companies expanding into international markets maintain their focus on putting the customer at the heart of the business across widely different markets?  In the second part of my blog, I share some of the key lessons I have learned from over a decade spent working with leading global brands. Below are some critical tips for implementing a successful global Customer Experience Management (CEM) programme in any geography that will help your brand to ensure global consistency while addressing local customer needs.

1. Engage staff

In some markets the opportunity for learning from customer feedback is a new (and perhaps not entirely trusted) experience. Employees need to understand from the beginning what the CEM programme represents and how it can help to improve the customer experience and drive customer loyalty and advocacy.  It is essential that the business is transparent about its expectations for the programme, how it will be used and the benefits it will deliver. In turn, you will have highly engaged employees, which have been proven to dramatically improve the customer experience.

2. Interpret feedback in the relevant context

Insights must be locally grounded in order to be meaningful. Far too often, global CEM programmes are set up centrally and key local components are missed, leading to inaccurate assumptions. For example, programmes are often designed to look at feedback in relation to weekends versus weekdays; however, in many places in the world, the ‘weekend’ is actually Friday/Saturday – or, in some places, Thursday/Friday. If your programme auto-defines ‘weekends’ and does not adjust for different market definitions, the insights generated will be deeply flawed.

Markets – at regional or even city level – can also vary dramatically within countries. This focus on market relevancy is core to Empathica’s (A Mindshare Technologies Company) engagement in global CEM, forming a key part of what we deliver to our clients’ global programmes.

3. Target opportunities that most impact on your customers

An effective CEM programme will incorporate a local action-planning tool that focuses effort on the areas that mean the most to your local customers. Empathica works to assure these focus areas are analytically derived, experience honed and strategically relevant. And once local managers know how they are currently performing on those key focus areas, they will want to know how to improve. Social sharing of best practices that work within your business – within your market – is a huge benefit to rapidly improving performance. Offering a tool that assists managers to see how others have effectively overcome challenges and removed barriers to improve performance is an invaluable component to driving customer experience consistency across locations.

4. Engage with customers

Typically, 80% of your customers are actually having pretty good experiences – and often your staff are making a positive difference. The problem is that staff rarely hear about those great experiences.  Customer WOWs are an important part of an effective CEM programme. It is critical to make it easy for your customers to share those great moments – and share those comments directly with your store/restaurant teams. That recognition of great work supports your teams’ continued positive engagement with customers, your brand and the CEM programme.

When your customers say they had a great experience and are highly likely to recommend your brand, Empathica makes it easy for them to do exactly that with Social Sharing, a unique, patented social media advocacy platform allows your customers to broadcast their good experience to their social media networks. And the good news travels fast!  Social Sharing has delivered over 1.5 million brand recommendations to over 180 million potential customers in the past three years.

5. Celebrate success

Employees will do what gets measured, but they will repeat what gets rewarded. Including opportunities to recognise and reward engagement and establishing a positive cycle of engagement early on brings huge benefits, including building trust within the business.  Celebrating performance lets teams know that their efforts are recognised and encourages repeating that good behaviour.

Well-designed global CEM programmes can add enormous value to businesses that seek to develop their international profile and can deliver strong rewards in customer loyalty and advocacy. And those two outcomes drive measurably improved business performance in sales, increased average spend and more frequent return. The combination of improved business performance and enhanced customer experience helps businesses thrive in a highly competitive global market.

The festive season may be over but the end of the busiest shopping season is not yet in sight for retailers. The January sales are in full swing, with brands vying for the attention of consumers on the hunt for a bargain and ready to spend those Christmas gift vouchers.

And, to add to the High Street havoc, thousands of us are also hitting the shops this month to return unwanted goods. An estimated 40% of clothing and between 5% and 10% of electrical goods and homewares bought via the internet or catalogues are returned to stores by shoppers. This seasonal rush sees many customers visit stores for the first time to return unwanted gifts purchased by others.

So what can retailers do to ensure they stand out from the competition and provide a great customer experience during the sales mayhem?

Step 1. Multiple channels, one experience

This time of year sees many goods bought online returned to brick-and-mortar stores, as many brands offer a free in-store returns service. Multi-channel experiences form the component parts of the customer’s overall journey—incorporating product research online, store visits, purchase and social media interaction with the brand, and recommendations or complaints to friends and family.

Customer opinions of your brand are formed over time across these channels. You may see them as separate, but customers view them as one brand experience. It is important for brands to deliver a consistent experience, delivering the same brand promise at each point of their customers’ journey—right through to the possible return of goods for a refund or product exchange.

If a store’s return process works well, first time visitors will consider coming back. If not, they will view this as reflective of the overall experience and may stay away. Feedback programmes can ensure each channel is consistent with the desired brand experience, enabling businesses to maintain a strong brand identity across what may be disparate parts of their operations.

Step 2. The human touch

By taking steps to enhance a customer’s overall experience, you can make them feel good and further differentiate your customer experience from other brands. Little things can make a big difference. A friendly welcome upon entering a store can make a great first impression to shoppers battling their way through sales crowds; shop floor staff can direct customers to what they’re looking for with ease and provide up-to-date stock information via mobile devices; and a friendly word at the checkout with clear information about refunds and returns policies can complete a great in-store experience.

Forging a human connection with shoppers can also help grow turnover. Empathica retail studies show a thoughtful product suggestion from a staff member can increase basket sizes by up to 30%.

Step 3. Walk a mile in your customers’ shoes

Store layouts change to accommodate sale items. At best, this can confuse customers; at worst, it can irritate. Examine every aspect of the store environment, starting from the outside looking in, all the way through to what is experienced as a customer leaves. Include all staff interaction points, from shop floor advisors to checkouts and returns desks. Ensure they build, rather than detract from, a great customer experience.

At sales times, more than any other, these elements are potential key moments to deliver the brand promise and consistency in operations to ensure every visit is a perfect one. Getting these details right will generate considerable goodwill among new and existing customers at a busy time of year. By delivering a consistent, well-executed experience, shoppers will visit more, spend more, and become active brand advocates.

The holiday season has come and gone. You invested substantial time and resources into creating exceptional retail experiences during the busiest and most profitable shopping season of the year. Now, as consumers steadily head to brick-and-mortar stores in search of great post-holiday deals, and you make way for spring merchandise, value isn’t all shoppers are looking for. They also expect exceptional customer experiences, which makes the post-holiday shopping season no time to slack off.

There are several ways retailers can create consistently high-quality experiences after the holidays and drive a continuous stream of customer loyalty and advocacy through 2014. Read our top 7 below:

1. Multichannel Integration

The showrooming concept is grounded in the fact that online-only retailers are missing a decision-making channel that customers value (the physical in-store experience). By leveraging physical store space to offer enhanced multichannel shopping opportunities, brick-and-mortar retailers can capture business from online competitors. When done well, multichannel integration combines online, social, mobile and in-store resources to deliver an experience that far surpasses the experiences offered by online competitors.

2. Deliver on Your Brand Promise

Successful retail is about more than product quality. When a customer enters a retail establishment, they expect to find a pleasant, enjoyable atmosphere and respectful, attentive staff. When executed correctly, these attributes can make customers feel happier, healthier or more attractive.

Brands typically struggle to quantify and measure these feelings, making it difficult to adjust customer experiences at the local level. The challenge for businesses this year is to implement technologies that will help them better understand the branded behaviors that elicit these feelings and to create customer experiences that are more engaging and satisfying.

Retailers can reinforce the behaviors that strengthen consumer-brand relationships or change behaviors to address customer needs and create a more desirable customer experience.

3. Customer Service

Customer service is an area in which brick-and-mortar retailers can excel, especially since many pure-play online retailers often have no in-person support. The key is to avoid populating stores with inexperienced sales teams who can’t help customers with questions about the products. It’s important to adequately train all sales team members to provide exceptional service and to monitor the quality of customer service by collecting structured and unstructured customer feedback during this busy shopping time of year.

4. Amplify Customer Feedback

Regardless of the time of year, it’s important for retail brands to aggressively monitor customer feedback through structured surveys as well as unsolicited reviews posted via social media channels. Using listening and monitoring technologies, positive customer feedback can be identified and amplified to promote repeat business. Responsive, offline treatment of negative messages or concerns can even encourage dissatisfied customers to give your brand a second chance.

5. Empower Local Managers

The worst thing you can to do to local store managers is funnel massive amounts of unanalyzed data and undifferentiated feedback to them and expect them to convert it into meaningful insights. Rather than overwhelming your managers, respect that they need to spend the vast majority of their time on the floor. Empower them with real-time guest feedback insights, pre-analyzed to clearly show local restaurant issues and opportunities for taking action and seeing improvement.

6. Share Knowledge

Location managers frequently encounter guest experience challenges they haven’t seen before. But the challenges that are new to one location manager are often challenges that have already been encountered by a manager at a different location. Knowledge-sharing technologies offer a convenient way to tap into the brand’s aggregate experience and provide location managers with the resources to overcome nearly any customer experience management obstacle.

7. Break Down Big Data

Big data, or data collected from large and complex data sets, offers several insights into customer experience improvements for retailers. However, local brand managers often have difficulty understanding how to leverage data at the local level. To overcome this barrier between general consumer insights and localized action, retailers should provide research-based advice and coaching to local managers in an effort to help individualize and improve local customer experiences.

Whether shoppers are interacting with your brand for the first time or fiftieth, the ability to deliver first-rate customer experiences is what will bring customers back all year long. Implement these strategies, and you’ll achieve longer-term customer loyalty success and brand advocacy.

With stories of Black Friday UK shopper mayhem all over the news closely followed by Cyber Monday, it’s clear the Christmas shopping season is well and truly upon us. Scores of customers are headed to your brick-and-mortar stores in search of great deals.

But value isn’t all festive shoppers are looking for. Across the board, consumers are also hoping to find exceptional customer experiences that allow them to shop on their terms, using the newest technologies to drive their choices.

For many retailers, this is the “make or break” time of year, accounting for 30 to 70 percent of their annual sales. The point often missed is that while a 30-day shopping window determines survival, the ability to deliver first-rate customer experiences is what brings customers back and determines longer term success.

Improving customer experiences

There is clearly an imperative for exceptional customer experiences at this time of year. Since the festive season represents many consumers’ first interaction with your brand, your ability to bring seasonal buyers back after Christmas hinges on the quality of your customers’ experiences this month. This may be your only time to create a positive impression.

But relatively few brands emphasise the delivery of high quality customer experiences in the Christmas rush. Far too often, customer service takes a backseat to moving as much product as possible with little regard to the experience surrounding it. Although it may be necessary to staff up stores with inexperienced, seasonal workers, temporary staffing without adequate training and a clear sense of company mission to deliver a great retail experience presents a serious threat to the brand.

Alongside an investment in experience training, it’s critical to provide near real time customer feedback in order to stay on track and keep serving up great experiences as a top of mind activity for all staff. Here are a few simple ways to do so:

Empower Local Managers

The worst thing you can to do to local store managers is to funnel massive amounts of unanalysed data and undifferentiated feedback to them and expect them to convert it into meaningful insights, especially during the year’s busiest shopping season. Rather than overwhelming managers with information that really isn’t useful, respect that they need to spend the vast majority of their time on the shop floor. Empower them with real-time customer feedback insights that make clear in just a few minutes what their local store issues are and what they should work on to provide great experiences.

Provide Actionable “Right Now” Strategies

Complex retail reporting tools are in abundance but they don’t always make clear today’s winning moves. Providing actionable, data-based strategies that can be acted upon “right now” is essential. Store managers need to be freed up as local leaders to focus on the rapid implementation and execution of plans to improve the quality of the customer experience throughout the Christmas shopping season.

Leverage Social Learning

It takes time for store managers to learn how to intuitively respond to customers’ concerns. But collectively, your brands’ store managers have a vast base of knowledge about specific strategies and actions that can improve the customer experience during the Christmas season. Consider leveraging virtual knowledge sharing and other technologies that enable social learning across the brand.

In many ways, Voice of the Customer (VoC) tools are your brands’ best resources for improving local customer experiences during the festive season. By implementing the right technologies, you can significantly increase your ability to provide location managers with the real-time, actionable insights they need to truly delight Christmas shoppers and keep them coming back throughout 2014 – and that should add up to a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

When you have to collect a set number of survey responses by a certain date, using paper questionnaires can seem seductively easy; they’re quick and easy to set up and, given the right audience and subject matter, you can guarantee to achieve your response target.

However, before you leap into the familiar, there are a number of factors to consider first:

Cost

The costs of paper, printing, and postage are all on the rise and we are all trying to move towards more sustainable and environmentally friendly communication methods. The cost savings alone of switching to online surveys can be a significant motivator to make the change.  In contrast, it can be costly to buy screens, tablets and specialist kits to collect feedback. One of the huge benefits of Empathica’s Customer Experience Management (CEM) programmes is that no additional investment in equipment or hardware is needed.

Survey flexibility

If you are considering open-ended questions for your survey, providing ample space for the respondent to complete their answer is crucial. Paper surveys will always have limitations on space, and sometimes are deliberately restricted to avoid respondents writing War and Peace, and therefore minimise the transcription or scanning workload required.

Web-based surveys are far more flexible than paper-based ones. It is very easy to add multiple text areas that the respondent can fill in, enabling you to collect valuable customer feedback. In return, all feedback is reported online and can be easily analysed in order to drive action plans to improve customer experience. You can’t include drop-down boxes, interactive slider controls and star-rating controls, clickable maps and images, or multimedia files on paper – all features that make the process more user-friendly and appealing to the respondent.

Time

Executing paper-based surveys takes valuable time. Whether administration is in-person, mailed or sent as an email attachment, speed is always going to be a factor. The labour and time involved in handling all that paper and postage costs are also factors to take into account.  In addition, once you have collected all your responses, data entry will be required in order to get the information into an accessible and usable format in your database and reporting systems. Multi-page or complex paper surveys may also require scanning to collect and organise data.

Online surveys however, can be used to collect data in very little time. Online surveys can be delivered to your target audience via email or social media networks within minutes. Because of this rapid distribution, your sample population can respond almost immediately, and data is collected automatically. Empathica’s CEM programmes can also provide real-time analysis tools so you can track the progress of your survey and its results.

Accuracy

Data entry accuracy is very high with online surveys, subject to misspellings and mistakes that the respondent may make. Respondents provide their feedback directly, avoiding the risk of errors creeping in with separate data entry from a paper-based response.
One huge advantage of online surveys is when you analyse your results. Modern filtering systems enable you to scrutinise any aspect of your responses with ease; for example, you can read through a group of comments from people that answered a question a specific way, providing a targeted view of subjective feedback.

Access

One of the frequent arguments for paper surveys is that non-tech savvy respondents may not have the required access to a computer and the Internet to complete an online survey via email or on social media networks. However, with Empathica, there is the option of leaving responses using interactive telephone technology accessed through a free phone number.

Technological advances and the adoption of the Internet, smart phones and tablets have revolutionised how leading organisations collect survey data efficiently, cost effectively with almost real time reporting. However, simply changing the way you gather feedback won’t drive change. You have to take what your customers are saying and turn that feedback into action plans that will drive experience improvements.

One of the major benefits of using an online CEM programme is that it makes it easier to analyse customer feedback to identify key insights for individual locations. These can be used to drive actions and implement changes that will make a real difference to customers’ experiences.

If you become the type of company that not only listens to customers, but also acts on their feedback, your customers will return to your locations, become active brand advocates and recommend your brand to friends, family and followers.

If you know the importance of listening to your customers and have been collecting customer feedback… you’re off to a great start! But have you done anything with it? Some of you may have read through each one of your customer comments and others may have analyzed the data and created good looking charts. But did your customer experience change for the better because of it?

Think of customer feedback as a two-way street. According to the Empathica Consumer Insights Panel, consumers are more than willing to provide brands with their feedback, but only 46% believe that brands use it to make changes to the customer experience. If your customers are willing to take the time to voice their opinion to help you improve your customer experience, it’s important that you demonstrate that you are acting on the feedback they provide to give them a better experience with your brand and locations. You do this by gathering feedback in two ways:

Ask the right questions

The feedback you get from your customers is only as valuable as the questions you ask them. Your survey questions should be reflective of your brand and accurately capture the brand experience you strive to deliver.

Look for answers outside of your surveys

A lot of things could be said about you but they don’t usually come in the survey form. Online reviews, call center transcriptions, direct feedback email, open-ended survey comments are all opportunities where you can understand trends in what customers are saying about you.

Simply gathering feedback won’t drive change however. You have to take what your customers are saying and turn that feedback into action plans that will drive experience improvements. Sound complicated? It’s really not and here’s how you can do it:

Know where to find insights relevant to you

The volume of feedback coming from multiple channels can be too overwhelming for any location manager to read through. They shouldn’t have to browse through all the feedback channels and use different tools to determine the patterns. In fact, our 3rd party Feedback and Text Analytics solution provides an end-to-end view of multiple channels such as social media recommendations, online reviews, call center transcriptions, direct feedback email, and open-ended survey comments in one central application.

Turn insights into actions

3rd Party Feedback and Text Analytics allows locations to drill down to key issues and take concrete action to resolve issues. For example, when negative sentiments arise about fries, location managers should be able to find out what is being said about the fries in seconds – is it too cold? Too greasy? Or too pricey? By filtering the comments, your location manager can determine the most common word related to “negative fries.” By quickly identifying the real issue that exists within their location, location managers can implement an action plan to fix this issue and coach staff on how to do it.

Become the type of company that not only listens but also act on it. In return, your customers will return to your locations, become active brand advocates and recommend your brand to friends, family and followers.

I recently received an email inviting me to fill out a customer satisfaction survey from one of my favorite online outdoor equipment retailers. I freely admit that I only opened it out of competitive curiosity. When I opened the email, and it promised to take only two minutes and ask two simple questions, I exclaimed, ‘An NPS survey! ROCK ON!’

But that was me speaking as the survey taker. As a data scientist and survey analyst, I recognized the shortcomings of an NPS-style survey. There’s no way to control the data points in the sample, so this equipment retailer wouldn’t be getting the data required to slice and dice my results in interesting and meaningful ways.

For example, they wouldn’t be able to narrow results down to a particular type of service, a particular shift, or a distinct product. They wouldn’t even be able to do a basic regression analysis to identify key drivers. On the other hand, is it really worth it to swing the opposite way and create an experience-killing 47-question survey? Probably not.

Which brings up one of the major conundrums faced by VoC practitioners today:

There is a fundamental disconnect between the way customers want to share their experiences and the way researchers want to control the scientific sampling of information. The result is friction in the feedback process.

No More “Us Vs. Them”

Consumers want fewer questions. Companies want robust analysis. The smart companies are doing what the consumer wants—but the even smarter companies are finding ways to satisfy the interests of both parties.

Today, there are ways to begin cutting the length and overall friction from your satisfaction surveys today, without sacrificing your useful back-end insights. Here are three things I would recommend to any forward-thinking customer experience practitioner trying to find the fabled frictionless feedback:

1. Use the Power of Text Analytics

Shorter surveys don’t have to mean smaller data sets, as long as you’re asking the right questions and taking advantage of powerful natural language processing engines. Mindshare Monitor™ and Mindshare Discover™ are both supercomputing solutions that can extract profound structured meaning from free-form text.

Learn all you can about using this powerful technology, experiment with it, and find out which of your survey questions have become redundant.

2. Separate Your Feedback Channels

Just because you’re favoring shorter surveys doesn’t mean you have to completely give up on longer market research-style surveys. You can dedicate separate feedback channels to administering two separate surveys simultaneously:

1. A short review-style survey that any customer can comfortably complete.
2. A longer research-style survey providing granular details for analysing new product introductions or marketing research.

Your goal should be to offer your customers a good feedback experience while still collecting enough data to power other types of analytics.

3. Shorten Surveys

Identify which data points are the most important to your goals—and ruthlessly eliminate the rest. Not only will this provide a better experience to your customers, it will drastically simplify analysis. If you’re collecting more data points than you need, you might be creating more questions than you are answers. If you can’t arrive at a decisive action after asking yourself a “so what” question, consider eliminating the metric.

For example, a restaurant survey may have a question inviting the customer to “rate our tabletop displays.” You learn you have an average rating of 73 out of 100. So what? Well, it means your displays should be better. So what? Well, a 10% increase in those ratings should mean people learned more about your product. So what? You get the picture.

Think Forward and Implement Now

Customer tastes and preferences around survey-taking behavior are changing. The forward-thinking customer experience practitioner will see this as an opportunity to start implementing the most advanced review-oriented survey techniques to provide a great frictionless feedback experience to customers—while collecting an even broader data set.

You don’t need customer feedback to tell you that your customers want to be treated with respect.

You don’t need customer feedback to tell you that a smile translates across a telephone line—and even a computer screen.

Yet, not surprisingly, that’s the story most frequently told in customer comments. From the thousands of customer reviews that Mindshare sees daily, the bulk of customer insights contain the same common sense recipe for success: “Be nice. Be happy. Keep products in stock. Treat customers like people, not transactions.”

Of course, completely unexpected insights pop up, too—but the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of customer comments amount to this:

“I’m happy because I was served a quality product quickly, politely, and conveniently.”

OR

“I’m unhappy because I was served a poor quality product slowly, rudely, and inconveniently.”

And that’s not a bad thing. There are valuable ways to put those customer comments to work. These recurring customer statements of common sense can make a big difference in your daily operations if properly put to use:

5 Ways to Use Your Common Customer Feedback

1. Focus on individual employees

Find out who is and who isn’t listening to common sense in your company to provide good service, then reward or retrain accordingly.

2. Connect

Respond to customers who leave feedback. Whether you learned something groundbreaking or not from their comment, you can show your customers you care—and help them connect with your brand on a personal level—by showing that you listened. Tell them how you’ve resolved their concern or thank them for their time. Heck, offer them an inside deal if you want them to feel really special.

3. Measure company profits in relation to customer satisfaction

If you keep a reliable record of customer satisfaction scores, then you can track it alongside company progress to provide an unbeatable bellwether for your business. You’ll soon be predicting the dollar signs on your bottom line through your customer satisfaction scores.

4. Market it

Customers who say nice things about your company are providing credible, and invaluable, word-of-mouth marketing. Share their words with the world, or, better yet, help them share their own words with the world through social media.

5. Motivate frontline employees

Even employees who are “just working for the money” will take pride in knowing a customer singled them out for their service. They will work better knowing how much they can influence the customers they interact with.

And that’s just for the most frequent comments. There’s another list out there for using the customer comments that contain surprise insights.

Remember that customer feedback isn’t always about learning what customers want; it’s about finding more ways to deliver it.