No matter what stage of development you're in, customer insights should direct your course ahead while creating value for your customers. You'll eventually corner the market if you carefully consider what your customers want, iterate based on consumer insights, and pay attention to what they have to say.
Additionally, in order to ask your customers questions without interfering with their customer experience, you'll need a feature-rich application. Creating and implementing a solid consumer insight plan will be simpler once you have the aid of a reliable instrument.
The biggest CX issue is that brands must collect pertinent data and insights. Businesses can only grasp the value of data by gathering it and turning it into insights. Implementing a system to gather data that will motivate actionable decisions by making it available to the relevant people or linked technologies at the right time requires careful planning.
How to Gather Customer Experience Insights?
Getting customer feedback is now simpler than ever, thanks to all the avenues available to organizations for communicating with their target market. You may learn how to garner customer insights in this section. Here are 7 methods to collect customer insights:
1. Do Consistent Surveys and Interviews
"Most brands are not spending enough time listening to and talking with their customers. This is always surprising to me because without customers, we don't have a business! They are literally the most valuable asset of any company, yet too often the focus is on acquiring more of them rather than keeping the ones we already have. Collect feedback frequently across channels, via surveys, ratings and reviews, customer service calls, focus groups, and one-on-one conversations. Analyze the responses and look for actionable insights. Listen for what you are doing well and do more of it! Then listen for what parts of the experience are missing the mark and try to x the underlying issue," says DAN GINGISS, Chief Experience Officer, The Experience Maker, LLC.
Surveys and interviews make it easy to determine what customers are actually interested in. A customer-centric mindset is crucial in professional services, and it's a big part of your job to comprehend and anticipate your customers' wants. Moreover, you get a feel of what you are doing well and where you might be able to improve.
The manner you put these techniques into practice depends on what you think will lead to the most meaningful insights. As a crucial component of our regular interactions, you can be confident that this is a very informal approach with long-standing consumers. This is typically done more formally for shorter-term initiatives, with at least two surveys taken at the beginning and end of the journey.
2. Poll Customers Before a New Product Launch
It's essential to listen to the audience's voice. Customer feedback is vital to have as early as possible when launching a new product. It takes more time to make necessary changes than the product is already on the market. You might ask customers to rate your product's features and advantages before publishing it.
After that, you ask buyers to describe the product's intended usage and location. This can give you fabulous inspiration for the images you should take. Social media comments are another fantastic source of inspiration. The last thing you need is customer feedback regarding price sensitivity.
3. Investigate What Made Customers Leave
Analyzing the reasons why customers left and talking to current and potential customers about what you can do to address their packaging-related pain points can be necessary steps to get your business back on track.
You or your team can call customers and say, "I see that you ordered X. What prompted you to order that specific item? And then determine the following:
- Why and how are they utilizing it?
- Where are they keeping it?
- What reason did they have to buy it?
- Do they have any suggestions for changes that might be made?
If you ask, you'd be astonished at how many customers will provide you with priceless advice.
4. Establish an Appropriate Review Assessment
Utilize customer service tools and set up appropriate review monitoring. The following methods work for doing this:
- Assemble customer reviews in one place.
- Speak with the customer personally to gain a better understanding.
- Sort the feedback into categories based on its urgency and importance.
- Assuming the criticism is accurate, plan your road map accordingly and use the complaint to improve your product.
Not all customer reviews are relevant. It is best to determine whether responding to the criticism is consistent with the goals and objectives of your business.
5. Leverage Social Listening Avenues
According to 23% of respondents in the financial services sector, companies do not pay attention to their customers' opinions or solicit their feedback via surveys, interviews, social media, etc. Customer feedback is gathered and listened to in large part through social media. You can access an untapped market of open customer feedback with social listening.
In addition to direct comments or mentions on social networks, your company can also look to other networks with built-in polling capabilities to gather customer feedback. Using social media is the easiest way to ensure that your team's product decisions align with your audience's buying behavior.
6. Utilize Live Chat Support
"Identify the moments of truth, those do-or-die moments. Businesses must have a 360-degree view of all the customer interactions on ALL channels (face-to-face, phone, web, mobile, SMS, chatbot, etc.). To do so, they must draw customer journey maps to see the channel(s) used on a specific touchpoint and make sure that the transition from one channel to another (e.g., from the web to the phone) is seamless. Businesses must then analyze each touchpoint, gather data, and design human/digital/ material/procedural solutions," says Daniel Lafrenière, Multichannel Customer Experience Strategist Daniel Lafrenière.
Offer real-time online support and solicit customer feedback when they can't find a product or have a question about a service. Solutions for a better customer experience are frequently found where the queries and difficulties often raised during an online chat are concerned.
Ensure employees keep tabs after the chat to ensure all of their needs are satisfied. Without checking their mailbox, this is a fantastic place to also give an online survey.
7. Listen To Your Sales Calls
Your sales calls are one of the most effective areas you should keep an eye on to understand consumer wants. Before you provide your product or service, a well-structured sales call will perform an excellent job of analyzing the customer's condition.
In the discovery phase of the sales call, a skilled salesperson will probe the prospect's situation, their discomfort or issues, and the costs associated with maintaining their current status.
You will be able to identify patterns and trends that can help you enhance your product and improve the effectiveness of your marketing message by recording your sales conversations and having your marketing and product teams listen to these calls.
How Can Companies Use Customer Experience Insights?
CX insights are the backbone of smart business decisions, ideally customer-centric. These help in crafting customer-friendly strategies based on their feedback in the past. This way, you’re taking care of their issues, needs, and expectations while serving them not just your products/services but a memorable experience.
1. To Personalize Your Outreach
According to the feedback received and analyzed, customized videos and graphics may be added to customer communications with just a few clicks. This customization overlay gives a personal touch and aids in customer retention.
Start a conversation to understand better what your customers like and dislike. In this situation, building a personal relationship with them instead of using gimmicky incentives will assist turn a consumer into a brand ambassador.
After sending a customized video from an executive, you may allow your customer service/success teams to handle all follow-ups to scale this strategy. This method can prevent the mindless responses that frequently occur in surveys.
2. To Spot Prospect Customer Needs
Utilize customer feedback to spot needs that still need to be identified or addressed. Take customer comments and feedback more seriously by getting involved. What requirements exist beneath or outside of what you hear or see?
Social networking technologies like Twitter or Facebook could be beneficial. The source of demand for your organization is emerging requirements. Provide yourself with the chance to address more potential customer needs.
You must always enhance and improve your product to remain competitive. Obtaining customer feedback will assist your startup in pinpointing the features users want, the parts of your product that require improvement, and more.
Furthermore, you can keep asking your audience for their preferences every year. Create those new products or buy them and redesign them in response to their feedback.
3. To Deliver Valuable, Pertinent Content
Valuable, pertinent content might draw many potential customers to your website. By developing a detailed buyer persona, you better understand your target audience and the kinds of content they'd be interested in. However, finding out what your audience wants to see can make your material even more valuable and pertinent to them.
With feedback from your audience, you may not only determine the precise subjects your audience wants to learn about, but you can also identify any areas for improvement in your content marketing plan. You could, for instance, research the preferred channels for delivering content to your audience.
Or you might discover a brand-new reason why readers engage with your material, allowing you to broaden your target demographic. Getting consumer feedback will help your company's content marketing strategy increase lead and sales generation.
4. To Enhance The Onboarding Process
It's crucial to keep customers after you get them. You risk permanently losing new consumers if they get overwhelmed and perplexed throughout the onboarding process. Consequently, use customer feedback to enhance the onboarding procedure.
You can get user opinions about your onboarding procedure through various methods. Every click and movement users make while interacting with your product and onboarding procedure is recorded by a session replay tool so you can analyze their experience.
After onboarding, you can also start a feedback survey and employ chatbots to respond to customer questions instantly. Even at our business, we have new hires go through the onboarding procedure and provide us with thorough feedback that you can use.
5. For Product Innovation
Customer insights showcase some very interesting facts about customer requirements. They speak about the product they wish to have on social media, web forums, feedback forms, and every possible channel they communicate with a brand. Insights show an optimized and unified view of customer viewpoint.
A brand can look for game-changing opportunities and innovate a product that customers demand before competitors. Using customer insights, you get a 360-degree view of the product that customers ask for through the feedback. Insights answer questions such as the demand for the product, how long the product will remain relevant, whether it is feasible to launch that product, and many more questions that will help you evaluate the authenticity of the product going to be developed.
6. For Competitor Analysis
Customer insights expose your competitors' strategies and tactics to attract potential clients in your industry. Insights reflect the weakness and strengths of your competitors. You can tap into the results of the insights to revamp your customer-related operations to get ahead of your competition.
Customer insights help you understand the market gap with which you can bring relevant solutions for customers first in the market and stand out in the crowd. In today's digital world, you need customer insights to outperform and stay at the top position. Also, you can keep track of your position in the market and maintain it using customer insights.
7. For New Market Outreach
Customer insights are the path to new market outreach, as you can gain the latest information on what's working in the market. The combination of technologies, such as AI, ML, cloud, and many such, has enabled us to get real-time insights. Reaching out with relevancy is no more a trouble for brands and their marketing teams.
For market outreach, customer insights have opened several doors to convert potential audiences into profitable customers. Outreaches have become more personalized, which is a customer delight factor. With the help of customer insights, you can run targeted campaigns that successfully generate quality leads and increase conversion rates.
Final Thoughts
You'll need to gather more feedback as your company expands if you want to keep growing. As you gather positive written evaluations and word-of-mouth appreciation, you'll organically attract more visitors to your website by paying attention to your audience.
Gaining actionable customer insights can be significantly aided by the kind, quantity, and frequency of the questions you ask. Your insights will be more profound, and it will be easier to identify common trends and themes as you receive more high-quality comments.
Determine if you are posing the right questions to the appropriate people in the proper mode if you receive few responses or notice a typical pattern in one feedback mode over another. If so, change your VoC approach and give it another shot.
Read More: 4 Steps to Implement Real-Time Customer Insights To Improve Customer Experience