To remain competitive, companies need to understand what their customers want and deliver on their needs. By analyzing customer feedback data, organizations can glean essential insights into customers’ hearts, minds, and share of wallets, and as a result, deliver a more personalized brand experience.
But customer feedback data covers a lot of data sources; a customer can interact with a company through social media sites, online review sites, through email, postal mail, by calling into the call center, through survey, and via online chat, to name a few! For departments such as Marketing or Customer Service, the choice is oftentimes a lot more straightforward – social media and call center data, respectively, are easy places to start analyzing customer feedback. But what about Operations teams? Insights relevant to Front-line Operations are often included in data coming into departments across the company, and from many different channels.
The 3 most valuable feedback source
For Operations teams, transactional, loyalty and point-of-sale data show what items are purchased, but they don’t explain what shoppers like, what they don’t like or how they feel. Teams need to go beyond that, and need to start by analyzing these 3 key data sources:
Social media: With 1.28 billion monthly active Facebook users, and 255 million monthly active users on Twitter, social media is rife with actionable insights waiting to be discovered. Capturing social feedback lets you connect directly with your customers in real time, build relationships, and inspire even more honest feedback. Social media also lets you immediately spot opportunities to fix negative experiences and promote positive ones.
Contact centers: Well-trained, effective call center employees can be the difference between a satisfied customer and one who decides to churn. Many businesses analyze call center notes, with more advanced companies turning to speech analytics for a more thorough and automated analysis of contact center phone calls.
Survey data: Survey responses include ratings, such as a score of 1 out of 10, along with detailed comments. By looking at both types of data, you have all the clues to solve any mystery in your business. For example, you can find out what topics your customers are talking about most and the emotions they are expressing. You can dig down into their motives behind buying, not buying or churning. You can also filter by loyalty and purchase information to uncover what loyal customers value most, giving you a real, 360-degree view of your customers.
But beware this common mistake
One of the most common mistakes made is listening to just one channel of customer feedback. Different channels reveal different aspects of the customer experience, and some channels are likely to be more positive than others. For example, social data could reveal you have problems with inventory, surveys may point to price concerns, and call center recordings could indicate product issues. But when you put them all together, a new insight may emerge. Perhaps service is the largest issue across the board, but it’s not amplified on one single channel.
Where to go from here
Once Front-Line Operations teams start analyzing their customer data, they can answer a whole host of questions, such as: which store is performing the best or the worst, and why; what are customers complaining about with regard to the produce department in Store X; why do customers choose our store instead of our competitor’s down the road; or how do our new stores perform compared to older stores. To learn more about how to use customer insights, read our CX Guide: 5 Reasons Why Store Operations Teams Can’t Ignore Customer Experience Data.
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