5 Mistakes Companies Make When Listening To Customers In Customer Experience

Customer Experience : The customer has become the center of the business, although understanding him is not an easy task.

Companies have internalized the importance of listening to the consumer and finding what they really want or need in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors and, therefore, survive in an increasingly saturated market. In fact, according to data from the IE Customer Experience Club, companies that have a CX strategy manage to multiply customer satisfaction and loyalty by 60%.

However, even today 70% of companies do not have a defined Customer Experience strategy or have it in a very incipient way, according to data from the latest Prodware study. And it is that, in practice, it is not always carried out in the proper way nor is it possible to extract the correct feedback, something that can seriously damage the company by not investing in the appropriate user experience actions.

Artificial intelligence has managed to make the tools aimed at analyzing “the voice of the customer” increasingly precise. Hello, Customer warns about the 5 most common mistakes made by companies today when it comes to working on active listening and implementing customer satisfaction and ‘customer experience strategies.

The 5 mistakes in the implementation and care of the Customer Experience

Collect only the feedback that comes reactively. Waiting for the customer to send the feedback is detrimental since only those who have had a bad experience and are dissatisfied come to the company. This type of client is an expansive bomb since the negative experience of a single client can reach 10 people.

In any case, it is biased feedback. A useful way to understand how best to listen to the customer is through the  “customer feedback iceberg” theory. In its visible part, there are dissatisfied consumers who openly expose that dissatisfaction. In the submerged zone there are 80% of satisfied customers and 20% are made up of the “silent minority”, who do not speak out. If all of them are asked proactively, at the right time, and through the right channel, more important feedback is collected and it will be closer to what you really need.

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Biased feedback from reactive reviews can give the impression that there is a majority of dissatisfied customers when in fact you may have a vast majority of satisfied customers who have never had a chance to comment on their experience. Studies indicate that a dissatisfied customer is three times more likely to share that negative experience than someone who has been happy with the product or service. Although it is necessary to identify these clients and what has gone wrong, this feedback is not representative of all clients, and guiding the strategy on it is a mistake.

Focus only on scores without adding Open Text analytics in quizzes – Customer satisfaction questionnaires are one of the most important tools for the company. Currently, there are different formulas such as the NPS, CNAT, or Ces surveys. However, although objective and measurable information is obtained that helps track evolution, for the client it is a process of synthesis and reduction that forces them to convert the experience into a number or score. In other cases, these questionnaires are usually too long, which lowers the response rates, and they are usually made up of direct questions that respond to internal metrics that are a priority for the company, but not so much for the client. What induces to obtain answers that deep down or already know or were already expected, and that do not represent the true concerns of the client?

 Those concerns are usually reflected only if the questionnaire offers the option of open text space. But for the company, that type of information is more complicated to measure and analyze.

Do not invest in artificial intelligence and machine learning for the analysis of open feedback:  to solve and optimize open text analysis, it is advisable to use tools based on artificial intelligence and machine learning that allow the large number of comments received daily to be taken on board. This makes it possible to make the customer listening strategy more profitable.

Not having a Customer experience department and not involving everyone else:  another of the main mistakes is believing that it is enough to treat customer satisfaction issues as a project within any department. 

In fact, it is common to see how user feedback is collected within the marketing department or the sales team, without involving everyone who is part of the organization. To ensure that the entire company is involved and oriented towards the creation of a user experience, input and motivation must be given to all employees, horizontally through the different departments, and vertically, from the CEO to all workers.