How Crucial Is It to Speak and, More Importantly, Listen to Your Customers?

Capture customer feedback in the places you are not asking for it and welcome innovation at all levels

What are the most crucial steps companies need to make when creating customer-centric culture?

Understand what value you want to add to the customer. How is what you are doing going to improve or help your customers lives? The company Vision, products, metrics must all align to improve whatever you are choosing to is your unique value add to the customer.

Second, you need to listen to the customers. If you’re not speaking to them, then listen to those who are. That might be customer service reps, twitter feeds or UX focus groups. This data is crucial and it should be source “without prejudice”. If you are asking CS agents to explain dissatisfaction scores, or only looking at social complaints, you are not capturing the customers real use and intent.

Third, you need to welcome innovation and suggestions from all levels. Running an operation is easy – constantly evolving it is not! How many months of the same business reviews will drive the business forward? Skip every second Business Review and replace it with an Innovation Review would be my suggestion.

What are the best strategies or ways of collecting customer feedback that can improve overall satisfaction?

Capture customer feedback in the places you are not asking for it. Twitter, Reddit, forums. In product feedback mechanisms are also good, but avoid capturing where a customer is in an “evaluating state”, such as a survey after a purchase or a Customer Service contact. Yes, there are times where CSAT or escalation surveys tell you something new, but often it just underscores what you already know. If you improve the product and service from a usage point of view, User Satisfaction will follow.

What kind of changes in the CX landscape can we expect during the next few years?

Increased automation and augmentation (by AI) will remove the trivial tasks from Service operations. This will allow CX groups to start refocusing and pushing harder in to new experiences. Asynchronous support as an example, has taken very long to adopt, because in many places to bulk of investment goes into the existing service design. As novel methods of solving problems at scale appear, there will be an increased opportunity to start looking at new service design. What happens when customers start sending bots (e.g. Google Assistant) to interact with companies on their behalf? We need to get ready!

 

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Thomas REBY is the Head of Hardware, Google Store and Google One, based in Dublin, Ireland. He is a Customer Service leader with a strong background in technology service, gained through a career in Dell, eBay and Google/YouTube. He has led CX, Knowledge Management and Product Support transformations globally, with extensive experience in Outsourcing, in order to build CX Operations at scale.