We all love customer feedback. It makes our performance better, our messaging stronger, and a good old-fashioned customer survey is an obvious way of generating it. In fact, that’s been the go-to approach of most businesses for years. Hey, it’s easy to do, and surveys tend to give answers that are easy to analyse, which is always a bonus.
So, brands sent out their lengthy surveys, and hope for some good responses. Or bad responses. Or even just… any responses.
Let’s be honest – answering survey questions isn’t the most exciting thing in the world. Especially when it’s the fourth brand survey you’ve been asked to fill out that week. Even the world’s best written survey questions can’t change that.
Not convinced? Here’s a stat that will stop you in your survey-sending tracks. 96% of customers who’ve had a bad experience won’t fill out a survey at all. So, while it’s always nice to hear good things, your coverage will be poor, meaning the majority of customers that could offer valuable insight won't engage with your survey. Leaving you with a poor data sample that you can’t turn into action.
Because to improve, we need to hear from everyone – the Ravers, the Ranters, and the silent shoppers. But endless customer feedback questions and survey exhaustion are blocking the way. Customer feedback fatigue is real – and it’s time we fought back.
It's just emotion, taking us over
But how, we hear you cry? It starts with the right approach to customer engagement. At Rant & Rave, we’ve invested a lot of time into discovering how to engage customers and capture feedback that really means something. The conclusion’s pretty clear. We need to let emotion take over.
If you’ve had half an ear to the ground of the CX conversation as of late, you’ll know customer emotion is the only predictor of future behaviour, and ultimately, future spend. As you can discover in The Essential Guide to Emotional Engagement, we’ve found some serious benefits to putting emotion at the heart of your customer engagement strategy – including being able to understand how customers feel, take action in real-time, and empower employees to empathise and respond to customers based on their emotion.
With this approach, not only are great experiences delivered, but the business reaps the rewards with improvements such as slashed call volumes, higher customer retention and reduced complaints.
But the value of an emotional engagement strategy doesn't stop there. For brands serious about improving their CX, there's a huge opportunity to segment customers from this emotion data, helping you to build stronger relationships.
Ultimately, this means you'll deliver more value to customers and with greater success. By varying your offering, the language used, and the communication channel, you can create a more personalised interaction that's one-to-one and serves the customer.
Every step you take… every move you make
The core of this approach lies in offering the opportunity to give feedback at every step of the customer journey, in real-time, and in a way that’s natural to the customer. The benefits of doing this are huge. For one thing, this builds the emotional dialogue which is so important to improving their experience. For another, feedback gathered within 24 hours is more accurate. Best of all, this approach allows you to action the feedback instantly, in manageable chunks. Great for your customer, amazing for your agents, and an all-around organisational win.
If you can create this emotional dialogue, you’ll be well on your way to fighting customer feedback fatigue, because your data-gathering is built into every step – meaning every move you make in response can be that little bit smarter.
We’ve seen first-hand how powerful this approach can be. Rant & Rave partner BOC (featured as one of our CX success stories in The Big Book of Ravers), previously sent out a more traditional annual survey, which only reached around 300 customers. The Rant & Rave Platform empowered them to send a simple feedback request after every customer interaction, asking for an experience score from 1 to 5, with a reason for the rating. The proof’s in the pudding - they’ve recorded a phenomenal 1,400% increase in customer feedback.
Lights, camera… engagement strategy in action
Start a conversation, gather feedback at every stage, minimise feedback fatigue. Sounds easy enough, right? Actually, it’s a little bit more complicated, and brands need to put in some ground work before their customers will enter into this sort of dialogue. The Rant & Rave Platform gives you the tools you need to take this approach, but you also need the right strategy if you really want to build stronger relationships while yielding insight that's actionable.
If you’re ready to take the plunge and kick-start your emotional engagement strategy, we’ve got your back. Download the Three Step Guide to Creating an Emotional Engagement Strategy now, and get ready for an avalanche of actionable insight.
