Most Voice of the Customer programmes are reactive – they wait until customers flag up problems through negative feedback before they resolve an issue.
But what if you could flip this process and start to spot problems before customers encounter them? If you can identify problems early, then you can solve them faster, saving the customer from a bad experience.
With mobile feedback, brands have an opportunity to better understand the reasons behind a customer’s score. The additional insight that comes from mobile – including device information and location – can provide a complete picture of the customer’s context. Customers can also use their mobile to provide richer feedback to the brand, this might include capturing images and video in the moment to make their voices heard more clearly.
#1 Be in the moment
There’s the old cliché that tells us that a picture paints a thousand words. With the rise of digital and it's implications for feedback, customers can now use pictures and/or video to show brands what they really think and feel.
For example, a coffee shop that has tables piled high with dirty mugs and half eaten muffins will be able to understand the situation better with a photo coming from a customer highlighting how bad this looks and how damaging it is to their experience.
The right business will understand that this feedback comes with a form of 'supporting evidence' and embrace it. It's critical that this feedback is dealt with instantly, in real-time to demonstrate to the customer that they care about their experience and act on the feedback they receive.
As a brand, it would also be an interesting exercise to understand whether images and video are more likely to accompany negative or positive feedback. It would allow brands to improve reaction times and quickly identify what types of problems drive emotion – ones where the customer will make the extra effort of taking a picture so that their feelings are clearly expressed.
#2 Track keywords in customer feedback verbatim
If you typically receive a high volume of feedback, then tracking keywords in customer verbatim is an efficient way of analysing themes that come up when customers giving both negative or positive feedback.
An online survey of Amazon reviews found that the average length of a review was 582 characters. Assuming that your customers write in a similar review length based upon their satisfaction, this can allow companies to segment data and understand what their customers are saying much quicker.
By tracking the consistencies and changes between these written reviews, you will soon be able to quickly spot the problem areas. For example is ‘contact centre’ is a keyword that comes up regularly, you know there is a problem.
Analysing word pairs and performing word categorisation is another way of tracking consistencies between positive and negative reviews and spotting problems faster.
#3 Find out if problems are located in a particular area
Understanding location-driven feedback is a powerful way for brands to identify problem hotspots. For example, when a customer provides mobile feedback about their experience in a local store, the location can either be entered manually or tracked through GPS.
This is valuable information for any insights team, as they’ll be able to spot any correlations between common problems and the location where they’re reported.
The brand can then liaise with the team to solve the problem or, if needed, escalate it.
#4 Connect the dots together – link data sources
Sometimes, feedback alone isn’t enough to get to the root of the matter. But if you can link the feedback to other business data, then you can create a more effective way of solving the problem.
One way to do this (for a retailer) could be to link customer feedback to in-store camera footage. This way, the words of the customer can be compared to the visual recording of what was happening at any particular moment – giving you a complete picture of the moment of feedback or interaction.
