Customer Experience monitoring is nothing new, but the ways and depth by which we can scrutinise it are evolving faster than ever before.
A few years ago the focus was on the digital revolution in customer service and finding the best ways of providing online services (often replacing traditional human-to-human based interactions).
Now though, customers expect online services as a key channel, so the digital marketer’s role has become even more vital.
Digital first
In an age where customers are more readily looking for a digital service as a priority, the phrase ‘Digital First’ has firmly entered the lexicon of the digital marketer.
Moving your prime sales and services funnels to the cloud makes a lot of sense for many businesses that focus on fast moving areas such as retail, banking and travel services. Customers want to be able to purchase services immediately and in many cases, use them online as well.
An annual survey by Russell Reynolds Associates asked 2,000 C-level executives about how digital commerce will affect their business in next 12 months and 90% professed to have a digital strategy in place to cope with these needs. The survey also asked the executives if they will be moderately or massively disrupted by digital in the next 12 months.
The results were very revealing, with responders in the Media sector showing the highest result at 72%, reflecting the nature of media proliferation across digital channels, be that written/pictorial or increasingly video media. Next on the list was Telecom with 64%, followed by Consumer Financial Services at 61%, Retail and Technology at 57%, Insurance at 53% and Consumer products at 52%.
It is no surprise that B2C organisations are seeing the biggest uptake in digital demand. These consumer demands have necessitated a big move from more traditional marketing campaigns to many exclusively digital ones, in a way that would have been almost unthinkable even a few years ago.
Whilst the growth in apps has facilitated this demand, they also make it more viable to market services through this channel as well.
The need to understand the customer experience and to make sense of customer feedback has grown too. It has never been more vital to understand how customers experience the key elements of your website and apps and to ensure you are outmanoeuvring your competition in the process.
Many feedback tools
The last few years have seen a rapid expansion in the number of online feedback solutions available, with many simple survey builder tools available. These can work for some smaller businesses, but for enterprise organisations the challenge is not just to collect feedback, it is also to know how to abstract useful information from it.
The real goal is not only to collect this data but to find meaningful insights in it that will make specific improvements to your online processes and sales funnels. Simply collecting customer feedback creates large amounts of data that need to be sifted through. Without being collected in context, it can cause quite the headache for the business trying to analyse it!
Finding the right tool to analyse all this customer feedback is essential and we have found that the demand for sophisticated tools that do this has grown significantly during the past few years.
Tools such as role-based dashboards (which provide feedback at the process level), text analysis and action management are key parts of the digital marketer’s armoury, turning largely unstructured data into keen insights that help the business to stay highly competitive.
Timing is vital
The pace of the digital economy also means there is no point following time-consuming methods of analysing data. At first digital marketers turned to simple spreadsheets, Business Intelligence (BI) software or created their own research and analysis tools for handling customer feedback data.
This inevitably became more and more time-consuming and made it hard to handle open comments, as well as marketers struggling to create digital context. Unfortunately, BI tools often lack understanding of open text in conjunction with customer metrics such as CES, and Goal Completion Rates.
This is why specific customer feedback tools have evolved to match the needs of the rapidly developing market. The best customer feedback solutions combine text and ratings with every key process of your website or apps to ensure they are consistently providing exactly what your customers want, need and deserve.
Staying ahead of the curve
The pace of development in the digital space and its ever-growing importance to so many business sectors can seem very daunting indeed. At the same time, at Mopinion we realised very early on that the basic principles actually stay very static and this has shaped our business and product development as well.
It is vital to remember that customer feedback is only as good as the results it delivers. You could be doing the “right things” (taking in a huge amount of customer feedback) but you actually need to concentrate on “doing things right” – looking at the relevant areas of concern in a prompt and timely matter.
With the plethora of digital marketing customer feedback tools on the market it is easy for digital marketers to pick one which happily collects data but fails to make sense of it.
The real value comes from finding the right solution for the specific business needs which will make a positive impact on the bottom line sales – which is always the ultimate goal of any business. Look at it this way – feedback is cheap, but insights are priceless.
