Founder of CX-AI.com and CEO of Success Drivers
// Pioneering Causal AI for Insights since 2001 //
Author, Speaker, Father of two, a huge Metallica fan.
Author: Frank Buckler, Ph.D.
Published on: October 14, 2021 * 6 min read
Every time I book a hotel, flight, or rental car, every time I buy a ticket for a game, every time I buy a product at some website – virtually anytime I do a business interaction, I get an ask for feedback.
It’s common sense that I don’t have time to answer all of them. Even worse, I am developing over time the habit of not even noticing those requests.
The driving trends behind this obvious picture is twofold
TREND 1 – DIGITALISATION: With digital survey tools from Qualtrics, Hotjar, to Survey Monkey, it’s a matter of a few mouse clicks and an investment of a view bugs to collect feedback and analyze it somehow.
TREND 2 – ROLE OF INSIGHTS: The first “big data” hype dates now over 20 years back. Since then, the amount of data has doubled every two years. But all this is mainly transactional data collecting along with the business processes.
What is not scaling that fast is customer feedback.
Based on this better data, many problems along the business process get optimized e.g. leveraging AI.
The miracle remaining stays the customer. What drives his behaviors and decisions? How does he perceive his experience?
Businesses release that each company typically has a major bottleneck: to better understand than everyone else the customer.
It seems that this is already common sense. The enlightenment that only better customer insights can only deliver this is trending now and in the future.
A BCG study from 2016 has asked CEO’s what the key areas for improvements are. The clear uncontested #1 was “customer insights”.
Humans are not just customers, and if they are, they are customers of hundreds of products. If customer insights remain the ultimate bottleneck, it’s clear that managing the access becomes mission-critical.
There are three frontiers you need to operate:
Enough feedback: Acquiring enough feedback from customers is the most intuitive frontier
Quality feedback: Its not enough to gather any feedback. You need to make sure that the quality is good enough to draw useful decisions from that. If you want to cut survey length, find the type of question that captures the most useful information.
Use feedback better: When feedback becomes scarce, you really need to make the most out of it. This field is the greatest sin and area for improvement of our time.
Too often, we survey customers and do virtually nothing with it. It’s not just wasteful but unethical as your customer trusted that the time they invested would be used for good.
Here is my list of 20 tools and tactics you may want to work thru to win the war for feedback.
They center around five strategies. First, improve, focus or alter the source of feedback (S. like Source). Second, better utilized the data you collect (U. like Use). Third, provide value to your customer so they have an incentive to give feedback (P. for Provide Value). Fourth, improve the execution of every step of the process. Improvements do not sum but multiply up (E. for Execution). Fifth, use multiple or the proper channels to reach out (R. for Reach)
SOURCES
USAGE OF DATA
PROVIDE VALUE
EXECUTION
REACH
Winning the war for feedback requires investing in ‘Starwars’ tech, not in spears and catapults. The S.U.P.E.R. framework gives you five areas to work on and dominate the ‘battlefield’ for human feedback:
First, expand the source of feedback. Blending different sources of feedback will be the new normal. Debiasing measures have become a new science.
Second, better utilized the data you already have. As feedback becomes more valuable, it is crucial to utilize data better. I see HUGE potential here.
Third, provide value to your customer, so they have an incentive to give feedback. The way you plan your CX program tells a lot about how customer-centric you are.
Fourth, improve the execution of every step of the process – from email send-out to survey design. Improvements do not sum but multiply up.
Fifth, use the right or multiple channels to reach out and invest in predictive outreach.
If you want to dive into more cutting-edge CX thinking, the “CX Analytics Masters” Course is for you. It’s free for enterprise insights professionals. If you are looking to discuss some of the advanced technics mentioned above, with an expert, reach out at www.cx-ai.com
Now I have a question: Was this article helpful? Please DM me directly with any comments or questions
– Frank