Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming many industries, and many CX teams are navigating mandates to incorporate it into their strategies. But let’s face it — today, most of the ways we use AI in CX are pointed at our teams and customers, not with them. Consider the following scene:

The three-headed CX monster plagues CX leaders with three core problems — siloes, dark data, and the “too-hard” pile. According to Deloitte, customer feedback, both organic and unsolicited, is often spread across as many as 23 different channels, leading to a siloed view of your customer experience. Dark data is typically unstructured data that is impossible to understand without a significant data science effort or tons of manual analysis, which often happens late or never. Unfortunately, this is the common fate of 90% of your customer feedback.  Because of siloes and dark data, some of the most brilliant CX insights are cast aside onto the “too-hard” pile. If it’s too complicated for any stakeholder to understand the impact of customer feedback and to execute on it, it stays stranded on the “too-hard” pile. Most customer feedback has a short time window to make an impact on any given customer’s experience — allowing it to linger here translates to failure to act, and failing to act in a timely fashion opens the floodgates to unfortunate consequences, from churn to a tarnished reputation. 

This is the final post in a three-part series about assembling your customer feedback stack so that you can take action faster and more effectively than ever before. In case you missed it, catch up on part I here and part II here. 

This post is the second in a three-part series about assembling your customer feedback stack so that you can take action faster and more effectively than ever before. In case you missed it, catch up on the first post here.

This post is the first in a three-part series about assembling your customer feedback stack so that you can take action faster and more effectively than ever before. 

Voice of Customer is nothing new. But between rising customer expectations, and as a result, the rise of CX as today’s competitive frontier, and advances in technology, organizations are rethinking their approach. To understand what’s changing and why we combined findings across the year of customer voice data and a survey of CX professionals. Check out our infographic that highlights the top five things to know about VoC in 2021. 

Too often, when organizations think about getting started with a traditional CX program, things generally go one of two ways: 

You’d be hard pressed to find an executive at any company billing itself as customer-centric who will say that listening to customer feedback isn’t important. So it’s quite possible that a customer experience program has been on your mind for some time, but it’s also quite possible that your version still exists as a quarterly survey program, or maybe as an aspirational bullet point in an internal strategy deck. Unfortunately, CX initiatives have long been easy to cast aside in favor of priorities perceived as lower effort and higher impact. But CX programs have come a long way — it’s never been more important to have a sound strategy in place, nor has it ever been more achievable to drive and measure positive outcomes for your customers and your organization. Best-in-class CX organizations are trading old-school CX programs for CX Ops, a new-action-oriented approach that unifies customer feedback and measures every interaction from every channel to help CX teams turn insight into action. 

Traditional CX programs fall short of measurable impact because they often rely on siloed, one-dimensional, and stale data. Poor CX data management results in an inaccurate and illegible portrayal of your CX and uncertainty about how to improve. According to Forrester, 77% of companies say that they don’t model the drivers of CX quality regularly, leaving them in the dark about what matters most to their customers. Furthermore, 65% of companies say improving their data analysis is critical to improving customer experience.