Customer feedback is the lifeblood of CX. Without it, CX teams can’t measure the quality of their experience and have no compass to help them improve it. Many teams start by listening to feedback in two ways:

History is full of infamously bad predictions. 

If you’re reading this, you probably know that a customer health score is a composite data point assigned to individual customers to summarize relationship health. It should enable you to understand how your customer relationships are likely to evolve in the future and know which accounts need attention at any given time. It needs to consider and weigh a variety of factors, and it’s only as good as the signals that feed it. 

Sentiment analysis has become quite the buzzword in the CX community, and with good reason. It’s never been more important to understand customer sentiment, and failing to do so brings unfortunate consequences.

Stop throwing away organic customer feedback.

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.