Why do you ask for customer feedback?
Want to be a CX champion? It’s not just about asking for feedback. It’s about caring deeply, acting swiftly, and making CX a fundamental principle in your organization.
Sunny Bindra recently wrote about the need for brands to understand why they collect feedback in the first place.
Because our competitors do it, and it makes us look bad if we don’t. Because it gives us an audit trail with which to whip or reward our employees. Because it acts as a salve to customers if we let them believe we care what they think. Because it helps us pretend we care…
We’ve listed our biggest takeaways from this article below.
Customer experience (CX) leads to financial success
Customer experience directly impacts revenue and profitability. If your customers love doing business with you, they will recommend your brand to others and are willing to spend more money on your goods or services.
CX directly impacts the employee experience (EX)
We’ve previously discussed that combined CX and EX is the key to unlocking your organization’s potential to drive success and growth. Positive customer experiences create a happier workplace (and vice versa), leading to higher engagement and loyalty and lower employee churn.
Collect real-time feedback
Gone are the days when you could get away with surveying your customers on a predefined time basis — I’ll interview my customers every quarter, twice a year, etc. This approach is inherently flawed:
- There is a risk that you’ll get a ‘vanilla’ response that will not be insightful enough as the interaction isn’t top of mind.
- If your customer had an issue, it’s likely they’re already giving business to your competitor.
Encouraging and receiving feedback from customers during their allows for proactive and timely interventions. Consider collecting feedback at important customer events across the journey map and automate it. Some events can make or break a customer’s perception of your brand — these are the moments where you need to collect the customer’s experience in real-time.
CX isn’t just PR
CX champions genuinely care about their customers and their feedback. They view feedback as an opportunity to improve and promptly act to address any issues. CX should be approached as a genuine reflection of the organization’s values and commitment to excellence.
The next time you’re about to build a survey, ask yourself these questions:
- Why are we gathering feedback?
- How can we ask it in the least amount of questions possible?
- How are we going to use it?
- How do we make it visible across our business?
- How do we contact the customer once we receive their feedback?
