Dive Brief

• More than half of consumers — 56% — have left brands that ignored their feedback, according to a survey of 1,500 consumers and 750 digital leaders from Quantum Metric, released earlier this month.
• Fewer than 1 in 5 consumers see surveys as an effective way to provide their feedback, and another one-third said they don't feel heard by digital brands at all.
• One-quarter of digital leaders have daily access to recent customer feedback, while about half — 52% — have no formal process for acting on the feedback they do collect, the report found.

Dive Insight

Gathering data on customer sentiment and behavior without acting on it is a fruitless exercise, but taking action on data is easier said than done. 

Brands have a plethora of ways to collect customer feedback, whether in the form of after-call surveys or mining comments and reviews. Contact center interaction logs are also a key source of sentiment and behavior data; one-third of consumers prefer to call support directly when they have an issue rather than complete a survey, Quantum Metric found. 

“Most companies are OK at addressing things you personally complained about on a service call,” Michael Hinshaw, founder and president of McorpCX, told CX Dive in an email. 

The harder challenge is addressing systemic problems.

“Where they fall down is turning what they're hearing across thousands of customers into actual changes in how the business runs,” Hinshaw said. “That's the harder work, and it's usually the part that gets skipped, because it takes cross-functional buy-in, not just closing a ticket.”

Every interaction is potentially a source of customer intelligence, according to Brad Cleveland, CX expert and author.

“What customers ask about, where they become confused, why they contact the company repeatedly, what they search for unsuccessfully, and where they abandon a process can be as revealing as the ratings they provide,” Cleveland told CX Dive in an email.

This is where cross-team collaboration must begin.

“If a customer says checkout isn't working, teams shouldn't have to wait for enough similar complaints to spot a pattern,” Mark Treschl, general manager of Voice of Customer at Quantum Metric, told CX Dive in an email. “They should be able to connect that feedback to what actually happened, understand if the same issue affected one customer or 10,000, and determine the impact on either the customer or business.”

That cannot happen unless the business has a cross-departmental process in place for identifying issues, evaluating their impact, getting them fixed across teams as necessary and then tracking results. 

Otherwise, “the organization is listening without really responding,” Cleveland said.

Fixes must then be communicated to customers. Half of customers want visible proof their issue was fixed in order to continue trusting the brand, Quantum Metric found.

“The strongest signal is relevant action,” Cleveland said. “Reflect back what you understood, explain what will happen next, provide a realistic timeframe when appropriate, and follow up.”

And while a dissatisfied customer may be challenging to deal with, that interaction is an opportunity to secure their lifetime business.

“If a customer has a bad experience and the brand listens, fixes it and gets back to them, that can actually strengthen the relationship,” Treschl said. “That's why I think of VoC as an accountability layer. It helps brands understand where they're falling short, what needs to change and whether they actually made the experience better.”