In my previous blog, I discussed the migration across the VoC industry in its approach to our approach of collecting insight from today’s empowered consumer – a shift away from panels and surveys towards customer-initiated comment cards, which support your customers’ need to provide insight in their own words at a time of their choosing on topics important to them. This contrasts with the counterintuitive consumer survey methodology in which customers had to be selected and were largely restricted in the insight they might provide by endless structured questions….a potentially abusive experience for empowered consumers.
The end result: today’s consumer insight is largely in the form of open-ended text…qualitative rather than quantitative data. This demands a different set of analytical tools and a different set of challenges. A quick review of recent Forrester or Temkin Group briefings reveal the new emphasis in the VoC industry on the importance of this open-ended insight, on deciphering sentiment, attributing emotion and integrating context…all critical to taking action to improve CX and close the loop with the customer.
CX insight collected in your customers’ own words has tremendous value over quantitative scores. There are numerous engines available to attribute sentiment and assign emotion. I want to focus on the value of context: where customer feedback comes from, how you collect it and how each layer incrementally contributes value to the customers’ comment as VoC insight.
In my world, context comes in three layers:
Reported context: This is context reported by your customers at the time they provide their comment. At OpinionLab, best practice comment cards include a short series of scale questions to supplement the open-ended comment and aid in structuring and interpretation. These may include an overall score for the experience, the 3Es (emotion, effort and effectiveness), task completion, purpose of visit or NPS. These simple contextual measures reported by the customer in a matter of seconds add enormous value to the task of defining alerts, distribution to relevant stakeholders, setting CX priorities etc.
Touchpoint context: This is context collected in the background relevant to the experience and addressing a CX solution. If the customer feedback is about a website, this context should include page identification, screen resolution, browser, operating system, all critical to replicating and resolving a web issue. If the customer feedback relates to a store, this context would include store location (available as part of our 2015 Summer Release), time of day, day of the week etc. The value of this touchpoint context is incremental to the value of the reported context. Each type of context contributes value to the original comment as critical VoC insight to improve CX.
Organizational context: This is the most challenging layer of context to collect but the incremental value it adds is enormous. This is the so-called 360 degree view. In short, to get a complete view of your CX, you need critical context from your customers and your employees to effectively “close the loop”. In essence, you need a method of leveraging the collective intelligence of your own workforce to provide the critical organizational context necessary to fix CX issues, interpret problems, label common systemic issues and leverage opportunities to improve. It is this context that builds the bridge to revised policies, improved processes and changed practices. It requires collaborative action.
A simple example might help. A large retailer had adopted a policy that a product bought online could be returned to any store. Customer feedback comments collected through OpinionLab via mobile devices revealed that the experience of returning a product to the store was very poor. Specifically, these comments suggested the process took too long, while task completion and other ratings were horrible (reported context). Touchpoint context revealed that the issue was not specific to a location or region, it was happening across all stores.
However, it was only when this customer insight was distributed across the organization that the source of the poor CX was revealed. Front line store employees reviewing feedback for their stores revealed that their regional managers had created a policy that specified one employee per store should be assigned to handle returns. The intent was to reduce the overhead of processing returns from customers who had bought online. However, that employee was often unavailable. Once the retailer understood this issue, it adjusted the policy to allow all store employees to process returns and resolved the CX issue.
The challenge, of course, is how to collect this critical organizational context through employees collaborating to review, interpret, discuss and label a steady stream of open-ended customer insight.
OpinionLab’s Winter Release 2016 specifically addresses this issue.
It represents a significant upgrade to our unique VoC solution and has been implemented following requests from our most advanced customers. It is a natural evolution to our platform and a critical innovation for brands that choose to manage customer experience by leveraging continuous open-ended insight from engaged customers, while recognizing the critical importance of organizational context and the collective intelligence of their workforce.
Collaborative Labels and Collaborative Notes functionality is immediately available to our existing customers at no additional charge. The OpinionLab 2016 Winter Release represents the ability for the entire organization to view, label and annotate customer feedback and create – in real time – critical organizational context necessary to collaborative understanding of CX and coordinated CX improvement.
If you are already an OpinionLab customer, I hope you’ll take the time to have a look. If you’re not, please contact us to hear about it.
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