For years, companies have damaged their relationships with customers by failing to act on the complaints, concerns, and requests they receive. “Too many companies squander the treasure that is customer feedback,” McKinsey once wrote.
Just how bad is this problem? In 2017, Gartner found that, “Although 95% of companies have collected feedback from their customers for years, only about 10% use these suggestions to change their processes and improve customer experience.”
Consumers themselves provide a more hopeful figure. Just over half in the United States say they believe most brands take action on feedback, according to Statista. Worldwide, just under half (49%) say the same.
Because my work involves tracking thousands of conversations that businesses have with customers across different platforms and channels, I see this problem in action all the time. People not only want organizations to act on their feedback, they also want to see action taken quickly. In this era, consumers are used to super-fast action.
Why are businesses, all too often, failing to make the changes customers seek? A big part of the problem is that the feedback has been scattered. Different representatives or chatbots have dealt with customers over social media, email, apps, texting, phone calls and more. Organizations have not pulled all that together into a single place, allowing their teams to discover key insights.
As my colleague Ken McMahon, who leads Customer Success for Nextiva, wrote recently, “Capturing feedback across multiple feedback channels provides insights to help business leaders make customer-centric decisions to improve customer experience.” For example,
If all this feedback were in one place, a company could discover that two-thirds of visitors want longer demo sessions.
AI Highlights Needs and Feelings
Fortunately, technology can finally deliver a solution. AI-powered tools can collect, process, and organize all that feedback, moving all interactions involving any customer into a single stream. These tools can transcribe what customers say by phone as well, so it’s searchable. And they can include notes and ideas that customer service representatives add themselves.
Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), these tools can “understand” the text. They can look for the most important points, and highlight those so that the next person, or chatbot, to deal with the same customer sees important guidance
These tools can also search all of the feedback then comes in from all customers and look for recurring patterns and themes, highlighting elements that need to be addressed. In a study published by the International Journal of New Media Studies, Dharmendra Singh of PIIT College in India wrote, “AI-powered analysis of customer feedback and comments can help identify trends in customer behavior and allow e-commerce businesses to adjust their strategies and marketing accordingly, in order to improve customer satisfaction.”
AI tools can also get a step further, measuring customer sentiments. This can be invaluable. It shows a company how people feel about the changes they’re requesting. Do they consider these changes urgent, or just a nice idea? Do they believe these changes would help relieve pain points or frustration? All of this can come across in the language they use.
Researchers Darlington Nwachukwu and Miebi Affen pointed this out in a literature review published by the International Academy Journal of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurial Studies. They noted that Salesforce research found “AI-powered sentiment analysis can help companies better understand customer feedback and respond more effectively to customer needs and concerns, leading to improved customer satisfaction.”
The Customer Feedback Loop
The best system is to create and maintain a customer feedback loop — a continuous process aimed at ensuring that the company acts on what customers are saying and gauges their responses. This system generally includes four stages:
- collecting feedback
- analyzing it and turning it into data
- applying and testing it out
- following up with customers
Given how technologies are developing, much of this loop can be automated — and soon, perhaps, virtually all of it.
As businesses turn increasingly to chatbots to handle some customer conversations, there are fewer excuses to avoid taking action on feedback. Over the next few years, surveys should begin to show that the vast majority of businesses and customers say that organizations are, at last, tapping into that “treasure.”