15 Jan
Improving CX Through an Automated Customer Feedback System
Customer Experience (CX) is a hot topic in today’s business landscape. According to Forbes, only 36% of companies cared about their customer experience in 2010, but now that number has risen to a staggering 89%!
Companies are identifying CX as a surer way of gaining a competitive edge from other similar businesses. In fact, a study conducted by the Walker group suggests that CX will become the key brand differentiator by 2020.
Businesses nowadays are becoming more and more customer-centric. The reason is apparent – your company gets its revenue through a customer. Having said that, no customer means no business straight away.
Now the question arises: “How do we attract and retain customers?“
Depending on their experience with your company, customers will decide whether they want to continue doing business with you or not.
Customer Experience is a broad term. From product quality to customer interaction to complaint resolution, it encapsulates all types of customer engagement.
The moment they get to know about you till the final purchase, customers go through various touchpoints with your company. These touchpoints contribute to the overall CX.
Big companies like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix have exponentially grown in such a short time. There is no secret that they achieved all this by taking care of their customers. They take CX seriously and provide exceptional customer service. They collect automated customer feedback and make significant improvements based on that.
Here’s a detailed reading on how you can follow the footsteps of 3 business giants and be successful.
Improving CX means improving customer satisfaction. You can only do so by knowing what your customers like and dislike. You can read your customers’ minds by using a single, handy process. This magical process is called collecting customer feedback.
You have to consider every customer’s individual experience and then see what collective changes you can make to improve CX on the whole. This fact alone makes automated customer feedback so important!
I remember filling in those short survey forms a waiter hands over after having finished your meal. Back then, I used to think if they would really care to read up hundreds of responses on a daily basis. It seemed possible only if they had superpowers to decipher my cacographic writing.
It looked like the survey form is just for fun, and it’s of no use actually. But, now I realise how important feedback is for companies who are determined to improve and stay on top of the charts.
Feedback is the only way to know what customers think of you. While there is an option to collect feedback manually, we’ll tell you why automated customer feedback is the best approach!
In the following section, we will establish the difference between automated customer feedback vs manual feedback.
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Automated Customer Feedback vs Manual Feedback
Well, both the systems work to achieve the same goal i.e to know what your customer wants and what makes them happy.
- While in a conventional feedback system, you gather and analyse data manually; an automated feedback system gives you a head start by collecting and analysing data automatically. All you have to do is review and make decisions based on the analysis.
- Accuracy levels are very high when using automated feedback systems because the chance of human error is minimised, and it significantly saves time and cost. No more sending the same person the same feedback twice or forgetting to send it to them at all!
- Work that is done manually, is tough to upscale. With a manual process, as you scale, you must invest more in human resources. This is not the case in an automated cloud-based feedback system. The software works just fine when you upscale it and doesn’t require any further input. Whether you are collecting feedback from 100 or 100,000 people, the process is the same.
- Transparency and accountability are also increased when using an automated feedback system. When we work manually, reports and files are not always handy to be shared with stakeholders. With a cloud-based system, however, all data, reports, and files are saved in the software and easily accessible by the management and stakeholders from anywhere they log in from.
After looking at these differences, it is clear that automated feedback systems are far better to use than ordinary ones.
Benefits of using an automated customer feedback system
Let’s see in-depth what an automated feedback system do to your company in terms of improving customer experience, and hence, growing your business.
Improves Customer Satisfaction
Improving customer satisfaction means listening to the customer and knowing what they want. Asking for feedback is not the solution to everything.
We have to make the customer realise that their feedback matters to us, and the opinion they have is valued.
This, in turn, develops trust and a sense of satisfaction in the customer regarding their experience with the company.
Enhanced customer satisfaction is directly proportional to the customer experience. Therefore, taking regular customer feedback can benefit your firm from top to bottom.
Helps in Catching Problems
Feedback helps your company catch problems that can interfere with your brand image, thus obstructing you from building a good clientele.
Even if you test your product multiple times before sending it out to the market, there can and will still be some errors or possible improvements that you and your team might have overlooked.
Customers are the actual end-users, and their experience with the product can tell where the problem is or how a few improvements can make your product a bestseller.
When you receive an area of feedback from one customer, you must work on refining this pain point and make sure other customers are not running into the same problem.
This keeps on helping you to improve and, in most cases, innovate to increase the number of happy customers.
The crux: a feedback system helps you catch problems and improve the customer experience you provide.
Wins Customer Loyalty
Winning customer loyalty is often one of the long-term goals of a company. This can only be attained when your customers have true trust in your company.
Here’s why loyal customers are so valuable:
- Loyal customers are more likely to refer you to fellow friends and colleagues.
- They tend to spend frequently.
- More referrals mean more customers and, ultimately, high revenue streams.
Listening to customers and acting on their request/advice is an effective way to win customer trust and loyalty.
The 360 feedback loop helps you listen to the customer and act accordingly.
This, in turn, improves customer experience, wins customer loyalty, and adds to your profit.
Reduces Churn Rate
If your goal is to reduce the churn rate, you need to identify why a portion of your customers wouldn’t want to do business with you ever again.
Is there something else that they’re looking for? Do they want more in terms of value for their money?
Did they have a bad experience with customer service?
Wouldn’t it be great if you had the answers to all these questions so that you could:
- Offer them a solution or compensate for service failure.
- Make sure other customers don’t have to face the same state of affairs
Using a feedback system lets you know where the company is lagging and helps to catch problems in production, marketing, management, or customer service in realtime.
Providing an exceptional customer experience will aid in retaining customers, which is the only way to reduce the churn rate.
An automated feedback system is a critical step to improving your customer experience. It gives you an idea of what the customer is expecting of you and in turn, helps you make important decisions to improve their overall experience with your company.
It can give you a chance to improve your offerings and catch problems that your staff might have ignored, or you had never thought of.
Gathering regular feedback shows that your company is focusing on the customers’ needs. It instils in them a sense of trust and loyalty with the brand, which in turn helps you retain customers, reduce churn and attract new customers. All of these factors add up to generating positive revenue streams over time.
Learn more about reducing churn rate here.
Why care about customer feedback?
Feedback is a great way of knowing what the customers think about you. They can help you in improving their experience and paving the way for the continued growth of your business.
What to do with customer feedback?
Use feedback to analyse your product and service offerings, bring improvements and innovation, determine staff engagement, make important business decisions and improve overall customer experience.
Why is automated feedback better than a manual one?”
In this fast-paced era, nobody has time to do things manually as it takes a lot more time and resources. An automated feedback system is efficient, cost-effective, easy to scale-up and easy to interpret!
How can the feedback improve CX?
Since feedback is collected from the customers, it tells you what weaknesses you have and where you can make improvements to satisfy your customers more and providing them with better customer experience.
How can feedback help in reducing churn rate?
Churn rate is the portion of your customers who wouldn’t buy from you again. If you know the reason behind their walking away, you can probably work to get things done correctly to retain them and subsequently reduce the churn.
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