These days it can be difficult to gather and action customer insights, especially when there are so many touchpoints to consider your customers’ journey. However, capturing customer insights and data is essential for businesses who want to grow and evolve while making decisions that will keep customers happy. And with 83% of firms believing it’s important to make customers happy, you’re in good company.
Customer insights can be gathered from a range of sources such as web analytics, social media and during the customer-service process. But, once you have the customer insights, how should you use them? In this article, we explore some of the ways to effectively action your customer insights.
1. Create a feedback loop
One of the simplest and most successful ways of actioning customer feedback and insights is by creating a feedback loop. This means that not only are you giving regular opportunities to your customers to tell you what they think (the good, the bad and the ugly), but that you’ll have a dedicated staff member or team who will read, analyse and circulate these insights.
The aim of a feedback loop is so that information gets used to create a data-driven decision-making process, meaning your customers have some input on your future operations. This can cover all elements of your business; from customer-service processes and channels to the evolutions of your product or service itself. If you’re stuck coming up with ways to gather your insights, take a look at this article for further information.
2. Prioritise negative reviews
Negative reviews can be difficult to digest, but it’s important not to ignore poor feedback, particularly when it comes from your customers.
By prioritising your negative reviews, not only can you ensure that you’re addressing the most pressing issues first, but also that you react quickly to stop your most at-risk customers from churning. It’s critical to your business that you react and action poor reviews quickly.
Similarly, looking at negative feedback first can help to identify trends in the customer experience. If lots of customers are having a similar issue with getting in contact, the delivery process or the product itself, this gives you a clear direction of the areas to address as a priority.
3. Keep an open mind
One of the most important things to remember when actioning customer insights is that the user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) of your journey will almost never match up to the way you have planned it, or mapped it out. It’s easy to create a generic route of touchpoints, but don’t forget to account for the fact that all customers will engage with your brand in different ways at a timescale that suits them, not you.
By keeping an open mind, you can remove the preconceived notions of how things should work, or how the customer should be interacting at a certain point in their journey with you. Try not to bring any biases to the table, and listen to your customers when they tell you they’re struggling – maybe they’re doing it wrong, but if so, concentrate on how to make it clearer for them, rather than disregarding their feedback. Listening to insights without notions or biases will allow you to make changes that make things simpler for everyone – keeping everyone happy.
Actioning customer insights doesn’t have to be a headache. Remember that negative reviews and insights, however painful, bring with them significant opportunities to improve and make your customer journey simpler for everyone – increasing sales, referrals and your brand reputation.
