Feedback at scale: the key to a better customer-led strategy

Successful products are no longer just about innovative features or good marketing. Today, differentiators lie in how well a product aligns with customer needs and the customer experience. A true customer-led strategy, where the end-to-end product experience is designed with the customer at the center, is more essential than ever for products to resonate with users' needs and build loyalty and advocacy that drive business outcomes by winning and retaining customers.???

But to measure, analyze and act on customer needs and experiences at scale, you can't rely on outmoded methods.???        

Most companies have and use vast amounts of customer feedback, from instrumentation, customer support contacts, CSM, surveys and product reviews. These are all rich with insights- but analyzing and responding to all of it requires multiple endpoints and often lengthy cycles spent reporting, synthesizing, prioritizing and actioning.???

In my own past work, I've done the after-the-fact thread-pulling when something like the weekly CSat scores are low- digging into them to find a support spike- digging into that to find a performance incident that both support and ops were slow to see and respond to.? Or spending tons of time digging into support drivers to figure out which should have already been pushed to self-help.?????

These types of cycles are no longer responsive enough, take too long to surface insights, don't connect the informational dots and as a result, allow customer experience to lag and churn to accrue.? A true customer-centric strategy today has to ingest and react to these feedback channels at scale- consistently, rapidly and effectively, using a model where all this data is centralized and visualized in real time.???

The good news is that there are some great tools out there for this- Thematic, Clarabridge, and Chattermill? are just a few that have arrived or evolved into this space and enable highly actionable insights that highlight customer usage and issues, churn risk, feature and operational enhancements, satisfaction and other key performance indicators. They can even provide an understanding of the "why" behind call length, interaction volumes, CSAT scores, sentiment, and customer behavior, as well as identify emerging and unknown issues in near real-time.???

These are game changers- using these kinds of capabilities, support, CSM, product and operations teams can work together in real time to see, react and act on opportunities, mitigate or avoid issues, and manage customer experience nimbly.? ?They are also a tangible example of end-to-end CX in action- the type of CX that directly drives a tangible business outcomes.?

I keep saying that right now is one of the most exciting times to be in customer support- because the capabilities and value it drives are so rapidly iterating; this is just one great example of how!

About me: I am a results driven customer support executive who is passionate about customer experience and customer support as core to the product value proposition, who builds and leads high performance support organizations for new products/channels, scales organizational capabilities for in-place teams, and innovates support strategy for growing products and companies.

[email protected] | www.dhirubhai.net/in/robarmstrongpm/

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