How can I measure customer sentiment and improve CX?

Organisations often resort to survey-based methods to track customer sentiment, which have significant drawbacks. Sentiment is rarely enough information to inform what to do next. It would be better to leverage insights about what customers think from start to finish of their experience with your service–this speeds up the learning process and the actions to improve your service.

The problem for service organisations

Most organisations have tried to survey their customers on their experience, hopeful that the results will reveal exactly where to learn and improve the service from the customer’s point of view. Whist the intent is admirable, often only an unrepresentative fraction of customers complete the survey and are limited to answering the questions asked. This makes for built-in biases that prevent organisations from knowing where the opportunities and pain points are in an end-to-end customer experience. What is more, the opportunity to recover from a problem situation with a customer has already been lost, causing churn and negative sentiment that could spread.

The solution

Combining diverse sources of data that relate to each customer's experience can generate new insights in several ways:

1. One can build a view of what customers are experiencing end-to-end via all channels (live chat, e-mail, telephone, and in-person)
2. High priority areas of improvement are highlighted for immediate action
3. Visualisations are created to show which initiatives are improving the customer experience
4. Predictive models can anticipate issues or help teams deal with them in real-time

Very often the customer end-to-end experience is influenced by various parts of the service organisation, each with its own sets of data. These need to be understood as a single timeline for each customer experience.

We help clients make sense of their messaging (be it with Zendesk, Intercom, or any other live chat tool). Sometimes a customer experience can span over hours, days or even weeks–if you do not have all of the data stitched together in chronological order from the customer’s point of view, the big insights for improvement are often missed. We also help clients get analogue experiences into digital format so they can help describe how well the service is working.

One can also tie in data from operations and payments to give a full picture of what the customer experienced–as visualisations that help define high-value improvements, and as predictive models–to inform teams the best course of action in the moment, or prior to that moment.

If you are looking to make your service best-in-class, contact us at [email protected] where you will see the insights we can help you bring to the surface.

We can do more with less by enabling our people to improve customer experience.