In today’s digital world, keeping up is no longer the goal; it’s getting ahead. With customers engaging with brands in a myriad of ways and channels, the ability to transform feedback into actionable insights has never been more crucial.
Organizations must take a pragmatic, modern approach to customer listening—one that looks at feedback holistically to better understand the entire customer experience (CX). When you pair the right, useful data with modern solutions and platforms you can transform your customers’ feedback into business intelligence that drives meaningful change.
Traditional vs. Modern Listening
A holistic approach to customer feedback doesn’t mean that tried-and-true methods need to be replaced, just modified. An entirely modernized customer listening strategy includes all different types of feedback to better understand the complete customer journey, including:
- Traditional listening: Solicited customer feedback typically gathered through long-form customer feedback surveys that focus on a single point in time, experience or channel.
- Modern listening: Customer feedback collected through multimedia channels and sources that are often optimized and personalized but can also be aggregated like social, employee, operational, financial, and CRM data.
Traditional methods of feedback, despite their limitations, aren’t without merit. At the same time, what a truly modern approach to customer listening does is aggregate all feedback—modern and traditional—into a centralized location to better understand business impact.
Understanding the Full Customer Journey
Survey questions provide answers, but that kind of solicited data can be limiting. Expand your listening program to include various touchpoints and channels. For example, SMS, email survey invitations, and QR codes meet customers where they are—on their phones. Social listening targets younger generations, and that data can open the door for unfiltered, meaningful stories and reviews that survey questions alone can’t capture.
Traditional listening methods still have a part to play. Methods of obtaining information like call centers or market surveys produce a wealth of data. However, when combined with an intelligent customer feedback management tool, this information can be personalized, compiled, and integrated into actionable data insights—a significant upgrade from basic answers to survey questions.
Bigger Insights, Bigger Wins
With modern customer listening, it’s important to note when a sale becomes more than a sale and can be transformed into a blueprint for achieving larger business objectives. Tools that digitally intercept targeted points of the buying journey can provide real-time insights into customer purchase habits and behaviors. This unique knowledge gained helps facilitate more intelligent predictive analytics so that your business can more easily adapt to losses and duplicate and intensify wins.
The truth is that not all brands have the talent and bandwidth to expand their customer listening programs in house. Leveraging robust data intelligence tools is crucial in optimizing, harnessing, and capitalizing on meaningful conversations. Collecting the information is one step, but combined with a modern CX program, you can add context to data, maximizing your business insights and performance.
To take a deeper dive into the evolution of customer listening, you can read our eBook, “How You Listen Matters: Modernizing Your Methods & Approach to Customer Feedback”.
