Last week I posted this question on my LinkedIn profile, ‘How do you deal with in-moment customer feedback?’ What surprised me was the number of responses to this problem and the real-time solutions that both large and small businesses have implemented to close the in-moment customer feedback gap.
When a customer makes a discrete complaint in an informal way, such as directly to a staff member, how does your organisation capture this type of feedback?
This is the scenario that happened to me – I’d mentioned to my assigned representative that I was unhappy with a couple of the services their organisation was providing. Whilst he responded empathetically, there weren’t any next steps discussed and my feedback wasn’t captured formally.
This got me wondering … whilst most organisations now have customer satisfaction surveys, what is the process/policy for capturing informal customer feedback?
Here’s 5 of the best solutions from the 75 posted comments; you can read the full conversation on my LinkedIn profile (link below).
Jeannie Walters says:
Great question and wonderful discussion! I have seen this handled in a variety of ways, and totally support what is said here about providing an easy, integrated way to capture the feedback in real-time and within the appropriate CEM/CRM tool. What I see after this is often where this falls down – those insights are not included in the higher level reporting or communications that drive action. We created a way to share customer comments of the week with one client who had a stand-up meeting daily with the contact center leaders. Each day, one of those bits of unstructured feedback were shared and then they’d vote on what was most urgent. It wasn’t perfect, but it was important to get things moving to other parts of the organization. Otherwise, they had a lot of captured feedback that wasn’t going anywhere, even though it was technically in the right place in their CRM system.
Tom Dawkins says:
Great question Alex! We’re a small team and tend to circulate all complaints and deal with them when they happen. What you’ve got me thinking about is what happens after that though. We don’t capture these in long-term records very effectively to allow for comparisons or analysis over time. It’s just short term rapid reaction, which I think is really important for a small business but not the whole story.
Christopher Brooks says:
In B2B, employee or sales team interaction where you are not in the moment of a customer interaction we found the same challenge; insight spilling out but not being captured. We designed I-Together (insight brought together) for this purpose. It’s an employee engagement App which allows for specific or generic insights to be recorded. They can be connected to themes the CX team have highlighted they are tracking, or be new thoughts and I-Together organises and builds up a scrap book of feedback of these ideas and issues. When ready, the CX team activate a challenge to colleagues (open or directed at a group) to review the findings and come up with a solution. It links to a learning path function which provides training to staff on relevant topics. And based on engagement, staff are rewarded with virtual medals and points. Both of which are shared with HR to be added to personal development plans and review. When ideas are created, they are shared back across the employees (anyone employee can download the app) and voted on, adding more credits for those who created them.
Eve Hyvonen says:
Interesting thread! Think the medium of interaction determines a lot.
1) If it happens on the shop floor, it may get acknowledged and addressed by first-liners or shift supervisor, but likely not logged unless there’s a decent handover processes and CRM in use. That is a problem; information is lost if it’s not captured.
2) Chat, email or call transcripts often get logged to CRM, but I’ve noticed extra info tends to get buried underneath the main concern – the query is tagged with the most appropriate code for reporting; for whatever reason the system I used to use didn’t allow for extra categories or keywords even if the query was quite complex.
3) The integration of social media feedback from various platforms to CRM also needs a process. What happens beyond that depends on a) company culture and b) the person dealing with the query. A culture of “you moan it, you own it” + maxed-out workload doesn’t motivate people to flag secondary issues.
To me a query resolution means _all_ issues are heard & addressed. If further action is required, employees should feel they can escalate & get a proper resolution. I hope AI will increasingly help sift through keywords in data masses and give a clearer picture of customer issues.
Nate Brown says:
I’ve helped a couple of teams implement a USB webkey button for EXACTLY this issue. It’s so important to capture organic, unstructured feedback! Ultimately it needs to be married into the same place to which your structured VoC is being organized and tagged. Customer Experience Management system for the win!
Link to read full conversation: