Customer Experience Blind Spots – Perception v Reality
Decision-makers are struggling with customer experience blind spots. They are losing sight of how their customers feel right now. Either their surveys still rely on closed questions or their teams are collecting disconnected feedback data. In many cases, it’s both. Resolving experience blind spots starts with doing a ‘stock take’ of all existing sources of feedback, looking at what’s collected and how it is used.
How well does your firm meet client expectations? Does management’s perception align with your client’s reality, or do they have customer experience blind spots?
How would you know?
Brand promises drive client expectations
This week I’ve been looking at 1,000s of customer reviews, comparing customer experiences with the brand promises those businesses made.
Why?
Because the unfiltered voice of the customer is a goldmine of potential insights. In this case, it shows where expectations matched reality.
Over the years, I’ve worked with many businesses to help them achieve customer and revenue growth. In that time, a common problem kept emerging. Businesses that want to be customer-led are being pulled in the wrong direction because they have experience blind spots.
Why?
- They rely too heavily on customer surveys based on closed questions
- They struggle with disconnected feedback data
Over-reliance on closed survey questions
Do you enjoy taking surveys? Most customers are happy to share their feedback and experiences with a business, and yet survey response rates keep falling.
A big part of the problem is how businesses ask questions. At best, question options focus on what the business believes is important to customers. At worst, the options only confirm what’s important to the business. Frustrated with not being heard, customers turn to email or social media, where they can explain their experiences in their own words.
The perils of disconnected feedback data
As businesses grow, listening to customers becomes a siloed activity.
As teams grow, senior managers become disconnected from the day-to-day customer experiences. Growing departments collect their own survey and feedback data. Call centres, complaints teams, regional and product managers ask their own questions and see customer experiences from their own perspective.
This process starts out of necessity. But left unchecked, can lead to different departments having different views of customer needs and experiences.
Customer experience blind spots
In short, decision-makers are seeing what they expect/want to see and not what their customers want them to see.
The business has customer experience blind spots.
How to resolve experience blind spots
My starting point is to do a ‘stock take’ of existing customer feedback sources. I go around the business, asking each team how they listening to customers and record what they hear.
The advantage of doing this as an outsider is that I get to ask the silly questions and look for feedback in strange places.
For example, I once discovered a business sending out surveys to new mortgage customers yet no one was being sent the results!
I’ve also met a complaints team that had a clear understanding of what was driving inconsistent customer experiences, but the rest of the business wasn’t listening to them. Apparently, their complaints reports had got so detailed, everyone else had asked to be taken off the distribution list..!
MyCustomerLens was developed to solve customer experience blind spots. Our real-time feedback aggregation platform automatically collects and summarises multiple sources of feedback. If your firm needs to keep its finger on the pulse and keep everyone on the same page, contact us today. We can have you up and running – and reducing your experience blind spots – in a matter of days.