Greg works in Customer Experience and Digital Transformation; he’s host of the Agile World Podcast and author of The Center of Experience.
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Competition for customers is increasingly focused on providing the best possible experience. In order to improve and sustain a great customer experience (CX), the quicker you can get insights from your audiences, the better.
Getting feedback in real time instead of asking for surveys after the fact allows you to have the data you need to make adjustments quickly — sometimes immediately — to ensure your customer has an optimal experience. Contrast this with waiting for an individual to fill out a survey once they are all the way through a process, and you can imagine the possibilities!
In this article, I’m going to discuss why real-time CX insights are increasingly important to understanding and improving your customer experience.
Survey Fatigue Is Real
As a customer experience professional, I’ve administered a fair share of surveys, and as a customer myself, I’ve seen quite a few more. There is nothing inherently wrong with these surveys, often used to calculate Net Promoter Score (NPS) or gain other similar insights. It can be annoying as a customer, however, to fill out a survey. And, in some cases, it can even make you feel less valued as a supporter of the company.
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Think about it. If you’re like me, you probably get at least four to five of these surveys a week, and regardless of how you feel about your experience, the frequency that you receive these surveys is too much. Add to this factors like the length or complexity of surveys, and surveyee fatigue becomes a real issue.
You could say that surveying your customers can become a customer experience issue of its own. Thinking about a real-time data collection approach to replace at least some of your surveys can help reduce your customers’ survey fatigue.
Actual Data Versus Perceived Data
Surveys that are given after a transaction have provided customer experience experts with useful data for decades, but there can be a huge difference between the type of insights you get from those methods versus the insights you can get in real time.
With more sophisticated data collection tools, as well as the ability to store and interpret large data sets, real-time customer experience metrics show us in quantifiable ways exactly what happened.
This means that instead of having to ask someone about their e-commerce experience, we can actually see in the data that it took a long time or they had problems with their billing information and maybe even contacted chat support to ask a question.
With real-time data collection using beacon technology, sentiment analysis, web analytics and more, we can measure the customer experience and identify pain points that an individual may not feel like articulating in a survey. We can also connect these measurements to look at the entire customer journey as a whole.
Real-Time Data Collection Allows Better Orchestration
Customer journey orchestration, or the ability to modify an individual’s customer experience within the journey itself, is becoming increasingly popular with recent improvements in technology and data integration.
Before real-time data collection, you would have to wait for a customer to complete a process like purchasing an item in a store or receiving customer service online in order to ask them about their experience.
By collecting data as a process in real-time, you can now take that information and modify things as they occur. This could be something such as routing an individual to the most appropriate type of customer service based on their stage in the journey or identifying and standardizing cross-channel messaging to make an individual’s experience more consistent. Thus, you can modify things during a journey instead of waiting until the journey is done and hoping that customers will give you feedback.
As you can see, real-time data collection of customer experience insights has great potential to improve your ability to understand and adapt to your customers’ actions and sentiments. This can have great benefits both for your company and its customers.
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Author: Greg Kihlstrom, Forbes Councils Member
