Many companies believe that the absence of negative customer feedback means that their customers are satisfied.
Unfortunately, this is not true. Statistics say that only 1 in 26 unhappy customers will complain.
Instead of expressing their dissatisfaction, they will simply stop buying from you. Customer Experience Statistics You Should Be Aware of in 2022, 1 in 3 customers will leave the brand they like after a single negative experience, while more than 90% of consumers would stop buying after two or more negative experiences.
It only takes several dissatisfied customers to question the brand reputation you have been building for years.
To prevent that, you need to continuously collect customer data and use it to improve customer experiences.
1. Map Customer Journeys
Mapping out customer journey means knowing what channels customers use to find your brand, what pages they first visit when landing on your site, etc.
When building a customer journey map, you should focus on customers’ demographics data, such as their age, family status, location, gender, and education. You will also need to analyze their behavioral data, such as their preferences, frustrations, problems, concerns, and expectations.
It is important to map the entire customer journey across all channels customers use to interact with your brand, from your call center to social channels and live chat scripts. Based on the data you collect, create buyer personas that will guide your marketing strategies and drive personalization.
2. Monitor Brand Sentiment
Every day, people talk about your business online and offline. Just monitoring these conversations is not enough. For you, it is important to know whether customers’ opinions of your brand are positive or negative. In other words, you should measure brand sentiment – the feelings customers have about your brand.
Track your call support data
One of the most valuable resources of brand sentiment is your call center. People are constantly calling your agents to ask questions, express frustrations with your brand and products, or seek help.
Now, in the past, it was difficult for customer support representatives to collect and store customer data. Fortunately, with the advance of the internet and cloud services, many businesses are switching to online phone systems that offer advanced customer analytics options. VoIP systems can now track and analyze customers’ interactions with your brand, letting you evaluate the overall sentiment for each customer’s account. This means your agents will be able to map every point along the buyer journey and analyze brand sentiment. By knowing how customers are feeling about your brand even before they talk to them, it will be easier for your agents to personalize interactions.
Analyze brand sentiment on social networks
You will need to invest in a social media sentiment analytics tool, such as Digimind, Rapidminer, Hootsuite Insights, or Mentionlytics. With the help of these tools, you can set keywords and hashtags to track, such as brand or product names, so you can get a comprehensive view of customer sentiment towards your brand. You can also stay on top of your competitors’ brand sentiment.
3. Conduct Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys come in many different forms, but their goal is the same – telling you how happy or unhappy customers are with your brand. This data lets you improve customer experiences in the future, compare and monitor CX over time, or segment customers based on their satisfaction scores so you can provide targeted user experiences.
Now, the most common types of customer satisfaction surveys are:
● Net Promoter Score: It asks the famous question: “How likely are you to recommend our product to your friend or a colleague?” Apart from analyzing brand sentiment, this data also tells you more about customers’ loyalty and willingness to recommend your brand to others.
● Customer Satisfaction Score analyzes how satisfied or dissatisfied customers are on a linear scale.
● Customer Effort Score analyzes the ease of customers’ experiences with your brand. For example, you could ask a user how easy it was to solve their problems with your business. They could rate their experiences on a scale ranging from “very easy” to “very difficult.” This data will help you fix common customer experience issues and minimize customers’ frustration and churn.
● Open-ended questions let you collect qualitative customer data. Even though they are more difficult to analyze, they are a true treasure trove of customer satisfaction and brand sentiment.
When surveying customers, it is always important to choose the right type of survey and the right questions, based on the type of answers you expect to receive. Survey questions need to be simple, easy-to-understand, and straightforward. Most importantly, they need to be sent at the right moment of a buyer’s journey, meaning you will need to map the most significant touchpoints before sending the survey.
Finally, choose the right medium, such as:
● In-app surveys
● On-site surveys
● SMS surveys
● Long email surveys
● Post-purchase surveys
Take Action
One of the major mistakes you may make is pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into collecting customer data and not taking any actionable steps. Do not let your customer data sit dormant on your computer. Use it to make more informed business decisions, minimize customers’ frustration, and provide relevant and personalized customer experiences.
How do you collect customer data to improve their experiences with your brand?