If you are having trouble getting your customers to answer your survey requests or the responses aren’t as useful as you had hoped, it is time for you to take a look at how you are asking questions and how it impacts the usefulness of the outcome.
Mistake 1: Forgetting That Your Customers are Humans
It’s important to remember that customers are not numbers or problems to be solved. Instead, they represent people with feelings and emotions who need help from you as much as you need their business. If you forget this basic fact, it will filter down your entire organization. You’ll end up treating customers like machines instead of the valuable people they really are, which will lead to a lot of frustration on both sides of the equation.
Mistake 2: Not Knowing Who Your Customers Are
- You need to know who your customers are. This seems obvious, but it’s a mistake that’s often made by many companies.
- The first step toward knowing this is defining your target customer: who will be using your software? If you don’t know this about yourself, then how can you possibly create something that meets the needs of your users?
- Once you’ve defined your target customer, it’s time to dig deeper into their demographics and psychographics.
Mistake 3: Not Listening to the Right Data
Even if you work hard to collect the right data, it’s still possible to go wrong. It’s easy to think that the most important thing is what you’re listening for, but it’s actually the context of how you hear it. If you’re only looking at your customer service inboxes and not digging deeper into what people are saying on social media or other places online, then your company could be missing out on some important opinions.
Mistake 4: Ordering the Wrong Data
You need to make sure that whatever tool you choose has access to all the data types that will enable it to do its job well—and this includes both quantitative and qualitative information.
Mistake 5: Focusing on Quantity of Data Over Quality of Data
The quality of your data is just as important as the quantity, if not more so. When you collect and analyze the voice of customer (VoC) data, it’s easy to get caught up on how much information you have and lose sight of what’s really important: making sure that the data is accurate, relevant, and actionable.
To improve the quality of your VoC software program:
- Apply a thorough screening process for all surveys before they go out; this will help prevent any bias from being introduced into results early on
- Make sure employees understand what types of comments are helpful for improving customer experience efforts.
Customer advocacy programs are a great way to gather customer feedback and ideas.
Mistake 6: Focusing on Process Rather Than People
Processes are only as good as the people who implement them, and many companies forget this simple but important fact. If your process is not well-understood by those who use it, or if there’s too much ambiguity about what it means for a customer experience to be “good” or “bad” in your organization, then it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your software is; things will still go wrong.
Tip: Customer reference programs are an excellent way for businesses to build their reputation, improve customer retention and increase sales.
Mistake 7: Not Engaging Employees in Your Customer Experience Program
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when creating effective customer experience programs is not engaging your employees. Employees are the ones who are closest to the customer and can best respond to their needs, identify opportunities for improvement and innovation, and develop strategies that will positively impact your business.
Mistake 8: Not Understanding the Voice of Your Employees
The employees are the people who are closest to your customers, and they’re also the ones who hear what they say. They know what they want and how they feel about different aspects of their jobs, including software applications that can help them in their work.
Mistake 9: Spending More Time Analyzing Data Than Taking Action on It
Data analysis takes time. And time is money. It’s important to make sure you’re not spending more time analyzing your data than actually taking action on it.
One way to avoid getting bogged down in this trap is by being sure you define what success looks like before diving into the data. This will help guide your analysis and let you know when it’s time to take action on the findings from your voice of the customer software program.
Mistake 10: Not Integrating Voice of Customer Software With Other Systems
Integrating your customer experience software with other systems is crucial. For example, if you want to connect your CRM system and your VOC program, you can use APIs (application programming interfaces). APIs are like a set of instructions that allow two different programs or services to communicate with each other. If you connect your customer experience software with an existing CRM or CMS system, this will allow for easy transfer of data between them so that the information gathered from one system can be used in another.