Offline experience surveys are ‘powerful’ to get feedback

What are the trends and predictions for customer feedback and care in 2018?

Joshua March is the founder and CEO of social customer service solution Conversocial. He previously founded social application company iPlatform and is a renowned expert in social media and customer service.

In this interview for CX Network, he discusses what’s next for feedback measuring and social care – sharing his prediction for 2018 alongside top tips to derive the most value from the changes in the landscape.

SEE ALSO: Customer Experience Predictions for 2018

With the start of the new year, what is your prediction for the biggest new trend, disruptor or change that will be impacting customer experience in 2018?

Facebook just launched Messenger customer chat, which is a replacement for traditional web chat powered by Facebook Messenger. While web chat is great, there are a number of challenges: you don’t know who the customer is, conversations disappear as soon as the chat ends, and the customer is tethered to the desktop.

Messenger customer chat solves all of these issues, enabling a customer to chat on your site just like they can today, but then continue that conversation seamlessly on their phone or back on your website at a later time. This is really amazing for customers, but also opens up huge new opportunities to keep engaging with sales prospects after they’ve left your website.

We already have three major customers who have replaced their traditional web chat with Messenger customer chat and think this will be really disruptive to the chat market in 2018.

>> Read more customer experience predictions alongside Joshua’s from companies such as Thomas Cook, Nissan, Hermes and LV= in our brand new market report.

There are big changes afoot in the customer feedback and care landscape, with customers having entered a phase called ‘survey fatigue’. What steps should organisations take now so they don’t risk losing that valuable input from their customers through surveying?

So many surveys are still long, multi-page forms with a tiny click-through and completion rate. Delivering in-line surveys within a messaging thread are much easier for customers to complete and get an incredibly high response rate – of 40-50 per cent.

With a response rate this high, the data becomes valuable not just for broad trends but also for being able to give specific feedback to agents or to spot potential issues with an unhappy customer.

Every organisation should be looking to simplify and shorten their feedback forms and find ways to deliver them to the customer like this, instead of requiring the customer to open up a link and fill out a complex form.

“Delivering in-line surveys within a messaging thread are much easier for customers to complete and get an incredibly high response rate – of 40-50 per cent.”

A big opportunity here lies within being where the customer is, and in many cases nowadays this means social media as you mentioned with Facebook Messenger. What other new opportunities for gathering customer feedback do social channels create?

Right now many of our customers are using in-line NPS and CSAT surveys to get feedback from customers after a service experience.

A relatively new concept is using these tools to survey customers about an offline experience. Done correctly, this could be a really powerful way to gather real-time feedback from customers about their experiences.

And are there any other measurement metrics that should be taken into consideration to improve customer engagement to drive seamless and personalised experiences?

I’m a big proponent of measuring ‘effort’ as a key metric in service experiences. The data shows that the effort of a service experience is the biggest driver of either increased or decreased loyalty, but this concept doesn’t get enough attention from most companies.

Once the feedback is captured, do you have any advice for how to make the insights actionable, so organisations can create business value through feedback?

Getting executive attention to insights is key to making progress. Customer service teams are getting so much feedback every day but unfortunately a lot of this just sits on a server somewhere.

Ensure you’re creating a real narrative about the insights you’re drawing, and back it up with both data and stories from individual customers to drive the point home.

“I’m a big proponent of measuring ‘effort’ as a key metric in service experiences.”

Finally, what one top tip can you share with organisations to allow them to derive the most value from the latest developments available within customer feedback and care?

Start looking at messaging as a serious customer service channel that needs to be managed and measured in the same way you do traditional service channels. The benefits are really huge.

Messaging is a lower effort service channel for consumers that creates higher customer satisfaction, at lower cost to deliver.

But your organisation can’t recognise this if you’re not measuring it (in terms of both operational effectiveness and customer feedback) in a consistent way.

“Getting executive attention to insights is key to making progress.”