Tag Archives: Customer Service Trends

Customer Feedback: Social vs. Traditional Tools

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
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Finding out how your customers feel about you, i.e. collecting customer feedback drives most customer experience improvement; after all, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

So what about social media? Certainly, by its nature, social media is where customers go to communicate their feelings. Therefore, monitoring review sites, along with Twitter and Facebook for customer feedback just makes sense. But, unlike traditional customer feedback tools, social media never provides a complete, accurate and objective perspective – so don’t abandon your traditional tools yet.

The upside, Social Media can be Actionable and Does 2 Things Well

Social media:
1) Captures complex thoughts and feelings about the customer experience.
2) Lets customers define which aspects of the customer experience matter most to them.

Compare this to surveys which prioritize multiple choice questions and, by necessity, work from a pre-existing hypothesis about what’s most and least important to customers.

On the downside, Social Media is Inherently Misrepresentative

A major downfall of social media customer feedback is that it is subject to extreme response biases.

Company solicited social media always skews toward loyal customers or “friends.” User-generated customer feedback (like that on Yelp, Amazon reviews, and Epinions) captures only the extremes of gushing or venting. And, both of these sources can only provide customer feedback from one group: members of social media sites, which may not be the majority of your customers.

Use social media for gathering actionable insights; use surveys for accurate data. But for actionability and accuracy use customer interviews, they’re a vastly underused feedback tool.

The Value of Customer Interviews

Customer interviews enable you to ask your customers questions that get at the heart of the customer experience, but that are not what customers address in their social media rants. For example, an interviewer can ask:  “who is the competition and what do they do particularly well?” Plus, interviews can be designed so that the sample group is large enough and balanced in a way that accurately represents your complete customer base.

Why are customer interviews underused? Sometimes, because they are more costly than generic email surveys; although they are rarely as expensive as focus groups and usability studies. But mostly, because companies don’t know customer interviews are an option and the lure of social media has obscured some of the best, existing methods.

CEx 2012: Nail Email!

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About Martha Brooke

Program Director and Founder, Interaction Metrics
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The biggest challenge for the customer experience in 2012 will be to make customer service emails work.  I am not talking about simply sending responses in a timely manner, although that’s a good start. Rather, it’s time for companies to step up and provide thoughtful answers to customers’ questions, answers that show the company and its representatives are listening and care what customers have to say.

Consider the advantages of email:

First, according to numerous studies, emails cost much less than phone calls. In some cases, email customer service costs half as much as the phone experience. Savings of this magnitude deserve to be front and center on any company’s radar.

Second, it’s the customer-centric thing to do.  The customer gets an answer on their time. They don’t have to wait in your call queue and they don’t need to plan around your company’s hours. Instead, customers state complaints or pose questions when it’s convenient for them.

Third, companies can provide information that’s difficult to provide over the phone. For instance, contextual information such as how to avoid problems in the future and extra resources that the customer can refer to at their leisure are better served through text than conversation. In the customer service monitoring business, we’ve heard far too many calls suffer when CSRs tell customers to go to a long-link-web-address and the customer simply gives up trying to write the whole thing down. Links in customer service email solve this problem.

But in spite of these advantages, the state of customer service email is bleak. Often, customers don’t really get answers and when they do, those replies can be a robotic string of FAQs that do little to forge a bond between company and customer.  And customers have been burned by email. They have learned that the only way to get a meaningful answer is to call a company and when that doesn’t’ work to ask for the supervisor. If that’s a dead end, customers often air their complaints on social media sites or in letters to the legal team or the company president.

Why is email customer service such a sorry state of affairs? Here are two reasons:

  • Call centers are exactly that: they specialize in calls. While nearly every call center offers email customer service, the fact is email and chat are just add-on services, not their specialty.
  • And then, there is the Peter Drucker quote that we return to again and again because it offers a reasonable explanation for all kinds of execution failures: “you manage what you measure” or, as other quality gurus have said “you can expect what you inspect”. The majority of customer service email is an improvised mess because companies lack the right guidelines, procedures and metrics.

All companies that have nailed customer service email have done so because they track critical factors like customer effort, answer completeness and overall empathy.

If you are a company with great customer service email, tout it! Tell your customers that you are different and that while their calls are welcome, that’s not the only way to get a straight answer. Promise replies within the day written by associates who take the time to read—not just gloss over—questions.  Even better: if you can verify it, state up front that your customers report that 95% of your email responses are smart, easy-to-understand and friendly.  By communicating these facts from the start, you’ll get the transition from call to email customer service underway.

2012? Let it be the year of excellent customer service email. Mastery on this front means you’ll have more satisfied customers, better interactions and a more profitable customer experience. Email on!