Customer Experience Competency #2: Experience Based Listening and Feedback

  • Deliberate and united listening (and understanding) in key experience moments.
  • Decision making and prioritization of resources comes from knowing and improving customers’ lives.

Because of the way we take feedback and then hand it off for resolution down the silos, we inadvertently send a “false positive” to CEOs and company leaders that customer issues are being resolved.

Customers experience a company across the operation, not down the silos.  So doling out the issues down the silo must shift to drive customer experience accountability. Unreliable customer experiences are often the result of the actions of more than one silo.  Experience based listening starts first by reporting out how the customer is experiencing the business – then encourages identification of the silo operations that all played in impacting that outcome.

This approach is fundamentally different than how surveys are viewed today in many organizations.  The results come out.  Every silo takes a look for what impacts them – then each individually starts some projects to try and improve the score.  But the connection to customers is often lost.  It’s about the score.  We lose the customer in all the energy in trying to serve them.

Surveys are important, but there are many opportunities to get close to customers and really “listen” in on what they have to say about the experience you are delivering to them. If we wait for the survey results or rely only on the data within surveys, then we miss the simplest, most easily understood feedback – customer listening.

Expand Your Customer Listening and Feedback

Some sources are:

• Feedback that customers provide during call center calls

• Customer input provided during a return

• Internet/social media feedback

• Feedback customers give your frontline folks in your stores

Determine Your Listening System

Collecting and organizing the information is important to prevent “one off” fixes and to attach issues to the appropriate stage in the customer experience. You need to determine how you can connect all of these listening “pipes” to take advantage of the information that enables you to trend and track it. (This includes discussing the IT implications of “buying” vs. “building” a listening system.)

By having “everyday” listening feedback, we loosen our reliance on surveys. We can take real-time action and also gain focus on the things that really matter.

Take Action: The listening feedback work requires committing to three alignment action items

1. Agree on the categories of customer issues that you will collect in a unified manner across the operation, so that you can consistently collect and trend listening feedback.

2. Agree to start reporting customer listening feedback by customer experience stage

3. Agree to stop handing off the experience issues to one department – identify the multiple silos that impact the experience and from there drive accountability.

Learn about the 5 Customer Experience Competencies

Competency #1 – Define the Stages of Experience to Gain Alignment around Customer Experience

Competency #2 – This is the post you’re reading. Experience Based Customer Listening and Feedback

Competency #3 – United (Cross-Silo) Experience Reliability and Accountability

Competency #4 – Manage Customers as Assets – Prove the ROI between Experience and Growth

Competency #5– Create “One Company” Customer Experience Culture

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