Discovering Customer Insights in the Age of Information Overload
In today’s competitive landscape, customers are demanding more from the organizations they do business with—and a great customer experience (CX) can mean the difference between strong brand loyalty and customer churn. Poor customer service costs organizations more than $3.7 trillion annually. That’s a number to watch.
Furthermore, there are now countless ways for customers to interact with different brands, from traditional avenues like phone calls to newer options like SMS and chatbots powered by the latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). While this increase in communication channels is intended to meet customer demand and deliver positive CX, it also creates more data than ever before.
Most organizations know that this customer data holds a wealth of insights, such as how frontline employees are performing, the issues your customers contact you about, how customers feel about your products or services, and more. It’s no surprise then that customer service leaders have increased their focus on improving CX by 19% in recent years. Yet many still struggle to extract intelligence from this data mess.
A recent Salesforce survey found that 33% of business leaders are unable to extract meaningful insights from their data and 30% are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data.
But with today’s technological advances, particularly in AI, turning data into actionable insights is becoming easier and more efficient – insights that can drive improvements in your customer service center and beyond. Here’s how.
Diversifying your data collection strategy
Despite these ever-increasing communication channels, data collection is often still fragmented or incomplete within organizations. On the one hand, many CX departments have continued to focus their data collection on solicited mechanisms such as surveys or online reviews – in other words, asking customers for feedback. CX leaders have relied on these methods for decades and we don’t see them going away, but using them as the sole source of customer data keeps CX in the dark ages. That’s because we know that solicited feedback, while valuable, is incomplete. For example, post-interaction and traditional NPS/CSAT surveys consistently have low response rates and often capture responses that fall on the extreme ends of the emotional spectrum (very happy or very angry).
On the other hand, many call center departments collect call recordings or interaction transcripts because it helps them meet compliance requirements. By doing so, they miss out on the power of what’s in those interactions—unfiltered, unsolicited customer feedback. In other words, feedback that customers share without being asked for it. This unsolicited customer feedback has the power to fill in the gaps of solicited feedback—those interactions in the middle where customers may not be emotionally charged but are sharing incredibly valuable feedback about their experiences, your products and services, whether they’re going to a competitor, and more.
Organizations need to diversify their data collection methods, collecting both solicited and unsolicited feedback and combining those data points to gain a complete picture of their customers. By analyzing all types of customer data, you can uncover insights into key indicators like agent performance and customer emotion to better understand CX and make data-driven decisions that improve customer outcomes. This comprehensive approach is essential, knowing that customer intelligence has the potential to drive businesses forward.
Scaling Emerging AI Technologies
Let’s say your organization collects all the data you need to get a complete picture of your customers; it would be nearly impossible to analyze all that data manually. Within the contact center alone, manually listening to conversations or reviewing interaction transcripts would result in viewing approximately 1-2% of all customer interactions. Is this a true representation of what happens in 100% of your customer conversations? Probably not.
Additionally, these types of manual processes prevent employees from focusing on other high-impact CX tasks, which can negatively impact morale and increase stress. In fact, another study found that 35% of employees believe data overload negatively impacts their job performance, and 30% say it affects their overall job satisfaction.
Advances in AI, particularly over the past 18 months, have changed the game for scaling analytics capabilities when it comes to collecting, analyzing, and uncovering insights from customer conversations. So much so that 86% of U.S. technology and data decision makers expected their organization’s investment in AI capabilities to increase in the first half of 2024.
These AI investments have not only helped scale analytics capabilities, they’ve also helped eliminate or reduce repetitive, manual tasks, allowing customer service and other frontline employees to focus on delivering better customer outcomes. And when employees are happier and more satisfied in their roles, they deliver better CX.
Driving company-wide change
Without elevating these data insights into your organization, CX satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) will remain in a vacuum. Customer insights can impact and benefit nearly every department, across the enterprise. And most business leaders already know this, with 90% of CEOs believing that customers have the greatest impact on their business.
However, organizations need to put this belief into practice. This means, among other things, leveraging customer insights to improve decision-making in marketing (e.g., by improving campaign effectiveness), for specific products or services (e.g., by identifying product problems or making smarter product development decisions), in sales (e.g., by identifying the language that leads to closed deals), and more.
When companies strategically orient themselves to CX – and the technology investments needed to achieve those goals – they can do more than just improve individual metrics like agent performance or efficiency. Instead, when entire organizations operate with the goal of being more customer-centric, meeting customers where they are and using what customers tell you to make better business decisions, that’s when real progress is made.
While CX in the digital age often means more customer feedback than ever before, it’s critical to cut through the noise and discover the actionable insights that will truly make a difference for your business. The alternative? Missing the intelligence that helps you adapt, improve, better meet customer expectations, and ultimately grow revenue.
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