When it comes to capturing customer feedback that you can truly act on, the more accurate, the better. With the continuing rise of digital, and the multiple channels through which your customers can interact with you, it can be difficult to know where to focus your Voice of Customer efforts to gain the highest response rates for feedback.  

Our latest webinar in partnership with Stonewater, “An Emotion-led Approach to Customer Feedback”, showed the importance of real–time feedback within the housing industry, and the attributes that make up a successful fast feedback program.  

Missed the webinar? Here are some key takeaways from the session that include Stonewater’s experience of moving to a real-time, emotion-led approach.  

More insight, less questions

As the old saying goes, less is more, and lengthy surveys can often be off–putting for your customer. A 20–question survey after an interaction with you is likely to be the last thing your customer wants to complete, especially in a situation where they had a negative experience with you. By simply asking your customer to score their experience, followed by a reason for their score, the option for an open-ended question gives your customer the freedom to elaborate, in their own words, giving you greater insight. If there are areas of your customer feedback process that require greater detail or for your customer to elaborate further on their experience, webforms can be used as a platform for more insight whilst maintaining a seamless customer journey. Stonewater previously conducted telephone interviews as their source of transactional feedback, but often experienced delays of up to six weeks from interaction with the customer and receiving the results from the survey. A change to real-time interaction has resulted in a clearer perception of the experience for the customer and improved response rates.  

Speaking the customer’s language

While there is value in allowing your customer to rate their experience on a sliding scale of scores, going one step further and giving your customer a platform to express themselves in their own words opens a world of opportunity. By providing the option to explain their reason for their score, you can develop a much deeper understanding. Capturing emotion during interactions means you can start to drive evidence-based change within your organization. 

For Stonewater, the introduction of categorizing the groups of words in customer verbatim comments allows for deeper analysis. More specifically, introducing terms such as ‘lockdown’, ‘pandemic’ and ‘PPE’ into their taxonomy means they can track where customers are talking about these topics, and they can use the insight to make the necessary changes to service.  

Fit into your customer’s world seamlessly

A huge part of seamless customer communication is ensuring you’re in your customers world. We don’t mean stalking their every move, but when they choose to contact you via email, SMS, phone or live chat, make sure you communicate with them through their preferred channel. By adopting an omni-channel approach you increase the chances of improving response rates.  With an open rate of up to 98%, SMS is a powerful tool to use, especially with its ease of use both from your organization’s perspective and your customers. Ultimately, you want to follow four golden rules by making the experience personal, relevant, low effort and in the moment to elicit high response rates with deep insight.

Just some examples of the channels to use to make customer feedback that little bit easier:  

Take the guessing out of your satisfaction scores

Whilst diving into data can seem daunting, it’s often where the details you really need exist. The data Stonewater load into the Rant & Rave platform helps them analyze and provide further insight about customer satisfaction trends and themes, including contextual and operational data for their frontline users. This allows agents to quickly and easily self-serve to identify why customer satisfaction levels change.  

Quality over quantity

Stonewater’s move to a real-time, emotion-led approach has resulted in a positive change of focus from call volume and handling time, to call quality and call outcome. A change that has seen CSAT scores in that area remain at 85% and above during lockdown. With the ability to deep dive on customer scores, responses and trends in their data, Stonewater have been able to identify areas that require more attention. This includes increasing the level of contact in Anti-social behavior (ASB) cases, building better relationships with their contractors by sharing feedback with them more openly and efficiently. And finally, reviewing survey processes has allowed them to see why their scores were struggling in certain areas and have already led to operational changes.  

To hear more about Stonewater’s experience including how they have managed customer queries during the global pandemic, watch the webinar here.