Transcript

Pete Wright:
Where is your competitive edge? Are you looking for it behind a conference room door? Worse yet, a boardroom door? What if we found ourselves in a position to look for our edge not internally, but scattered among the very people businesses strive to reach: our customers? Our guest today is going to help us dive into the often overlooked well of customer feedback, exploring why listening to our customers is not just good practice, but essential skill for growth. Andy Scott is a seasoned expert in harnessing the voice of the customer and he’s here to break down how businesses can transform feedback from a conference room afterthought into a roadmap for success. I’m Pete Wright and this is Connected Knowledge. Andy Scott, welcome.

Andy Scott:
Thank you, Pete.

Pete Wright:
For those who aren’t analysts, for those who are in, say, product marketing administration in an organization, why are we talking about customer feedback today? Why is it important to us?

Andy Scott:
So it’s a great starting question. Let’s understand the basics. For me, listening to customers and understanding their feedback is imperative for businesses to understand what they need to do next. It’s great you’ve got a good product and the pricing of it and whatever else you might have out of the market, but things change very, very quickly. So to be able to understand how your customers are feeling about the experiences they’re having with whatever product or service you are offering and doing that on scale and in real time gives you the ability to keep your finger on the pulse of where things are going, what things you might need to do differently, help drive any vision or strategy that you’ve got. There are lots of other sources to understand what you need to do with your business, but you cannot ignore the voice of your customer.

Pete Wright:
Set the table for me. What is the current state of the nation in organizations? Do we have a sense? Do you have a sense for how well organizations are using their customer feedback proactively and actively?

Andy Scott:
Yeah, I think many, many customers, or should I say organizations, out there do it very well. They do it differently. I don’t think there’s a perfect way of doing it and that all comes down to the organization, the industry they’re in, how they communicate with their customers. There’s different ways of doing it, but what we are finding is we’re still having many conversations with different organizations who either don’t do it at all and they know they need to do more of it. They don’t do it at all or they do it, but it’s very manual and it’s very delayed and there’s a lot of resource goes into trying to understand and pick the data. So it very much depends organization to organization, industry to industry, but there are still a lot of people out there who aren’t getting the value out of the voice of their own customers.

Pete Wright:
Well, let me pose to you the Steve Jobs problem. I believe it was Steve Jobs who said, “I’m not going to ask the customers what they want. They don’t know what they want. I’m going to show them what they want.” That is a sentiment I think that we hear often in organizations. How do our customers know what they want until we’ve given it to them? So what value is customer feedback for driving strategic direction? How do you respond to that?

Andy Scott:
Well, I would say there are a few geniuses around and I’m not going to tell them how to run their multi-billion pound business or to create them because …

Pete Wright:
Andy, I’m trying to get you to give me a diss job on Steve Jobs. That’s what I’m trying to do.

Andy Scott:
Yeah, I’m going to do that and wait for all my Apple equipment to break the next day. It gets switched off remotely. But to your point, I’ve worked with different organizations and I’ve seen it where you’ll have a product team who’ll sit there and go, “Well, we think we should do this and it looks really cool. And isn’t this great? This is just a natural development of what we already do or we’ve seen a competitor go in this direction, so we should try and just do that.” And there’s some merit in both of those different ways of looking at things, but to understand what’s causing pain to your customers, that is going to give you an idea of where you need to go or what you need to fix. It isn’t always going to tell you what the solution is.

You’ll still need your product people and marketing people to come up with ideas of how to solve the problem because if you don’t understand what the challenges are for your customers because you’re not listening and understanding it, then you don’t have that input to direct you in which direction you should be going. And I’m quite sure Steve Job’s genius, but he would’ve had some data to say, “You know what? I think people just want a better interaction with their device to have all this screen scrolling and all of that.” He could have been gut, but he probably did some level of research to it as well and that’s what it comes down to. Some organizations have massive research departments and that’s great, but a lot of people don’t. And this is getting that research, if you will, that data in which then you can decipher and understand how you can use it to build into things like continuous improvement of products and services.

Pete Wright:
Sure, and that has become sort of a de facto stat in investor meetings, right? Customer sat, customer sat, customer sat, so let’s talk about how we get that data. Maybe starting traditionally, how do we get the kind of data that is actionable?

Andy Scott:
As I said, there’s lots of different ways of doing it. My view on this one is to get as broad and as deep amount of data as you can possibly get from your customer base. And to do that, you want to make it really low effort to capture feedback, so that’s asking a feedback request rather than things like a traditional survey, which is maybe a long form survey. Me, me, me, tell us about us as an organization. You’re going to miss things that you don’t think to ask, but maybe are important to your end customer. And you’re going to not get that many replies potentially because it’s a bit survey fatigue, a bit of a turn off. I don’t want to see and answer your 10, 15 questions. You want to be able to have a cross section of feedback. So you don’t just want to be capturing information from maybe social media where it’s the loud minority who want to just shout and be seen.

Maybe they’ve got lots of followers or influencers or they think they’re going to get a discount if they kind of mention your brand on a social tweet or something or other social media sites available. So the approach we would look at is you know who your customers. You know who are are interacting with you. Ask them the feedback as often as possible, but within a reality. You’re not asking people every single day for feedback, but within a reasonable period to make sure you’re constantly getting that pulse from a broad section of your customer base across different touch points on that journey. So you can then use that to identify different pain points at different points based on also different customer times.

Pete Wright:
I feel like you’re speaking to and about me. I think feedback fatigue is legit right now, right? Because there is such valuable interest buried in the data, I feel like I am asked often for my feedback. I’m asked after every retail exchange at reputable retailers. How did Josie do in selling you this product? Here are 10 questions that we’d like you to answer. I am a next, next, next, next, next guy. I am a Josie was great, 10 stars out of 10, whatever. What do you want from me? Give me some insights in how you craft the collection of data so that you get data that you can trust from guys like me.

Andy Scott:
Okay, so there’s a few different things we look at there. One is to reduce survey fatigue because you’re absolutely right. If all you’re getting back is duff information, then it’s not very useful. And what’s the point in doing it? Or even worse is you might make decisions based on a large section of duff data, poor evidence, and then there’s a trust issue in the future when you want to make another change. They go, “Well, we did that and it didn’t work because we base it on all the data.” So some things we do is we don’t over survey people. Okay? We want to understand when is the right time to survey, so you would want to understand what are those key touch points on that journey, when we should be asking.

But on top of that, somebody might go through those touch points twice in a week and you got to ask. We then got to look at should we survey them twice or do we want to build in some safety nets to say, “Actually, you know what? They’ve all been surveyed this week. Let’s not survey them again,” because that might just actually drive them and start ignoring you. So again, I use a very well-known online retailer and every time my family buys something it gets the same feedback and you kind of ignore it after a while because you’re asking me the same thing and the same thing. That’s number one. Also, it’s trying to find those emotive journeys to ask for feedback as well and then keeping it really low effort.

That’s one of the key things I would look at. So it’s not the 10 questions or the business led questions. You’ve got a KPI metric, that’s fine. You may even have a perception question. We feel we did this. Did we? A yes, no, maybe. That’s important, but for us it’s getting to the why. You tell us in your own words what’s important. That’s what I would want to know about. And that was coined once, is the why behind the KPI and that’s where we want to get to. That can be a two or three questions, takes you two minutes to complete and you can be on with your way. So if it’s relevant and it’s contextual to customer and then it’s really low effort.

Pete Wright:
Recognizing that this data goes into medium to long-term strategic planning is one thing. What is the sense of using this data from, again, we’ll talk about me, from a customer feedback loop perspective? So if you’re asking me questions about product and I give you feedback and I never see any change, do you ever notice those sorts of bubbles of lack of trust or people not willing to fill out feedback mechanisms because you never do anything with it anyway?

Andy Scott:
Yeah, and that’s a really important point, so we always talk to our clients about going back, what was it, that 12 plus years I’ve been in this sector. There’s no point in collecting customer feedback if you don’t act on it. However, I would also add, and I say this to all of our clients and prospective clients talk, acting on feedback is one of the hardest things to do. Collecting feedback and understanding it is good and it can be a challenge, but it’s doable. Making changes, having that confidence to make the change is really difficult. So I would split the next bit into two parts. There’s recovery loop on a one-to-one basis. So if you’re getting real-time feedback and you know somebody’s had a bad experience, I remember being told this, gosh, 20 odd years ago now. One of my first jobs working for a bank, the regional manager used to say a customer complaints or a poor experience is an opportunity to build trust with them because things go wrong.

It’s how you fix them and having some of maybe that human interaction. We’ve all got the AI talk at a moment, but actually maybe having somebody to pick up the phone and go, “We see you’re getting some poor feedback. We’re really sorry about that. Could we go into a bit more detail and see if we can find a mutually satisfactory outcome?” So that’s on that one-to-one basis closing note. On the broader piece, understanding trends and themes from your customers and then making that change in your business might not affect all customers but a segment of customers. Great, you’ve don’t it. You’ve taken the hard step and done something about it and made that change. The worst thing you can do now is not tell people about it because you’ve made the effort, you’ve been brave, you’ve made a change. But if your customers don’t know about it or they don’t see it straight away, maybe because it’s not going to impact them on a regular basis, you’re missing a big piece of the pie there.

You need to shout about it. So if you have a website, or a newsletter, or whatever it might be, a report that your customers interact with you, you need to be talking about it there and saying, “You know what? In the last month you said we did. Here’s a statement or a score that you’ve changed.” Something you’ve done because that then has an impact on capturing more feedback because your community, your customers go, “I gave feedback.” Even if it wasn’t my feedback, somebody gave feedback and they’ve made a change. So I feel it’s a two-way conversation here. It’s not just the consumer and the organization providing the service or the product.

Pete Wright:
I know as a customer what the biggest cries are for change because of the internet. I can go on Reddit and I can see in a heartbeat without your intervention at all exactly what the top issues are that we’re facing that are likely coming back to you through, let’s say, official data collection channels. And so I know that has to be an interesting evolution in customer feedback, sort of managing the flow of data, knowing that there are forums that are collecting data that are vastly outside of your control. Do you have guidance on how to manage those sorts of forums?

Andy Scott:
So managing these forums, I would say you want your customer base segment customers to have a place to be able to do what they need to do. And I think if you’re in a product marketing or product management point of view, you’re going to want to understand what’s going on in those spaces as well. And some customers feel, though, I believe you need to give them the opportunity to give you the direct feedback because that is where you can control it and do most with it, when it comes back into you and you can analyze it and understand it in the space of how does that fit in with all of the other feedback you’re getting or is this an outlier, a loud outlier potentially as well? That’s where you can be able to put it in rather than being swayed, but it’s a bit like even if you’ve got a formal complaint from somebody, you’re not necessarily going to change the business based on a single formal complaint because you’re not going to knee jerk on it.

You might have to act on it and deal with it individually and that’s the same with some of these review in social sites as well. They have an important place to play because people do go to those sites when they’re researching potentially what they want to buy from. So it’s definitely an area that you need to be aware of and look to manage, but I would say that sits alongside the importance of a direct channel for your customers to give feedback to you either at direct interactions, but also we have things called listening posts. So this might be if you have the classic button on the website, click here, leave feedback. So they’ve not had an interaction with you, but they want to tell you something. So it’s just having lots of different ways for people to lose feedback, make it as easy as possible to capture that feedback.

Pete Wright:
I love how you’re talking about that because I think it gets back to our earlier point. If you have channels that are direct, that are super customer centric, that offer the opportunity for somebody to complain about a bad experience and get direct one-on-one resolution, and all these channels are efficient, that allows people not to worry quite so much about just screaming in the internet void. Though that will happen because internet void.

Andy Scott:
It will happen, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, we actually are going to talk about something that actually addresses all of these checkboxes and that is Rant & Rave.

Andy Scott:
So Rant & Rave, we are a voice to customer product and we are an end-to-end solution. So we work with clients to understand when are the right capture touch points for their journeys because not every client’s the same. What are the right channels to use to capture feedback? We then focus, I think I maybe mentioned earlier on, on customer verbatim. Closed questions are great because somebody likes to track and measure KPI scores. That’s fine, but the verbatim is at the heart of it for us. It’s to understand the customer emotion about how they really feel about the interaction they had. So we do this real time analysis on the verbatim and then we present it back into real time dashboards that are intuitive to use, but they’re also locked down for different types of individuals within an organization to use to help them do the best job that they need to do because we have different roles in the organization. We need to consume this feedback in different ways. That is an overview of what the Rant & Rave product offers.

Pete Wright:
Can you give me a case example? I mean without naming any names, unless you have customers you can name. Walk me through how a large institution would implement and use Rant & Rave to actually manage some change.

Andy Scott:
Okay, so we won’t necessarily go into how they would set up a project necessarily, but they’ve got the data coming in, so they’re live and they’re operational. So you’ve got the feedback coming in constantly and one of the big things is what customers sometimes will notice is the volume of feedback. Because often if they’ve gone from not doing much feedback or very manual, they’ve got a very small sub-segment of feedback they’ve got coming in and they can’t necessarily rely on it. Suddenly …

Pete Wright:
What are the touch points? Where am I going to see it as a customer?

Andy Scott:
Okay, so the classic one could be you’ve called up a contact center team, had an interaction, maybe updated your bank details or your contact details or whatever it might be and you’ve interacted with them and that might be the only interaction you have with that organization for six months, a year even potentially. So it’s a great opportunity for them to reach out to you via let’s say text, maybe email, they’re the two most popular channels, to ask for feedback in real time. And as I said, that could be as simple as, hi, you just spoke to Peter on the phone, we’d love to know how we did. Please give us a score, whichever score metric that organization wants to do. Often that comes down to the industry they’re in.

And then for me, whatever score it is is that please tell us why you gave that score. So if they gave, be it, a 10 out of 10 or two out of five, whatever it might be, they can tell you in their own words what’s important to them and you might not know. One, they’re going to talk about the interaction. They’re going to say maybe Pete was really polite and helpful and he resolved my issue and I know what’s going to happen next. It was great. But you know what? They might also throw in there, by the way, I’m still really annoyed about that 20 quid charge you put on my account two months ago because there was an issue. I didn’t realize I did something. Or you might …

Pete Wright:
I’m carrying a grudge that I didn’t even know about until you asked me.

Andy Scott:
Well, exactly. Or it might be some feedback, but not about that direct interaction. It might be Pete was great, it was amazing, but your product, you’ve got to fix this issue with your product. I don’t like it and I’m not going to stay with you if you don’t fix this. You wouldn’t have asked for that after a contact center interaction traditionally. But because you’ve got that open text verbatim, the customer can tell what’s on their mind.

Pete Wright:
Is there a range? So I recognize if I give somebody a 10 and I’m really excited, then I’m raving. And I’ll use flowery language to describe what a glorious experience I had. And if it’s a one, I generally have a complaint on deck and I’m okay to just unleash in that text box. Is there a range in the middle where people typically don’t fill out any of the why questions or do you see people actually giving more thoughtful answers just because you’re asking the question this way?

Andy Scott:
Yeah, so you will have some people who don’t want to give feedback. They just don’t need to and that’s going to happen. There’s going to be a percentage of that, but it’s quite low and that’s okay. If we’re asking feedback at the right time, not every day just because they’ve had some kind of automated interaction, there’s going to be an emotional reason they needed to interact with you. Therefore, they should be wanting to give some feedback. And if they don’t, that’s okay. But if they do, and it doesn’t actually matter if it’s a one, a five, or a 10 depending on the score metrics, it’s the way we analyze the feedback. We understand which bits the customer thought you did well, so Pete was really friendly. Great, we know that Pete did well, but your online portal’s really difficult to log in. So that’s maybe to do with a process or a product that we offer.

This is the bit we didn’t do so well, so we can separate this verbatim out to understand which the bits we did well and not so well, regardless of the overall score they gave you, because maybe they really like you. They don’t want to mark Pete down, so we’ll still give you a four out of five, which you might ignore. Well, four we don’t have to worry about, but actually within that verbatim there is an area we could improve. Which might not be about Pete because Pete’s a good guy. It might be about the overall service or the brand, or the product, or something they’ve just released that this customers go, “Ah, this is more opportunity to tell you what I think about something else as well.” So a broader part of the business can learn from this as well, not just, let’s say, that contact center interaction.

Pete Wright:
Okay, perfect. And I feel like I veered us into a new direction with my touch point question, so let’s get back on the rails. We were talking about how Rant & Rave enables people to make decisions.

Andy Scott:
Yeah. Okay, so we’ve counted the feedback, we’ve analyzed it in real time, it’s presented in dashboards. So within the dashboards we would provide you can have real time dashboards for managers and teams to understand what’s going on today in my team. Maybe who do I need to speak to? Who’s having a good day or a bad day based on that feedback? I can look to coach. Where were the areas that I need to focus on? We can also pull out insights to understand what are the key drivers of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, let’s say. And what we’re looking at here is the correlation between customer scores, those KPI questions, your CSATs, or net promoter scores, or Es, and then the categories people are talking about and sentiment analysis we’ve done on it. And this is really important because if somebody is giving you a bad score, we can understand why is that.

So if customers are talking about categories that come up in their verbatim, it means it’s important to them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t mention it. And if they’re talking about it negatively, this is highlighting why they’ve given you a poor score, because this thing they think you should do better. And this isn’t based on 10 people in the last week. This might be based on hundreds of people in the last month because we don’t make knee-jerk, but these then become the themes that you can feed into continuous improvement, say expectation setting or I felt rushed on the phone call. Well, maybe we need to review how long we set our team to spend on the call with our clients because it’s really valuable. Our customers don’t like the fact they feel they’re rushed. We’re losing something there, so these are things that the business can then look into and go “Right, we’ve got this evidence that we don’t do this very well. Let’s look at it and start making some changes and do some testing and measure all that.”

Pete Wright:
I mean, I know you’ve said multiple times we don’t make knee-jerk reactions and we don’t allow one nasty comment to change our entire business strategy. And yet everything you’ve described, it seems like we would be enabled to act quickly if we need to, if we see trends that come up not over the course of a month, but over the course of a week or days.

Andy Scott:
Yeah, absolutely because the feedback comes in real time. First of all, that gives you the opportunity to do that one-to-one recovery. So if somebody’s had just a bad experience, so we can resolve it, but you can also see very quickly if there are trends happening. Maybe there’s a service style. Maybe there’s a new product feature you’ve just released and it’s not working properly and people are struggling to access it. You will pick up these trends very quickly because the feedback is en masse. You’re asking feedback from lots of people every day and the feedback is coming into your system within moments of them leaving the feedback. You are not having to wait for a report to be sent to you or for somebody manually to do the analysis over a period of time.

One client we did have who moved to Rant & Rave, they used to have a three-month cycle to be able to capture and understand their feedback and then look to take action. Well, I mean, there’s a phrase we’ve used for years. You sort of tried drive the business use in your rear-view mirror because you’re looking at what’s happened yesterday. You can’t make real-time changes. Whereas you want to be looking at the dashboard and the windscreen in front of you to go, “What’s happening now and how do I react to it if I need to?” If something’s desperately gone wrong and we can see the feedback telling us it, we can jump on it and make those changes.

Pete Wright:
Anybody who’s listened to this show knows that one of my favorite sort of perennial questions is about culture. As we get toward wrapping up here, can you talk to me about what Rant & Rave allows you to do as an institution? How does it enable change internally by giving visibility to these sorts of customer insights?

Andy Scott:
Yeah, this is a great subject. I’m going to try and keep this short for the time we have because this is something you could talk about for hours. So culture, Rant & Rave is a product. Like with any software product, it’s an enabler. You need to have a customer-centric culture. You need to have leadership buy-in to say this is what we’re doing as an organization. It’s not a departmental issue to capture feedback and try and act on it. We are all responsible for the customer experience, the customer journey and the success of this organization, so we need to enable potentially our frontline guys and girls to see feedback in real time so they can react and maybe self-coach and make changes to the way they’re interacting with customers in real time. We need to open it up to other parts of the business to go, “This is a thread of information to feed into alongside operational data, revenue data, complaint data to say this is another important thread to make changes, but it enables things like self-coaching and change within an organization.

But it all comes down to that culture. So it’s a massive enabler, but organizations need leadership and bravery to go, “This is what we should be doing.” It’s the right thing to do, to listen to customers and to react to it and to make change. Like we said earlier on, there’s no point capturing feedback and just sitting on it to say, “Well, we capture feedback and we can publish a score once a month. What are you doing with the feedback?” You’ve added the culture in your organization to want to change as well and that’s really important. And we have that with all the clients that we work with today and in the future.

Pete Wright:
It seems like very much like a chicken or the egg question, though, because you have this enabling technology that requires a certain sort of culture to take advantage of it. And yet at what level does the technology itself and the visibility actually affect change into the culture that you’re trying to achieve?

Andy Scott:
Having visibility of feedback on a daily basis, let’s say you have it from an agent having on a dashboard on their screen every day. Every day they can see what customers are thinking about, their interactions. Not the wider business, just an interaction. So we’ll go out to Pete, his interactions he’s having with his customers every day. He can see how he’s doing, so it becomes part of his daily life. How is he interacting? What could he do different on his next calls? How can I improve? It becomes …

Pete Wright:
That seems extraordinary to me. That seems extraordinary.

Andy Scott:
We call it democratizing feedback. It’s making it transparent. We know Pete can’t change the product or the process somebody’s going through, but he absolutely can be responsible for his behaviors, the soft skills he’s providing. So that’s where we would focus on to say if we’ve got everybody who’s interacting with the customer understanding the impact they have on their customers, it engages people. So you then suddenly having engaged employees and you’re getting increasing self-esteem as well because we all want to do the best job we can do. We all rely on feedback and we’ve had the Olympics recently and I remember listening to an interview with somebody who did make it through the qualifying rounds.

I can’t remember exactly which athlete, but they basically said, “I will learn more from this negative experience than I will from any race I win.” So it’s that same thing. You know what? Negative feedback is scary sometimes, but it’s how we improve. And as long as the culture’s right, it’s not a stick to beat anybody up with. It’s the carrot. This is how we improve and we’re all doing it on an individual all the way up to product management and to leadership who’s driving the strategy and the vision of the business and they’re using this data to help them. Then that just becomes self-fulfilling and we capture more feedback because we’re making change and we tell our customers we make change and they give us more feedback. And it works. It continually works in that cycle and everybody improves from it. And that’s what we’ve seen with many of our clients.

Pete Wright:
It’s a beautiful synchronicity, man. I know we could talk about this for a long time. I’m deeply fascinated by this stuff and I hope our listeners are, too. I think it’s just really, really interesting and particularly when you look at how culture bubbles up from the frontline people, the most valuable people, the people who have direct interface with your customers. I know I’ve got some links that you’ve supplied here, but is there anything specific? Have you got somebody who’s listened to us and thought, “I’m curious, what’s the next best thing they can do?”

Andy Scott:
Well, the next best thing will be to contact us. So we’ve got our website, uplandsoftware.com/rantandrave. If you Google Rant & Rave, it would come up as well. That’s best thing to do. Contact us. There’s a contact, request a meeting, or request a demo button and I’d love to talk to anybody out there around their voice to customer program or potential voice to customer program.

Pete Wright:
Definitely, definitely schedule that demo. You got to see it in action and see how it can impact your culture positively. Thank you so much, Andy, for hanging out with me and educating me today.

Andy Scott:
Thank you, Pete.

Pete Wright:
And thank you, everybody, for downloading and listening to the show. We appreciate your time and your attention. Make sure to swipe up in those show notes and check out the links that we’ve got in there and a link right there to schedule that demo. We’ll send you right over to the right page. Thanks everybody. Until next week, I’m Pete Wright and we’ll see you back here on Connected Knowledge.