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The "what" and the "why"
Most feedback programmes are focussed on the data and the metrics. We call that the “what”. The most important currency isn’t data - it’s insights from, and ideas in response to scores. We call this the “why”. Metrics are important because they will give you an indication of what is happening and assist in evaluating progress. But what they don’t do is tell you why things are happening with your customers or what can be done about them
Dialogue Design
Cookie cutter or point and click designed surveys fall short in uncovering those wow insights and hidden/latent customer needs, which are critical in understanding the difference between what & how you deliver services/ products and what your customers need and want. We individually craft each and every dialogue, drawing on more than a decade’s experience, our understanding of your customers, and of course your business to extract maximum insight
Dynamic Customer Questions
Static questions have limited capability when trying to extract insights from you customers. Our customer engagement technology is the most sophisticated on the market. We deliver dynamic customer questions that offer targeted questions based on who each customer is and the responses they’ve given. Typically we offer multiple targeted follow-up verbatim questions and associated ratings to make best use of the time your customers give you.
Sentiment Capture
We deliver high-quality verbatim comments that are tagged with a sentiment score direct from the customer. As the customer defines sentiment and subject, it is always 100% accurate, we don’t need to rely on estimates from text or sentiment analysis that can only be as strong as the feedback behind it.
Any Language
No matter how you want to ask the why, we can assist. With a global base of clients BigEars has developed the ability to reach any audience, in any language.
Multiple Channels and Methodologies
It is important that customers are given the opportunity to give feedback through their channel of choice. So we offer voice surveys via mobile phones and web surveys via email or mobile browser. Our web app based survey methodology allows customers to choose whether to respond by typing or speaking.
Data Collection
Data collection and statistical analysis is not the secret sauce to a great CX. If it was, the companies who gathered the greatest amount of data from the most touch-points and put it through the best formula would have the best CX. But this is just not true. Yes, you need to be data driven but the key to creating a great CX is not through staring at dashboards, it's listening to your customers and applying action through human ingenuity. We manage data collection by using smart tools to ensure the right customers are asked the right questions at the right time. The data we collect is displayed in our reporting tool, Customer Radio where there are all sorts of charts and graphs to track and monitor scores. As mentioned, we firmly believe that great CX does not come about through staring at a dashboard. So our interactive dashboard is a starting point not an ending point. By clicking through the quantitative graphs you can easily listen to the voices and the reasons that underpin that score - allowing you to truly listen to your customers and apply action through human ingenuity.
Freshness
Getting a customers feedback as close to the interaction as possible will ensure the experience is fresh in their mind. Our invites go out as close to the point of interaction as possible and can even be real time (if your data feed allows) allowing customers to opt-in just after their interaction.
Triggered
With technology that can be integrated into almost anything, there are numerous ways to trigger a survey request relevant to that experience, from a particular type of call through to an outcome.
Methods
BigEars takes a huge amount of pride and effort in ensuring that the feedback surveys we create are a very good customer experience and the methods we use play an important role as this is also part of the customer experience.
Text to Call Back
Customers are generally very mobile centric. So it makes sense to provide them with a feedback invitation directly to their mobile phone. We have been utilising this invite methodology for 12 years and it has been very successful. Customers receive a friendly text message as close to their point of experience as possible. They simply reply , “Yes" at a time that suits them and that response triggers our system to call straight back to them with a voice survey which they then complete. We can also send invites to web surveys by text.
Post Call IVR Survey
If you are looking to answer a simple NPS question, a post call IVR survey can be very cost effective. Even though we have the technology and the capability to offer post call IVR surveys we have found a number of areas of concern that mean that this is not a recommended method for us. Research and experience has shown that entry into a post call survey can be reported as high (typically reported as high response rate), but a higher % of customers exit the survey without completing it than other channels. On top of the lower completion rates, you also have lower qualitative feedback, which is critical to understanding your customers.
Email
We can send invites to email addresses. This is helpful for situations where you don't have the mobile phone number of your customer, or where they have expressed a preference to be contacted by email. The email can contain a link to a web survey, Online Voice or can contain a telephone number which they can call to participate in a voice survey, or a "click to be called" link, which will trigger a call out to their mobile when clicked.
Website
There are many ways to trigger an online survey request from your website, during or after interactions. Website survey requests need to avoid interfering with the user experience so the advice is to only request feedback when a user completes a meaningful transaction, and the rest of the time make it a passive opt-in option that the user can choose if they are seeking it.
Chatbot or Live Chat
A survey request can be easily triggered during or at the end of a chatbot or live chat session. This can be a simple as a clickable link to our innovative Online Voice. That can be agent initiated, or an automatic part of wrapping up the chat session
In (mobile) App
If you have a mobile app that customers use, there is an opportunity to embed a feedback process within this app. Feedback collection can be achieved a number of ways from your app:
Link to a mobile browser based app - Which would require the least integration Iframe our Online Voice browser feedback capability into the app - slightly more integration, but more seamless than popping out to the mobile browser.
Use our web feedback app API to implement the full feedback capture UI inside your native app - The most integration, but a native app UI.
Feedback Fatigue
When the decision to become customer centric is made by a company, the temptation is to go into customer feedback overdrive and to try and collect as much data as possible as often as possible. What is known is, this feedback overdrive approach can actually be harmful, affecting the brand, degrading the relationship and ironically leading to less valuable data. In fact so many companies are asking for feedback so often the universal effect has been a drop in survey responses globally over the past decade. The lesson is - don’t over survey your customers, and make it the best possible experience when you do. Surveys should have value, when a customer has a compelling reason they are happy to take the time to give you considered and insightful feedback and in turn everything you collect, you have an obligation to use really well.
Dehumanisation
The biggest challenge facing companies is, how do we get our people to care about the customer? The problem is in a data and metric driven environment people care less because metrics dehumanise. The best way to humanise and build empathy for customers is by listening to them share their thoughts, feelings and experiences in their own voice. We believe everyone has something to gain by regularly listening to customers share their stories; in fact it is essential to a genuinely customer-centric culture.
Saturation Theory
We use Saturation Theory to continue sampling and analysing data until no new ideas appear and all concepts arising from the data are well-developed. By using this approach, we can often minimise the amount of effort required to understand customers’ needs. We see this approach as superior in every way to the typical big-platform, automated, quant-oriented approach, where customer stories are frequently just reduced to numbers and metrics. Tools such as sentiment analysis, theming, and text analytics all have the effect of turning complex customer experiences into metrics that can be tracked and analysed. These tools are popular not because they produce greater clarity, but because they provide the illusion that it is not necessary to engage directly with a large volume of customer verbatim that is the by-product of the need to feed the quant dashboard with a high volume of data.
Ban Lists
Before offering a customer the opportunity to leave feedback we scrub the data against our ban lists. This ensures that any customers you have tagged as not to be contacted will not receive an invite. Any customers who have opted out or unsubscribed will not receive an invite and we manage things so that you can specify the stand down period between a customer giving feedback and then being asked to give feedback again (this can be customised for different companies and different customer groups).
Analysis
We live in a data rich world. Stats and scores and numbers and graphs saturate our workspaces. And so often customer experience is reduced to numbers on a graph. We understand and respect the importance of quantitative data. Our surveys all contain rating questions so you can keep track of scores and see how they change over time. However the problem we have solved is how to make the qualitative feedback accessible, digestible, and shareable, so it too can be part of the picture. We have built a suite of tools and reports to handle this in an elegant and seamless way, so that understanding the customer stories behind the score will become second nature for your organisation. And customer stories will be the examples you are able to cite when you explain why the numbers on your graphs and charts are changing.
Customer Radio
Customer Radio is where your BigEars audio feedback lives. The brainchild of our founder and CTO, Mark Forsyth, it is the only voice feedback app of its kind in the world. Rather than reducing feedback to a set of keywords and points on a graph, Customer Radio makes it easy for you to listen to, sort, and share the actual voices of your customers.
Native 'Elastic' Search Engine
In Discover view of our Customer Radio your feedback can be filtered by key words or phrases, by score, question, date, location, or just about anything else you can think of.
Transcriptions
Every comment is transcribed by one of our expert transcribers, giving you unmatched accuracy and readability. A transcription, rating score and metadata accompanies each audio clip, and a single click allows you to access the full call.
Integration
We have a very integration friendly platform that can integrate to pretty much anything. We already have data-feeds going for other clients. So if you need to integrate to other technologies, existing tools, your CRM or even a data lake, we can.
Data Analytics
All of your survey Quantitative data is displayed on our interactive dashboard. Click on your graphs to hear the actual customer stories behind your scores. We can attach a whole bunch of data to survey responses, making it easy for Encore to drill down into specifics. Below is some data (not limited to) that we are happy to receive and attach to responses:Agent, Calling Number, Portfolio, Account Number, Customer ID, Agent ID, Team, Team Leader, Agent, Email, Team leader email, Interaction date, Interaction type, Call duration, Customer segment, Customer_since, Account status.
Curation
At BigEars we now offer a curation service for all of our customers. Digesting and curating feedback into usable, powerful and actionable insights is what most companies struggle with. We provide the curation specialists to take the pressure off your team and this means we can send you curated content of your best customer clips. Each month we will create playlists and stations on emerging themes, and on any topics specified by you. We can sort and organise the feedback by geography, transaction type, demographically - or by any criteria you suggest. From the playlists we
Sentiment Capture
We deliver high-quality verbatim comments that are tagged with a sentiment score direct from the customer. As the customer defines sentiment and subject, we don’t need to rely on estimates from text or sentiment analysis that can only be as strong as the feedback behind it.
Service Recovery
Intervene early and intercept clients comments before they become complaints. Any time a customer gives a negative rating about an element of their experience, we ask them to explain what went wrong, and then we ask whether they have any suggestions about how things might be improved. We send full details to supervisors or process improvement specialists for a call back, coaching or root cause analysis.Another important point is that even when customers leave a high score, sometimes their comments will include feedback about something that “could have been better”. Seeing these emerging trends means you can front foot issues as they arise and before they become problems.
Getting Customers into the Boardroom
Connecting C-Level and Board Level executives to the customers is a challenge for any organisation. BigEars audio feedback is a very tangible way to bring the customer voice into the boardroom. With our highly targeted curation services we can share real customer voice, anchored in what the data is telling us, really bringing the data to life and closer to the real experience of your customers.
Confirmation bias, wherein we unknowingly give more weight to information that is consistent with our own beliefs. Similar to this is availability bias, which the tendency to make decisions based on what you already know.
Overconfidence bias, wherein we overestimate our own abilities and underestimate the strengths of our competition. In fact, one study found that up to 80% of executives have misperceptions regarding their company’s relative performance to competition. The alignment between internal perceptions about of how customers make choices vs. actual customer data is, at best, only 63%, with businesses most commonly overestimating their competitive advantage over the competition. These biases can lead to some significant miscalculation of how customers will respond to marketing and business efforts, and they can certainly provide a handicap to reaching organisational goals.
Socialise and Embed Feedback
What is happening? Well in most organisation access to customer feedback rarely gets past Marketing, Cx, the contact centre or BI and if it does it is fragmented and not consistent. In a customer centric organisation, everyone needs to be connected to the “voice of the customer”, from the frontline staff right through to the boardroom - consistently and regularly. Our platform Customer Radio, makes access to feedback extremely easy and sharing feedback is a breeze.
Recognise and Celebrate
Hearing the customer’s voice directly has proven far more effective at changing staff behaviour than metrics or written feedback alone. Whenever a team member receives perfect scores, we send a recognition alert to the team member as well as their supervisor so they can hear customers articulate how they made such an impact.
Sense of Purpose
When training and coaching your teams hearing customers voices talking about the impact an agent has had on them can really shine a light on what it takes to be "great" at your job. Anecdotally we hear that when call centre agents listen to positive feedback it shows them very clearly that they are having a positive impact through the work they do. This is intrinsically motivating and rewarding and instills a sense of purpose and pride in their work. Higher staff satisfaction also leads to lower attrition rates and can improve customer satisfaction.
Close the loop
The biggest reward you can give your customers for leaving feedback is to listen and take action. Sometimes closing the loop can be as simple as communicating back to your customers what you have heard and what you changed as a result. Hearing customer comments and identifying emerging trends before they become problems is a hugely valuable function of a feedback programme. It's important that when you collect feedback it does not fall into a "hole" where insights are not turned into actions. At BigEars we have developed alerts to ensure that nothing important is missed. Customers who leave a very low score can request a call back and an alert is sent to the person who is responsible for rescuing unhappy customers so this opportunity is not missed. We also generate alerts for any low scores - so your team can follow up where necessary. And alerts are also generated for exceptionally high scores so that the staff members who are doing a great job can be recognised and congratulated.
CX Maturity Model
Customer Centricity is a continuous journey of improvement. It all starts with gathering high-quality customer feedback and acting upon it, then there are layers of activity that collectively lead you towards the goal of VoC being central to any strategic change. BigEars team and technologies are experienced at supporting organisations at all stages of this maturity model.
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