DYK # 10: “Did you know that the challenge with ‘Acting on insights’ can have several root causes?”
🔊 It’s the middle of the month again, and that can only mean one thing. It’s DYK time again!
📊 Earlier this month we ran a LinkedIn poll on “What are the biggest challenges your organization faces when it comes to customer experience and voice of customer?”, and I promised to write the next DYK around the number 1 challenge you shared with us.
SOO… today it's DYK day, and in DYK # 10 we explore “Did you know that the challenge with ‘Acting on insights’ can have several root causes?”
If you’re struggling to act on your customer feedback / VoC data, apparently you’re not alone. In our most recent poll, that emerged as the number 1 challenge for organizations.
There can be various reasons for the “pain” you’re feeling, and the struggle to act on your data. Let’s look into it.
Layers of potential root causes:
Poor quality of data to start with.
One potential reason that fuels your challenge to act on VoC data could be poor quality of data. That often stems from a poor program design, i.e., you might not be asking the right questions in your survey, or track the right metrics; meaning you’re not collecting the right data to start with. If that’s you, head on over to the VOICE - VoC and CX Summit website and sign up for the conference. I’ll be speaking on the challenge of collecting the right / wrong metrics and the impact it has on your insights quality and subsequently the quality of decisions you make and the quality of actions you take.
Poor data quality can also be a reflection of poor systems or poor backend data. Perhaps you’re not able to connect any metadata with your survey data, or you’re unable to connect any data-dots across the business. With the many data silos that results in, we only ever see a part of the picture, but never the entire picture, leaving us to ponder about context and experience drivers.
2. Poor ability to translate data into insights, to know what to do.
If data quality isn’t an issue for you, you have great customer feedback and are also able to connect that data with some other data sources (metadata, digital analytics, contact center data, etc.), you might be struggling with the challenge of converting data into meaningful and actionable insights. That could have two reasons - you don’t have the right technology in place, and / or you don’t have the right people skills internally.
With a lot of our VoC data unstructured in nature these days, the need for great text analytics, as well as unified data analytics increases. What does that mean you ask? It means crunching numbers is one thing, but analyzing unstructured data (e.g. text, voice, etc.) is a different matter. Whether we’re analyzing survey verbatim, online reviews or contact center conversations, you need the right technology in place to help you do that. Combining your “qual” analysis with your metrics and other “hard” data, provides an even richer picture to enhance the quality of your insights.
While great technology is great (!), you also need to have the people skills in-house, to leverage that data, set up your program, and make sense of all of it.
3. Lack of a customer centric culture and frameworks / processes to enable and empower employees to act on insights.
If you can tick off # 1 and # 2, your challenge might be culture or process related. Acting on feedback isn’t easy - many organizations struggle with that. While collecting and analyzing data can be aided by technology, and we often have specific teams for those tasks, when we get to acting on feedback, it’s less tech driven, and involves the entire organization. It becomes a team sport.
Holding data “hostage” in your silo doesn’t help anyone, and it won't help you drive changes or improvement opportunities across the business. It’s important to share the right insights with the right people, create processes to enable acting on feedback, and empower your staff to do so.
There are typically two types of feedback to act on:
A) Smaller, often operational or tactical issues.
Service Recovery / Case Management / Call Backs / whatever you might call your “closing the loop with the customer” processes are a great example. Setting up processes and frameworks for your frontline staff to “close the loop” with your customers, i.e., getting back to them to resolve any outstanding issues (if they agreed to be contacted), is a small but effective way to improve customer experiences.
In this example it might be processes you have to establish, or getting buy-in for headcount to enable call backs.
B) Large, complex, and often systemic in nature.
These are the types of things that all too often end up in the “too hard basket”. It’s things such as price, product quality, or pain points that are driven by poor backend / frontend systems (technology), poor or restrictive processes or policies, etc. It’s typically something that requires more than one person or team to drive the change. It typically requires budget, resourcing, buy-in from the top, and prioritization amongst other business initiatives.
Sharing the data with the right people, and setting up processes to facilitate acting on feedback are a great start. But very little is going to happen if you lack a customer-centric culture.
Summary
Whether it’s small things or big things you’re looking to address, your employees need to be able and empowered to act in the best interest of your customers, even if that requires resources and / or budget. For those larger pieces of work you will need to get them prioritized amongst other business priorities, competing against everyone else in the business to get your initiatives across the line.
Are you mature enough to not only pick up smaller operational / tactical elements, such as SR or fixing a mistake on the website, but strategic pieces of work? Do you have a culture of customer centricity where employees are empowered and enabled to act on the “big, ugly” things that require resourcing, budget and people power to fix? Do you have processes in place to enable those initiatives to be tabled and actioned?
If so, your challenge to act on insights might lie somewhere else, e.g. poor data quality or inability to convert data into meaningful and actionable insights. If it’s something else entirely, I’d really like to hear from you!
If you find yourself stuck in any of those challenges, or you’re not quite sure why or where you’re stuck, I’d recommend a program review. Program reviews are a great exercise to take stock and get clarity on what’s working, what isn’t working, and where your improvement opportunities lie.
Unsure how to conduct a program review? Well, we might just have the consultant for you 🤩 Get in touch with us today, we love program reviews, they’re a great and powerful tool to help get you unstuck and back on track!
#InsightstoAction #VoC #CX #customerexperience #VoCprogramreview