Proof the Path to Customer Success is Customer Survey Data

Find Out What Your Customers are Saying, and How to Translate Their Feedback into CX Enhancements

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Philip Mandelbaum
07/15/2022

A wide paved road leads out toward the light into the distance over multiple hills, symbolizing customer experience efforts leading to customer success

Seven minutes before a business meeting this afternoon, I clicked off a call with Whisker, maker of the Litter Robot. (In case you missed it, there are a few cats at my house.) The call itself lasted less than 60 seconds. The customer support agent cheerfully asked me for the serial number; I didn’t have it. Without even an infinitesimal hint of frustration, she asked for the email address on file. Within seconds she had our info, and asked how she could help. I told her we’d merely misplaced the power cord for one of our three (yes, three!) Litter Robots; without hesitation, she replied, “No problem, we’ll have a new one shipped out to you within 24 hours.” No fee for shipping. No guilt for our forgetfulness. And yet I hung up embittered.

Why? Because this is how consumers are today — and because I’d already waited on hold for 28 minutes before selecting the option to receive a callback. Yes, having a callback option is better than not having one, but waiting a half hour to request a new power cord feels excessive. So while I would’ve seized the opportunity to leave my agent a positive review (there wasn’t one — a missed opportunity), I also now have a very shareable story about that time I:

Scrolled past all the self-help and other online support suggestions on a consumer brand’s website;
Clicked to call the customer service phone line; and
Sat on hold, listening to crappy music, on a weekday afternoon, for 2800% longer than the time it would later take for an agent to solve my problem.

Worse still, the chatbot (or ‘representative’) was offline, leaving me stuck either using the phone (I’m part of Gen Z, and I prefer chat) or sending an email and waiting days(?) for a reply. Not good. Which sucks because someone at Whisker:

Wisely wrote a customer experience policy about not interrogating or charging customers when they call with a broken or missing component
Successfully trained the agent who helped me

A standard male minskin kitten with a tie-dye outfit from Catskills Cattery rests on the shoulder of Catskills Cattery co-owner Philip Mandelbaum while he works on a project for Customer Engagement Insider
^{One of our kittens, keeping me company at work}

My experience today could have cemented my family as perpetual high-value customers. The question Whisker should be asking is: Was it so bad that I’m searching for alternatives?

Not in this case, but that might leave me in the minority. Ninety-six percent of consumers will leave a brand for bad customer service — and, according to the June 2022 Market Study on CX Trends, Challenges & Opportunities from our sister organization CCW Digital, “a staggering 63% will share the experience with close contacts or social media followers.”

Since, simultaneously, only one in 10 consumers feels their brand interactions have meaningfully improved in the past year, it’s worth looking more deeply into what our proprietary data can tell us about what you should be doing to win the post-COVID Consumer Wars of the 2020s.

What the Customer Satisfaction Survey Tells Us

Almost half of all consumers say their brand experiences have gotten worse (33%) or much worse (9%) in the past year. This could be because, post pandemic, many organizations are still struggling with COVID-era employee cuts, new workplace environments (i.e., remote or hybrid) and/or supply chain issues (41% think brands are providing “nothing approximating a solution”). Or, it could be that these brands still don’t understand the importance of customer experience, or how to deliver the experience their customers seek.

Well, let’s see:

Consumers want their interactions with brands to be personalized, but only about half (52%) encounter even some degree of personalization
Consumers want brands to understand, appreciate and empathize with them, but nearly two thirds believe the average agent doesn’t know much about the customers they’re serving or even the companies they’re representing — and 64% feel that most customer service employees don’t care about them either
Consumers want their interactions with brands to be seamless, across channels and employees, and while more than nine in 10 companies acknowledge that their agents do have access to multiple interfaces to address customer concerns, only about 45% of consumers say they experience seamlessness or easy transitions

Why? Perhaps brands are just doing it wrong. Despite, for instance, all the recommendations to expand or finetune your self-service portals and chat bots:

Only 3% of consumers feel self service is sufficient on its own
30% prefer a live, human agent for all interactions
About half (47%) are willing to try on their own but want to know they can always escalate
41% say it’s “flat-out unacceptable” for brands to only offer options like email or chat

After engaging with CX teams, consumers are most likely to complain if they face rude or disrespectful employees (63%), conclude without a solution (58%), or have to wait too long (48%); however, their biggest pain points are, in order:

Long wait times (60%), as I experienced after misplacing a power cord for a Litter Robot
No live agent (46%)
Limited hours (39%)
Reauthentication, or having to repeat your private personal information with each new employee (37%)
Frequent transfers (37%)
No customization (34%)

As my colleague, Brian Cantor, author of the June 2022 Market Study and co-creator of Customer Engagement Insider (and my position), explains in his analysis, addressing ‘CX trends, challenges and opportunities:’ “Clearly, agents are not engaging in the most productive, empathetic conversations possible. They do not come across as sensitive to, let alone knowledgeable about, the problems customers are facing.”

So, what do we do!?

A view from behind and below of someone walking up a flight of stairs, with only parts of the legs and shoes visible, symbolizing the nine steps to gaining actionable insights from customer surveys

9 Steps to Translating Customer Survey Data Into Actionable Insights

Want to solve your customers’ and prospects’ pain points? Start from scratch, assigning your Customer Experience Director with:

Surveying your customers on their needs, goals, pain points and preferred communication methods, and assessing the root of any disparities between your results and ours
Surveying your CX staff about their pain points in meeting customer needs
Auditing your CX staff, identifying any diversity issues as well as the top and bottom performers, and creating recruitment and mentorship programs to improve DEI and overall performance, plus a gamification/rewards system to enhance engagement
Auditing your CX policies, processes, roles and responsibilities, identifying and addressing gaps and opportunities, targeting long wait times, limited hours, repeat authentications, frequent transfers, lack of personalization and any additional pain points clarified in your own customer analysis
Auditing your CX tools, platforms and software, identifying and addressing unnecessary expenses and unmet needs
Auditing your CX training program, identifying and addressing unnecessary segments and developing new training modules, as needed
Coordinating with your Director of Marketing and Director of Sales to audit interdepartmental coordination, with a focus on improving consistency and authenticity across the entire customer lifecycle
Learn the seven steps to customer success (and outperforming your peers through CX) — and develop your customer review strategy
Demo the top customer survey and customer support tools to determine which would be most effective in helping you achieve true customer success

Two white hands from two different people hold onto each side of a hand-cut black paper heart, symbolizing customer support

The Top 9 Survey Tools

Want to know for sure what your customers are thinking? Want to “turn” their “feedback into gold?” Survey them, using one of these top nine survey tools:

Then, melt that gold into dollars and sense.

The Top 9 Customer Support Tools

While you already know that automating your employees’ more mundane responsibilities can free them up to focus on the message and the big picture, sometimes CX tech is about more than automating and streamlining.

To better organize, analyze and optimize your customer experience, you need a customer support platform; demo these: