Once you have the right people onboard, the next essential element of a customer experience strategy is making sure you have the right data. This should be up-to-date, accurate and stored in a central hub so that your business can gain a deep understanding of the customer. Collecting this data is important because it enables you to start listening to what’s called the ‘Voice of the Customer’ or VoC.

This is a research method that’s used to collect customer feedback and capture how people feel about your business, products or services. Voice of the Customer data can be gathered in many different ways - through surveys, interviews and focus groups, by monitoring emails, reviews and social media comments, and by analyzing transcripts of conversations people have with your customer service team. Then, brands can use artificial intelligence - AI - and machine learning to tease out customer opinions, emotions and sentiments. They can then identify patterns or trends in the data that need to be acted upon, like changes in levels of customer satisfaction.

Voice of the Customer data is generally qualitative and it can be added to quantitative data to provide context about why something might be happening. Say your web analytics data shows that a large percentage of your customers are abandoning their purchase at the payment stage. Voice of the Customer data might reveal that you’re not providing enough payment options for customers which, of course, isn’t a great experience.

This type of data can also help to reveal otherwise unknown, negative opinions from customers who haven’t actually made a complaint. The vast majority of people will simply switch brands when they experience problems or annoyances, rather than making a complaint, so this type of data is especially useful.

Take Apple, for example. The brand sends an email survey asking about the in-store experience of any shopper who made a purchase in the Apple Store or who booked an appointment to try on an Apple Watch. Whenever it identifies someone who’s unhappy with their experience, the store manager calls them within 24 hours to ask them about their problems and any suggested improvements they have.

Apple has actually found that those originally unhappy visitors became better customers than people who were satisfied with the in-store experience, with just those simple follow-ups generating over $25 million in extra revenue in the first year of doing so.

We’re coming to the end of this part of the lesson, but there’s one thing that’s missing from our list: tech. When it comes to customer experience, technology is your friend. There are many different tech solutions out there and they all come in different shapes and sizes.

But, whatever tools you go for, you’ll likely want access to all, or some, combination of the following: Customer Relationship Management - or CRM - systems, Customer Data Platforms - also called CDPs, Digital Asset Management software, web analytics tools, email marketing and marketing automation software, and content and social media management platforms. Each of their capabilities vary but there are a few functions you’ll almost certainly need…

First up, any tech solution you use should be able to store data in a central hub and give you that all-important single customer view. It should help with capturing customer feedback and identifying problems and future trends. And it can give you a hand with managing and measuring both customer loyalty and customer service programs.

It should also be able to dynamically create customized and personalized content for individual people, or specific customer segments. It should help with the management of AI, machine learning, chatbots and other automated functions and, finally, enable you to perform complex data analysis and management reporting.

The purpose of all of this tech is to take a lot of the heavy lifting out of improving the customer experience. It can give you the tools you need to make customers feel listened to and understood, and help them achieve their tasks quickly and easily - which should be the main focus of your customer experience strategy.

Data & Tech